Buleros_--One charged with distributing crusading bulls
and collecting alms for them.]

Silver Stick listened coldly, as though he had formed some definite
idea about Luna, and therefore did not make much account of his words.

"However bad they were," he said slowly, "they could not be worse than
they are at present. At all events no one robbed the Church. Everyone
was contented in his poverty, thinking of heaven, which is the only
truth, and the worship of God which corresponds to it. Is it that you
possibly do not believe in God?"

Gabriel avoided an answer, and went on talking of those times.

"It was a period of barbarism and stagnation, and while Europe was
developing and progressing the people who had been foremost in all
civilisation were now left far behind. The kings, inspired by Spanish
pride and the hereditary pretensions of the German Caesars, conceived
the mad idea of mastering all Europe, with no more support than
a nation of seven million of inhabitants, and a few companies of
ill-paid and starving soldiers. The gold from America had gone to fill
the Dutchmen's purses, and in this undertaking, worthy of Don Quixote,
the nation received blow after blow. Spain became more and more
Catholic, poorer and more barbarous. She aspired to conquer the whole
world, yet in the interior she had whole provinces uninhabited; many
of the old towns had disappeared, the roads were obliterated and no
one in Spain knew for certain the geography of the country though few
were ignorant of the situation of heaven and of purgatory. The farms
of any fertility were not occupied by granges but by convents, and
along the few highways bivouacked bands of robbers, who took refuge,
when they found themselves pursued, in the monasteries, where they
were welcomed for their piety, and for the many masses they ordered
for their sinful souls.

"The ignorance was atrocious, the kings were advised even in warlike
matters by priests. Charles II., when the Dutch troops offered to
garrison the Spanish towns in Flanders, consulted with the clerics as
on a case of conscience, because this might facilitate the diffusion
of heresy, and he ended by preferring to let them fall into the hands
of the French, who, although they were enemies, were at all events
Catholics. In the university of Salamanca the poet Torres de
Villarroel could not find a single work on geography, and when he
spoke of mathematics, the pupils assured him it was a kind of so