"I live a life more great than I.
The life I hope is life so high,
I die because I cannot die."
--_Santa Teresa de Jesus._
All Spaniards venerate the name of _Isabel la Catolica_, nor is the
impressionable De Amicis the only foreigner who has trembled and wept
at Granada before the enshrined memorials, jewel box, mirror, missal,
and crown, of her royal womanhood. She is a precious figure in Spain's
sunset revery--a saint beneath a conquering standard, a silken lady in
a soldier's tent. Yet this peerless queen, merciful, magnanimous,
devout, "the shield of the innocent," caring supremely for the glory
of God and the good of her country, gave consent, albeit reluctant, to
the establishment of the Inquisition, Christianity's chief scandal and
Spain's most fatal blight. So ironic were the stars of Isabel.
The Inquisition, it is true, originated in Italy early in the
thirteenth century and followed the flight of some of the Albigenses
into Aragon, but its work in Spain had been comparatively slight and
merciful until the "Catholic Kings," in the interests of religious
reform, for the purification of the national faith, let its horrors
loose. Wherever one moves in Spain the sickening breath of the _auto
de fe_ lingers in the air. In such a square, we read, was once a
mighty bonfire of Jews; beneath our feet, we are told, is a mass of
human bones and cinders. This sunshiny Seville, with her parks and
patios, her palms and orange groves, a city seemingly fashioned only
for love and song, had her army of nearly twoscore thousand martyrs,
who, dressed in the hateful _San Benitos_, yellow coats painted with
flames and devils, were burned to death here in our gay _Plaza de la
Constitucion_, then known as the _Plaza de San Francisco_, and in the
_Quemadero_ beyond the walls. As one mingles with some outdoor throng,
all intent on pageant, dance, or other spectacle, one shudders to
remember that just such dark, eager faces were ringed about the
agonies of those heroic victims. For there are two sides to the
Spanish Inquisition. If Spaniards were the inquisitors, Spaniards,
too, were the dauntless sufferers. The sombre gaze of the torturer was
met, as steel meets iron, by the unflinching eye of the tortured. But
"the unimaginable touch of Time" transforms all tragedy to beauty, and
red poppies, blowing on the grassy plain of the _Quemadero_, translate
into poetry to-day that tale of blazing fagots.
Sometimes the victims were of foreign blood. Hakluyt has preserved the
simple narratives of two English sailors, who were brought by their
Spanish captors from the Indies as a sacrifice to the Holy House of
Seville. One, a happy-go-lucky fellow, Miles Phillips, who had been
too well acquainted in Mexico with the dungeons of the Inquisition,
slipped over the ship's side at San Lucar, made his way to shore, and
boldly went to Seville, where he lived a hidden life as a silk-weaver,
until he found his chance to steal away and board a Devon
merchantman. The other, Job Hortop, added to his two years of Mexican
imprisonment two more years in Seville. Then "they brought us out in
procession, every one of us having a candle in his hand, and the coat
with S. Andrew's cross on our backs; they brought us up on an high
scaffold, that was set up in the place of S. Francis, which is in the
chief street of Seville; there they set us down upon benches, every
one in his degree, and against us on another scaffold sate all the
Judges and the Clergy on their benches. The people wondered, and gazed
on us, some pitying our case, others said, burn those heretics. When
we had sat there two hours, we had a sermon made to us, after which
one called Bresinia, secretary to the Inquisition, went up into the
pulpit with the process, and called Robert Barret, ship-master, and
John Gilbert, whom two Familiars of the Inquisition brought from the
scaffold before the Judges, where the secretary read the sentence,
which was that they should be burnt, and so they returned to the
scaffold, and were burnt.
"Then I, Job Hortop, and John Bone, were called, and brought to the
place, as before, when we heard our sentence, which was, that we
should go to the Galleys, and there to row at the oar's end ten years,
and then to be brought back to the Inquisition House, to have the coat
with S. Andrew's cross put on our backs, and from thence to go to the
everlasting prison remediless.
