re fanatical defenders, nor sectarians more fiery
partisans, than the ecclesiastical writers of the Peninsula; the dogma of
the infallibility of the Pope, the superiority of his jurisdiction with
respect to the bishops and to the general councils, was propagated not
only in books but in the pulpit and the confessional. Nevertheless the
enlightened ministers of Charles III., Aranda, Campomanes, and
Floridablanca (the first initiated in the school of French philosophers
of the eighteenth century, and the last two in that of the learned and
pious recluses of Port-Royal), after having procured from the king the
abolition and banishment of the Jesuits, desired to foment in Spain the
opinions which those eminent ministers of the crown maintained against
falsifiers of Christian truth; and, to that end, they founded a
collegiate church in the principal convent which those fathers had in
Madrid, conferring its canonries upon ecclesiastics who professed the
same doctrines as themselves, and who were, besides, generally venerated
for the profundity of their scientific knowledge, as well as for the
sanctity of their lives. The canons of San Isidro, to whom allusion has
already been made, were Jansenists; and, consequently, they professed
opinions diametrically opposed to those of the Spanish clergy. According
to them, as has already been intimated, the episcopal dignity was equal
in all those who possessed it, and the pope was no more than the first
among equals--_primus inter pares_; the right to confer dispensations was
not vested exclusively in the court of Rome, but each bishop could
exercise it with equal authority in his diocese; external discipline of
the church belonged of right to the regal authority, as also did that of
presentation to benefices; the bulls and other papal precepts were not to
be obeyed without the indispensable requisite of the monarch's
approbation; and, finally, the Pope, as well as the rest of the bishops,
was inferior in authority to the general council, in which was
concentrated the legislative power of the church, whether with respect to
the dogma or discipline and administration.

The boldness of these tenets excited the displeasure and irritation of
the Inquisition; but the power of that formidable tribunal had already
notably declined. Charles III. had taken two means calculated to
militate against its preponderance, to humble its pride, and deprive it
of the faculty of exercising its sanguina