with the poetical sentiment, in such a manner
that, in their eyes, every enemy of Christ was the enemy of the whole
nation; difference of creed, therefore, according to their rude code of
international laws, was a legitimate cause of war. In their eyes the
unbeliever was a political enemy. Mere contact with an unbaptized person
was considered a pollution. They believed that all who did not worship
Christ were worshippers of the devil, and that Mahomet and the Moses of
the Jews were nothing more than the representatives and agents of the
fallen angel. Whilst those ideas were gaining ascendancy, the clergy,
the only depositaries of letters and of knowledge, were rapidly
possessing themselves of power, riches, and influence, and endeavouring
to conserve and confirm those advantages by all possible means. Of those
means none was so convenient, in times of continual violence and warfare,
to the habits of a nation just emerging from a savage state, and which
recognised no other merit than physical force and warlike valour, as that
of encouraging those sanguinary and ruthless propensities, sanctifying
them in some way or other by religious sentiment, and stirring up and
inflaming the passions of the nation, with a view of exterminating all
persons who did not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the church and the
power of its ministers. Thus it happened that Christianity, from a very
early period after its introduction to Spain, was deprived of that spirit
of meekness, suavity, and tolerance, impressed upon it by its Divine
Founder, and became possessed of a spirit of the most implacable
resentment against every person who had not gone through the baptismal
ceremony; and thus, also, it was that the religion of the country
degenerated into a violent and revengeful sentiment, and took part in all
the excesses and all the aberrations of the human passions; thus it was,
in fine, that the national spirit became predisposed to the persecution
of the Jews, Mahometans, and Protestants, by means of that execrable
tribunal, the Inquisition.

Immediately after the conquest of Granada, in which these cruel and
destructive habits were openly displayed, an occasion presented itself
for giving still greater scope to their exercise. The subjugation of the
Continent discovered by Columbus was a war of religion no less than of
ambition and of conquest. The mere circumstance that the aborigines of
America had not received the light of the gos