"I with the rest were sent to the Galleys, where we were chained four
and four together.... Hunger, thirst, cold, and stripes we lacked
none, till our several times expired, and after the time of twelve
years, for I served two years above my sentence, I was sent back to
the Inquisition House in Seville, and there having put on the coat
with S. Andrew's cross, I was sent to the everlasting prison
remediless, where I wore the coat four years, and then upon great suit
I had it taken off for fifty duckets, which Hernando de Soria,
treasurer of the king's mint, lent me, whom I was to serve for it as a
drudge seven years."
But this victim, too, escaped in a fly-boat at last, and on a certain
Christmas Eve, about the time when people in London were beginning to
like the comedies of a certain poor player, one Will Shakespeare, did
Job Hortop, Powder-maker and Gunner, walk quietly, after twenty-three
years of martyrdom, into the village of Redcliffe, where he had been a
ruddy English boy with no dream of the day when he should be "prest
forth" by Sir John Hawkins and compelled, sore against his will, to
embark for the West Indian adventure.
Religious liberty now exists under the laws of Spain, although the
administration of those laws leaves much to be desired. In three old
conventual churches of Seville gather her three Protestant
congregations. Beneath the pavements of two of these heretic
strongholds old inquisitors sleep what uneasy sleep they may, while
one of the Protestant pastors, formerly a Catholic priest, has quietly
collected and stored in his church-study numerous mementos of the Holy
Office. Here may be seen two of those rare copies of the 1602 revision
of the Spanish Bible, by Cipriano de Valera, whom the Inquisition
could burn only in effigy, since the translator, who had printed his
book in Amsterdam, did not return to accompany the Familiars to the
_Quemadero_. Here are old books with horrible woodcuts of the
torments, and time-stained manuscripts, several bearing the seal and
signatures of the "Catholic Kings," these last so ill written that it
is hard to tell the name of Ferdinand from that of Isabella. Among
these are royal commissions, or licenses, granted to individual
inquisitors, records of _autos de fe_, and wills of rich inquisitors,
the sources of whose wealth would hardly court a strict examination.
Here, too, is the standard of the Holy Office, the very banner borne
through Seville in those grim processions. Its white silk is saffroned
now, but the strange seal of the Inquisition, a bleeding Christ upon
the cross, is clearly blazoned in the centre, while the four corners
show the seal of San Domingo.
The Inquisition prison, the dreaded Holy House of Seville, is used as
a factory at present, and heresy no longer secures admission there;
but I looked up at its grated windows, and then, with a secret shiver,
down on the ground, where the Spanish pastor of antiquarian tastes was
marking out with his cane the directions of the far-branching
subterranean cells. We slipped into an outer court of the _fabrica_,
where the two gentlemen, effectively aided by a couple of sturdy lads,
pried up and flung back a sullen door in the pavement and invited me
to grope my darkling way down some twenty crumbling steps, overgrown
with a treacherous green mould. There was no refusing, in face of the
cloud of witnesses whose groans these stones had heard, and I took a
heart-breaking plunge into the honeycomb of chill, foul-smelling,
horror-haunted dungeons, whose roofs let fall a constant drip of water
and from whose black recesses I was the unwilling means of liberating
a choice variety of insects.
"But even yet one cannot call one's self a Protestant in Spain, you
know," said an English diplomat to us in another city of Andalusia.
"It's not socially respectable. Spanish Protestants are the very scum
of the earth--illiterate, dirty, boorish. You couldn't associate with
them for a minute."
"But that Spanish pastor who called on us yesterday was entirely a
gentleman," we remonstrated. "He has studied for seven years in
Switzerland and Scotland, seems more open-minded and intelligent than
most Spaniards we have met, and was so courteous and graceful in his
bearing--not to mention the whiteness of his linen--and so
entertaining in his talk, that the Spanish ladies in the room
chorussed his praises, after he had bowed himself out, and declared
him most delightful company."
The diplomat twirled his mustache and smiled, as only diplomats can.
"And you owned up that he was a Protestant? And their faces darkened
as if a storm-cloud had blown over from the Sierras?"
"Precisely so," we admitted, "and after that the best they could say
for him was that they never would have thought it."
