n with reason
of the way in which the ancient grandeur of the Church has been
extinguished without popular aid."

[Footnote 1: In 1897 an Act was passed "to colonise derelict land in
Spain."]

"That is true," said Silver Stick; "there is no faith. No one is
capable of making any sacrifice for the house of God. Only in the hour
of death, when fear comes in, do some of them remember to assist us
with their fortune."

"There is no faith, that is the truth. The Spaniard, after that
religious fever that nearly killed him, lived in a state of perfect
indifference, not from scientific reflection but from inability to
think at all. They know they will go either to heaven or hell; they
believe it because they have been taught so, but they let themselves
be carried on by the stream of life, without the strength to choose
either one place or the other. They accept the established, living
in a sort of an intellectual somnambulism. If now and then thought
awakening suggests some criticism it is smothered at once by fear;
the Inquisition still lives among us though we have no longer the
bonfires, but we are terribly afraid of 'what will be said.' A
stationary and narrow-minded society is our modern holy office. He
who raises his protest, rising above the general and common monotony,
draws upon himself the stupid anger of scandalised man, and suffers
punishment; if he is poor he is put to the proof of hunger, his means
of life being cut away from him, and if he is independent he is burned
in effigy, creating emptiness around him. Everyone must be correct and
agree to what is established, and hence it arises, that, bound to
one another by fear, never an original thought arises, there is no
independent thought, and even the learned keep to themselves the
conclusions they draw from their studies. As long as this goes on the
task of the revolutionary is useless in this country; they may change
the apparent nature of the soil, but when the pickaxe strikes they
come at once on the stones of ages, solid and compact. The national
character though it has lost its religious faith is unchanged. Faith
is dead, but the corpse still remains with the appearance of life,
occupying the same place and obstructing the pathway. The Church is
poor and driven into a corner compared to what it was formerly, Don
Antolin, but do not fear, its situation will not be aggravated, the
tide has risen to its full height and will not overflow; as long as
the peo