taunch Church of England man,
he was certainly an anti-clerical one in Roman Catholic Spain. In any
case he steered judiciously enough between contending factions,
describing the fanatics of either side with vigour and sometimes with
humour. Mr. Brandram's injunction to Borrow 'to be on his guard against
becoming too much committed to one particular party' seems to have been
unnecessary.

Borrow's three expeditions to Spain have more to be said for them than
had his journey to St. Petersburg. The work of the Bible Society was and
is at its highest point of human service when distributing either the
Old or the New Testament in Christian countries, Spain, England, or
another. Few there be to-day in any country who, in the interests of
civilisation, would deny to the Bible a wider distribution. In a remote
village of Spain a Bible Society's colporteur, carrying a coloured
banner, sold me a copy of Cipriano de Valera's New Testament for a
peseta. The villages of Spain that Borrow visited could even at that
time compare favourably morally and educationally, with the villages of
his own county of Norfolk at the same period. The morals of the
agricultural labourers of the English fen country eighty years ago were
a scandal, and the peasantry read nothing; more than half of them could
not read. They had not, moreover, the humanising passion for song and
dance that Andalusia knew. But this is not to deny that the Bible
Society under Borrow's instrumentality did a good work in Spain, nor
that they did it on the whole in a broad and generous way. Borrow admits
that there was a section of the Roman Catholic clergy 'favourably
disposed towards the circulation of the Gospel,'[115] and the Society
actually fixed upon a Roman Catholic version of the Spanish Bible, that
by Scio de San Miguel,[116] although this version Borrow considered a
bad translation. Much has been said about the aim of the Bible Society
to provide the Bible without notes or comment--in its way a most
meritorious aim, although then as now opposed to the instinct of a large
number of the priests of the Roman Church. It is true that their
attitude does not in any way possess the sanction of the ecclesiastical
authorities. It may be urged, indeed, that the interpretation of the
Bible by a priest, usually of mature judgment, and frequently of a
higher education than the people with whom he is associated, is at least
as trustworthy as its interpretation at the hands of v