The diplomat claimed that he had made his point, while we protested
that the incident only went to show how unreasonable was the prejudice
of whose existence throughout Spain there can be no manner of doubt.
Perez Galdos, for instance, the most popular novelist of the day,
stated to an American friend, who repeated it to us, that he frankly
could not afford to introduce the figure of a Protestant into one of
his stories. "It would not only kill that book," he said, "but it
would hurt the sale of everything I have in the market and embarrass
all my future undertakings. I should simply be risking the loss of my
reading public." And yet Senor Galdos is the author of "Dona
Perfecta," that artistic study of the conflict between new ideas and
old in Spain. In this significant novel, a civil engineer, a man of
thirty, whose scientific education in the large cities of Seville and
Madrid has been supplemented by study in Germany and England, comes to
one of those mediaeval towns, or corpses of towns, that rise so
spectre-like from the ash-colored plains of Old Castile. Crumbling
walls and blackened towers jealously guard the life of ages since,
that feudal life of high and low, pride of station, pride of animal
prowess, pride of holiness, pride of idleness, pride of ignorance; the
life of superstition, of family exclusiveness resulting in
intermarriage to the point of insanity; of that fierce local bigotry,
peculiarly Spanish, which dreads and hates all foreign intrusion. The
streets, devoid of business activity, swarm with vigorous mendicants,
who have no better shift, when times grow hard, than to deform the
children who are born to them like kittens in their mud-walled hovels.
The casino, where half the town smokes half its time away, hums with
malicious gossip. The university languidly pursues the studies of
Latin, scholastic divinity, Church history, and all that savors of the
past. Under the gray vault of the cathedral women kneel before the
image of the Christ Child, bringing Him a new pair of embroidered
pantalets and entreating of His rosy simplicity what they would not
dare ask from the "Ecce Homo"; or they kiss the satin-slippered feet
of the miracle-working Virgin and vow her, if their prayer is granted,
seven bright new swords of the finest Toledo workmanship to pierce her
patient heart. The man of scientific training, fresh from the modern
world, is brought into sharp collision with this dim old town. High
principles and essential, spiritual Christianity count him for
nothing; he is speedily denounced as no better than "a murderer, an
atheist, or a Protestant," and his strong young life is actually
beaten out by that blind, terrible force of Spanish fanaticism. So far
the novelist can go; such a hero he dares paint; but not a Protestant.
The notions of Protestantism prevalent among the people, not the
peasants only, but the gentry, are little short of ludicrous. A
black-eyed lady of Cadiz was amazed at our assertion that Protestants
prayed. A Madrid senorita asked us, in friendly confidence, if it were
true that Protestants "denied Christ and spat on the Virgin." The
popular identification of Protestantism with all that is impious and
criminal we encountered as early as our second afternoon in Spain. We
were visiting, in the picturesque fishing-hamlet of Pasajes, a gaunt
Basque church, where the old dame who served as caretaker showed us a
waxen image of a sleeping girl, said, not without probability, to have
been brought from Rome. Beneath the figure is a burial stone, whose
inscription would locate it in the Catacombs. When friends of ours
were at Pasajes some three years before, the grandam's story ran that
the image was the likeness of a Christian martyr, slain by her pagan
father at Rome in the time of the Imperial persecutions; but the tale
glibly recited to us was this: "_Ay de mi!_ The poor young lady! Her
father was a Protestant, and, of course, hated religion, and when his
daughter, so beautiful, was on her way to her first communion, he hid
behind a corner, with an axe, and of a sudden jumped out on her and
struck her dead."
