inate the family; and, above all, that the convents shall not be
filled by force, undue persuasion, or cajolery. The state of the Roman
Catholic religion and its priesthood in England is constantly being held
up as the ideal of what the Church in Spain should be.

Almost all the modern novelists of Spain show us characters of priests
with whom every reader must feel sympathy. Valera, Galdos, Pardo Bazan,
and others depict individual clerics who are simple, straightforward,
pious, and in every way worthy men, the friend of the young and the
helper of the sorrowful. Sometimes they are not very learned, and not at
all worldly-wise, but they show that the type is largely represented
amongst the priesthood of Spain, and there are not wanting some of
distinctly liberal tendencies. There was a remarkable article in a
Madrid paper of radical, if not socialistic, tendencies, the other day,
by one who signed himself "A priest of the Spanish Catholic Church."
Lamenting over the sentimentalism of modern religion, and the distance
it had travelled from its old models, he says: "Instead of the Virgen
being held up to admiration as the Mother of Our Lord, and as an example
of all feminine perfection, the ideal woman and mother, the people are
called on to worship the idea of the Immaculate Conception, an abstract
dogma of recent invention, and in place of showing us the perfect man in
the Son of God, they are asked to worship a 'bleeding heart,' abstracted
from the body, and held up as an object of reverence, apart from the
living body of Jesus Christ." It is the reform of the national religion
still ardently loved in spite of all the crimes that have been committed
in her name, that the liberal-minded Spaniard wants, not the
substitution of a foreign church; although no doubt the opportunity, now
for the first time possible, of learning that there are people every
whit as good and earnest as themselves, who yet hold religious opinions
other than theirs, is bound to have a widening and softening effect on
the narrowness of a creed which has hitherto been regarded as the only
one.

The extraordinary outbreak against the Jesuits and the religious orders
of the last year had many causes, and had probably long been seething,
and waiting for something to open the floodgates. That something came in
the marriage of the Princess of Asturias, and the coincidence,
accidental or otherwise, of the production of Galdos's play of
_Electra_. The ma