failings of the
Roman Catholicism of the present day. In the first place, all
Christendom was Catholic, but that creed was not stained with the abuses
and errors which, many ages afterwards, provoked the grand work of
reformation. In the second place, society in general was wanting in
those energetic attractions which led, in our age, to the cultivation of
the arts and of the sciences, to the exercise of lucrative professions,
and to speculations in credit, commerce, and industry. Finally, the time
of the popes' aggrandizement had not yet arrived; as yet, Rome had not
begun to exercise over the Western nations that pernicious influence
which afterwards degraded her religious doctrine, nor that proud
preponderance which threw back kings and governments to the class of
humble subjects of the Vatican. In Spain, at least, religion was not so
material nor so dramatic as it became in subsequent ages; the mendicant
orders, which contributed so much in later epochs to the corruption of
religious doctrine, had not been founded, nor had the multitude of new
devotions, which afterwards complicated the simplicity of worship and
converted it into a code of forms and ceremonies, been invented.

Before the conquest of the Moors, as has already been observed in the
body of this work, Spaniards were truly Catholics, and nothing more than
Catholics. At that period, they had no other knowledge than that
acquired from the study of Christian truth; excepting the military, there
was no profession but that of the ecclesiastic; the arts, still rude, and
almost denuded of invention and of ideality, were limited in their
application to religious objects; and even architecture itself was not
ostentatious of its grandeur and its beauties, nor were its plans and
resources developed in great dimensions, except in the erection of those
proud cathedrals, which, like those of Burgos, Seville, Palma, and
Toledo, still excite the admiration of foreigners, and continue to be
objects of study to the artist. {202}

Animated by so vigorous a principle of action, the only one which was
capable of exciting the enthusiasm of their energetic but simple minds,
Spaniards became the admiration of the world for their prowess, for the
elevation of their sentiments, for their conquests in the East, where the
Arragonese humilitated even the throne of the Caesars, and, above all,
for the innumerable series of exploits and sublime feats of valour and
patriotism wit