It is such prejudice that goes far toward justifying the maintenance
by foreign societies of Protestant churches in Spain. They cannot
stand alone, in face of all this hostility, and yet the country has
need of them. No European nation can nowadays be shut in to any single
channel of religious life, and doubtless, apart from all questions of
creed, there are Spanish temperaments to which the simpler _culto_ is
more natural than the elaborate ritual of Rome; but, waiving
discussion as to the relative gifts and graces of these two great
divisions of Christ's fellowship, the new seems essential, not for
itself alone, but as a stimulus and corrective to the old. Time may
make it clear that a purified Roman Catholicism is better suited to
the Latin races in general than plainer rites and less symbolic
worship, but there are heavy counts against the Roman Catholic Church
as it exists in Spain. The private lives of the clergy, as a class,
have been so open to reproach that even the finger-games and nonsense
songs of the little children, learned with their baby lispings, mock
priestly immorality. The Church, steward of untold wealth, has endowed
many charities, but the fundamental trust of knowledge it has most
sluggishly and inadequately dispensed. Santiago de Compostela, for
example, is a very nest of religious foundations. Thirty-six Christian
fraternities are gathered there, yet we were told on good authority
that not one peasant in a hundred of those within hearing of
Santiago's fivescore and fourteen holy bells can read and write. In
matters of State, the Church has utterly lost the allegiance of the
progressive party and, to a large extent, the political confidence of
the nation. As Spaniards study the history of their country, they
realize more and more that her colossal mistakes and misfortunes have
been due in large measure to Jesuit and Dominical policy--to the
father confessor in the royal chamber, the inquisitor in shadow of
the throne. With reference to the success of the Church in promoting
spiritual life, a beautiful young nun, her eyes glistening like happy
stars, assured us that there was more devotion in Catholic Spain than
in all the rest of Christendom. A scientist of repute, his voice
choking with grief and wrath, declared to us that the fetters of
superstition had become hopelessly riveted, during these ages of
Church control, on the Spanish mind. But call it what you will,
devotion or superstition, and admitting, as the tourist must, that it
is a most conspicuous and impressive feature of Spanish life, there
are nevertheless thousands of Spaniards, especially the younger men,
over whom it has lost sway. These are the _indiferentes_, many of whom
might find, as some have found, in a fresh presentation of
Christianity, the Godward impetus which they no longer gain from the
Church of Rome.
The most cheerful _indiferente_ I encountered in Spain was a whimsical
old philosopher, well on his way to the nineties, yet so brisk and
hardy as almost to vie with Borrow's Portuguese dame whose hair "was
becoming gray" after a life of one hundred and ten years. His hair,
indeed, is white, and extreme age has written its deforming marks on
face and figure, yet he runs up the steepest stairs, reads the finest
print, fills his days with a close succession of labors and
amusements, and scoffs at religion as airily as if Death had passed
him on the crowded way and would never turn back to look for him
again.
At our first meeting he offered, with characteristic kindness, to come
and read Spanish with me. As I had invaded Spain for the express
purpose of studying the Spanish drama, I took a volume of Calderon
from my trunk and hopefully awaited his visit. But it was a matter of
several visits before I could open my Calderon. The jaunty old
cavalier arrived, brimming over with chat and anecdote, and when at
last I hinted at the reading, produced with pride from his inner coat
pocket a little, paper-bound _geografia_ that he had written himself
for use in the Spanish schools, and proceeded to regale me with
extracts from its pages. I looked severely at the little artist, whose
eyes were dancing in a demure face, and endeavored to profit by this
unexpected course of instruction. The author chuckled much over his
sagacity in having arranged the subject-matter of his book in
paragraphs and not by question and answer. In the latter case, he
explained, the children would learn the answers without reading the
questions, a process bound to result in geographical confusion. The
little volume, as is the wont of school books in other lands, tended
to give to its students a disproportionate idea of the importance of
their own country. Spain and her colonies were treated in seventy
pages, Great Britain and her colonies in three, France in four, while
America, from Greenland to Patagonia, was handled as a single entity,
one figure each, and those absurdly small, being set for "her
population, army, and navy." The _Confederacion de los Estados Unidos_
was barely mentioned as one of the five "States" of North America.
But the only feature of his book for which the author felt called upon
to apologize, was the catering to popular superstition, as in stating,
for instance, that in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is
adored the veritable body of St. James. He cast a quizzical glance at
me in reading this, and then laughed himself purple in the face. "One
has to say these things in this country," he gasped, still breathless
from his mirth. "Drops of water must run with the stream. If only
there were a shrine where people might be cured of being fools!"
