ch those
times give rise are enough to drive one mad. Many Catholics dream of
canonising Philip II. for the cold cruelty with which he exterminated
heretics, but such a king had really no Catholicism but his own; he
was heir to the German Caesarism, that eternal hammer of the Popes.
Driven by pride, he was always sailing to the windward of schism and
heresy; that he did not break with the Pontificate was solely that
this latter feared that the Spanish soldiery, who had twice entered
Rome, would remain there for ever, and that it would have to submit to
all their extortions. The father and son robbed us with dissimulation
of our nationality, and dissipated our life for their purely personal
plans of reviving the Caesarism of Charlemagne and forming the Catholic
religion to their own imagination and taste. They nearly destroyed the
ancient religious feeling of Spain, so cultivated and tolerant from
its continual intercourse with Mahomedanism and Judaism; that Spanish
Church, whose priests lived peacefully in the towns with the alfaqui
and the rabbi, and who punished with moral penalties those who from
excess of zeal disturbed the worship of the infidels. That religious
intolerance which foreign historians consider a purely Spanish product
was really imported by the German Caesars. It was the German friar who
came with his devout brutality and his crazy theology, not tempered
as in Spain by Semitic culture. With their intolerance and
impracticability they provoked the revolution of the Reformation in
the northern countries, and, driven out of them, they came here to
plant afresh their ignorance and fanaticism. The ground was well
prepared. When the free towns whose municipalities were republics
fell, the people also languished; the foreign seed produced in a
short time an immense forest, the forest of the Inquisition and the
fanaticism which still exists; the modern woodmen cut and lop, but
they soon fall off wearied; the arms of one man can do little against
a trunk that has grown for centuries. Fire, nothing but fire, can
exterminate that cursed vegetation."

Don Antolin opened his eyes in horror. He was not angry now, he seemed
quite thunderstruck by Luna's words.

"Gabriel, my son!" he exclaimed; "you are 'greener' than I thought.
Just think where you are; remember what you are saying. We are in the
Holy Metropolitan Church of all the Spains."

But Luna was fairly launched by the renewal of his historical
remembran