s and schools, and a
certain number among the lower classes of Spaniards have joined these
communities. A private diary of a visit to Madrid so long ago as 1877
describes the English service there. The congregation numbered "quite
five hundred." "They were of the poorer classes of both sexes, with a
sprinkling of well-dressed men and women. They seemed to perform their
devotions in a spirit of entire reverence and piety, not unlike a
similar class in our churches at home. The clergyman delivered an
impressive and forcible discourse, chiefly on the honour due to the name
of God, and reprobated the profane use of the most sacred names, so
common among the Spanish people.... Altogether I look upon the
congregation at the Calle de Madera as a nucleus of genuine
Protestantism in Spain."

As this is the opinion of a perfectly unbiassed onlooker, and has
nothing of the professional element about it, it may be taken as
absolutely reliable. In the towns, such as Bilbao, where there is a
large English colony, there are various churches and chapels, and
considerable numbers of communicants and Sunday scholars. Looking back,
as I am able to do, to the days when there was no toleration for an
alien faith; when even Christian burial for the "heretic" was quite a
new thing, and living people could tell of the indignities heaped on the
corpse of any unlucky English man or woman who died in "Catholic" Spain;
when to have omitted, or even hesitated about, any of the religious
actions imposed by the Church would have exposed one to gross insult,
and perhaps injury; the progress towards enlightened toleration of the
opinions of others seems to have been remarkable. It is, perhaps, more
significant that the members of the new congregations should be
generally of the lower classes, because it is precisely these people who
have always been mere unthinking puppets in the hands of their priests.

Although there is at the present moment such a deep and widespread
revolt against the Jesuits and some of the other orders, especially
among the students and the better class of artisans and workmen, there
is not, so far as a stranger may judge, a revolt against the Church
itself, nor even against the parochial clergy. It would seem rather that
there is a fixed determination that the priests shall keep to their
business, that of the service of religion, and shall not be allowed to
interfere in secular education, or, by use of the confessional, to
dom