Quick-witted as the old gentleman was, he presently detected a lack of
geographical enthusiasm in his audience. His literary vanity smarted
for a moment and then he fell to laughing, declaring that ladies
always had a distaste for useful information. "That old wife of mine"
could not abide arithmetic. He digressed into an explanation of the
Roman notation, making it quite clear to us wherein IX differs from
XI, and with antiquated courtliness of phrase, even for Spain, asked
our gracious permission to cause himself the pain of departure.
He often reappeared. His wiry arm, reached through the Moorish bars of
the outer door, would give its own peculiarly energetic twitch to the
bell chain looped within. A maid, leaning over the railing of an upper
story, would call down the challenge inherited from good old fighting
times, "Who comes here?" And his thin voice would chirp the Andalusian
answer, "Peace."
On his second visit he fairly gurgled with pleasure as he placed
another volume with his name on the title-page before me. Since I did
not incline to solid reading, behold him equally ready to supply me
with the sweets of literature! This, too, was a school book, a
somewhat haphazard collection of Castilian poems, with brief
biographies of the authors represented. Its novel educational feature
was the printing of each poem in a different type. The result was a
little startling to the eye, but the editor was doubtless right in
claiming that it made the reading harder for the children, and so
developed their powers through exercise. Here, again, he was ashamed
of the fact that fully two-thirds of the poems were religious.
"But what can one do in this country?" he asked testily. "All the
reading books have to be like that. Bah! But we will not read these
pious verses. The others are much more entertaining."
Determined not to wound him again by any lack of interest in books of
his own shaping, we sat patiently through page after page of that
juvenile school reader; but when, with a pamphlet on spelling and
punctuation, we had completed the list of his works, I once more
called his attention to Calderon.
This struck him as a capital joke. He had never read Calderon himself,
he had hardly heard of Calderon, and that a foreigner, a woman at
that, should insist on reading Calderon, was funny enough to make his
old sides ache. There were modern authors in plenty who must certainly
write much better than an out-of-date fellow like that. He had books
that he could lend me. He had friends from whom he could borrow. But
nothing would please me but Calderon! Why under the fanciful moon
should I set my heart on Calderon?
"_Bueno!_" he cried at last, whisking the mirthful tears from his
eyes. "_Vamos a ver!_ Let us go on and see!"
We opened the classic volume at the Catholic Faust-drama, _El Magico
Prodigioso_, and began to read, soon passing into the great argument
between Cipriano and Lucifer as to the nature of God. Our guest,
sensitive to all impressions as he was, became immediately amazed and
delighted.
"But this is lofty!" he exclaimed. "This is sublime! Good, Cipriano,
good! Now you have him! What will the devil say to that? _Vamos a
ver!_"
At the close of that tremendous scene he shut the book, fairly panting
with excitement. But nevertheless there was a twinkle in his eye. He
knew now why I craved this Calderon. He was evidently a religious
writer, and women were all religious. It was an amiable feminine
weakness, like the aversion to geography and arithmetic. But his
indulgent chivalry rose to the occasion. Having learned my taste, such
as it was, he would gratify it to the utmost.
"If you would only come and see my library!" he proposed. "I have
exactly the book there that will please you. I have not read it
myself, but it is very large, with most beautiful pictures, and it
tells these old stories about Lucifer and all that. I am sure it is
just what you would like. Will you not do your humble servant the
honor of coming to-morrow afternoon?"
I ran over in my mind our engagements for the morrow. He mistook the
cause of my hesitation.
"Indeed you need not be afraid to come," he urged. "My house is as
safe as a convent. That old wife of mine, too, will be sure to be
somewhere about. And you can bring the silent senorita with you."
I was aware of a slight convulsion in "the silent senorita." She could
speak all the Spanish she chose, but she found the eccentricities of
this visitor so disconcerting that she affected ignorance, and he
supposed her mute presence at our interviews to be purely in deference
to the Spanish proprieties.
My youthful chaperon, much elated by this reversal of our natural
positions, duly attended me the next day to our friend's surprisingly
elegant home. He was forever crying poverty and telling us, with the
tears that came to his old age as easily as the laughter, how the
hardships of life had beaten out of him every ambition save hope to
"gain the bread" until his death, but we found him luxuriously housed,
and I was afterward informed that he was one of the richest men in the
city.
He ran with that wonderful sprightliness of his across the marbled
court to meet us, and ceremoniously conducted us up the handsome
staircase. He led us through all "our house," typically Andalusian,
with statues and urns of blossoming trees set in the open patios, with
Moorish arches and bright-hued tiles, shaded balconies, tapestried and
curtained beds, _braseros_, and rocking-chairs, and in every room
images and paintings of the saints, at which he made irreverent
grimaces.
There were family portraits, too, before three of which he broke down
into weeping--the son who had died in the prime of manhood, the
daughter lost in her fair maidenhood, and, where the stormy sobs shook
him from head to foot, the Benjamin of his heart, a clear-eyed young
officer who had fallen in the Cuban war. The tears were still
streaming down the quivering old face when we turned silently
away--for what word of comfort would Americans dare to speak?--and
followed him to his study.
He was of extravagant repute in his locality as a scholar and a man of
letters, and his study was what a study ought to be,--well furnished
with desk, pigeon-holes, all the tools of literary labor, and walled
with books. Among these was an encyclopaedia in which, to his frank
astonishment, he found an article of fifteen pages on Calderon. The
great volume we had come to see lay open on a reading stand. It was a
Spanish Bible, with the Dore illustrations. I wanted to look at the
title-page, but our eager host, proud to exhibit and explain, tossed
over the leaves so fast that I had no opportunity.
As he was racing through the Psalms, impatient because of their dearth
of pictures, my eye was caught by the familiar passage, "As the hart
panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God."
With prompt curiosity, he popped down his white head, in its
close-fitting skullcap, to see what I was noting, and instantly went
off into an immoderate gust of laughter.
"_Muy bien!_" he wheezed, as soon as he could recover anything like a
voice. "But that is very cleverly put. He was a witty fellow who wrote
that. Just so! Just so! The deer goes to the water because he means to
get something for himself, and that is why the young men go into the
priesthood, and why the women go to mass. It's all selfishness, is
religion. But how well he says it!"
"No, no!" I exclaimed, for once startled into protest. "He is saying
that religion is the impulse of thirst."
The incorrigible old worldling took this for another jest, and, as in
gallantry bound, laughed harder at my sally than at poor King David's.
"Excellent! Perfect! So it is! So it is! Religion is the impulse to
fill one's own stomach. Just what I have always said! 'As the hart
panteth after the water brooks'--ho, ho! I must try to remember that."
His enthusiasm for Calderon soon kindled to a flame. As the plot
thickened he ceased to be of the slightest help in any difficulties
that the text might offer. In vain I would beseech him to clear up
some troublesome passage.
"Oh, never mind!" he would say, vexed at the interruption. "They
didn't write very well in those old days. And I want to know which of
her three suitors Justina took. Three at once! What a situation!
_Vamos a ver!_ I hope it will be Cipriano."
As the spell of Calderon's imagination passed more and more strongly
upon him, this most sympathetic of readers quite accepted, for the
time being, the poet's Catholic point of view, trembling for Cipriano
and almost choking with agitated joy when Justina, calling in her
extremity upon the name of God, put Lucifer to flight. But after we
had read the drama to the end, through its final scene of triumphant
martyrdom, he sat silent for several minutes, and then shook his head.
"Not true; it is not true. There is no devil but the evil passions of
humanity. And as for Cipriano's definition of God--it is good, yes; it
is great, yes; but who can shut God into a definition? One might as
well try to scoop up the ocean in a cocoanut shell. No! All religions
are human fictions. We have come, nobody knows whence or why, into
this paltry, foolish, sordid life, for most of us only a fight to gain
the bread, and afterward--_Bueno!_ I am on the brink of the jump, and
the priests have not frightened me yet. Afterward? _Vamos a ver!_"
This man had heard of Protestantism simply as an ignorant notion of
the lower classes. For the typical Spanish Protestant of to-day
presents a striking contrast to the typical Spanish Protestant of the
Reformation. When heresy first entered the Peninsula, it gained almost
no footing among the common people, who supposed Luther to be another
sort of devil and the Protestants a new variety of Jews or Moors; but
the rank and learning of Spain, the youthful nobility, illustrious
preachers and writers, officers and favorites of the Court, even men
and women in whose veins flowed the blood royal, welcomed with ardor
the wave that was surging over Europe. The very eminence of these
heretics sealed their doom. The Inquisition could not miss such
shining marks. The Holy Office did its work with abominable
thoroughness. Apart from the countless multitudes whom it did to death
in dungeon and torture-chamber, it burned more than thirty thousand of
the most valuable citizens of Spain and drove forth from the Peninsula
some three millions of Jews and Moors. The _autos de fe_ were
festivals. Among the wedding pomps for the French bride of Philip II,
a girl thirteen years old, was one of these horrible spectacles at
Toledo. The holiday fires of Seville and Valladolid drank the most
precious blood of Andalusia and Castile. Though Saragossa had a mind
to Huguenot fuel; though Pamplona, on one festal day, heaped up a
holocaust of ten thousand Jews; though Granada, Murcia, and Valencia
whetted their cruel piety on the Moors who had made the southern
provinces a garden of delight; yet in all these cities, as in Toledo,
Logrono, and the rest, the Spanish stock itself was drained of its
finest and most highly cultivated intelligence, its sincerest
conscience, purest valor, its most original and independent thought.
Spain has been paying the penalty ever since. Her history from Philip
II has been a judgment day.
No root of the Lutheran heresy survived in the Peninsula. The new
Protestantism does not spring from the old. The blood of the Spanish
martyrs was not the seed of the Spanish church. The Protestant of
to-day is far removed, socially and politically, from the courtiers,
marquises, knights of Santiago--those gallant cavaliers who were
stripped upon the scaffold of their honorable decorations and clad in
the yellow robe of infamy. This nineteenth-century Protestant may be a
lawyer or a journalist, but by exception. Ordinarily he is a petty
farmer, a small shop-keeper, mechanic, miner, day-laborer, of humble
calling and of lowly life. In politics he is almost surely a
republican. When the monarchy was overthrown, in '68, Protestantism
was, for the moment, in favor, and hundreds of the triumphant party
hastened to profess the reformed faith. With the return of a Roman
Catholic court and perhaps upon the discovery that the new
Christianity, too, has its burden and its yoke, many fell away.
Yet Protestantism has now an assured footing in Spain. Protestant
churches may be found in most of the important cities. There are some
fifty foreign preachers and teachers in the field, aided by nearly
eighty Spanish pastors and colporteurs. The number of Spanish
communicants is between three and four thousand, the church attendance
is reckoned at nine thousand, and there are five thousand Spanish
children in the Protestant schools. Several centres have been
established for the sale of Bibles and Protestant books, and six or
seven Protestant periodicals are published and circulated. In answer
to the continual Romish taunt that Protestantism is a war of sects, a
house divided against itself, a Protestant Union was organized at
Madrid in the spring of 1899. All, save two, of the fifteen missions,
supported by various societies of Great Britain, Germany,
Switzerland, and America, joined hands in this. Only the Plymouth
Brethren and the Church of England held aloof.
[Illustration: A MILKMAN OF GRANADA]
The Inquisition exists no longer. Religious liberty, even in Spain,
has the support of law. Yet still the Spanish Protestant, this poor,
plain Protestant of to-day, as obscure as those Galilean fishermen
whom the Master called, is harassed by petty persecutions. Children
sing insulting verses after him in the street, especially that pious
ditty:--
"Get away with you, Protestants,
Out of our Catholic Spain,
That the Sacred Heart, the Sacred Heart,
May love our land again."
He is jealously watched on the passing of "His Majesty the Wafer" and
pursued with mud and spittings if he fails to do it homage. College
boys rub charcoal over the front of his chapel and stone his
schoolroom windows; work is refused him; promotion denied him; his
rent is higher than his neighbor's, yet not his neighbor's family nor
his landlord's cross his threshold. If scorn can burn, he feels the
_auto de fe_.