ry vengeance. In the first
place, the penalty of death was prohibited, and it could only impose the
punishment of confiscation, imprisonment, and banishment. In the second
place, he ordered that one of the judges of each tribunal of the
Inquisition should be a secular person; and, for the discharge of the
duties of these functionaries, men were selected in whom was reposed all
the confidence of the ministers. The inquisitors knew that, once
committed to those coadjutors, they could not expose themselves to the
beginning of a struggle in which all inferiority was on their side. The
canons of San Isidro were not, ostensibly, persecuted; but no means were
spared to discredit them in public opinion. Thus it was that they lived
isolated, and were regarded with mistrust by all the clergy; and with
them disappeared from the Peninsula the only element of opposition to the
tyranny of Rome, which had been notorious in the Spanish Church from the
times of the Gothic monarchy.

CHAPTER II.

MONACHISM--The superiority of the monastic over the secular
clergy--Reasons for it--Orders of monks--The Carthusians--Their
advancement in agriculture and love of the fine arts--Their seclusion and
mode of living--Only learned men admitted to their order--Their form of
salutation--Curious adventure of a lady found in the cell of a
Carthusian--The Hieronimites--The Mendicant orders--"Pious works"--The
_Questacion_--Decline of Spain accounted for--Vows of chastity, poverty,
and obedience--How vow of poverty eluded--_La honesta_--Vicar-general of
the Franciscan orders--His immense income--Religious orders have produced
many great and good men--Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros--His celebrated
Bible--Corruption of monastic orders--Insubordination of friars to the
bishops--The Jesuits--Deplorable reputation of their literature--Pascal,
Escobar, Sanchez, and Mariana--Suppression of the Jesuits by Charles
III.--Their subsequent expulsion by Espartero under Isabella
II.--Nunneries, though spared on suppression of religious houses, utterly
useless--The Pope's attempt to perpetuate them by _concordat_--The lives
of the nuns described--Their means of subsistence is now
precarious--Convent de las Huelgas.

All the power, all the influence, and all the riches of the secular
clergy, such as we have described them in the preceding chapter, would
not have been sufficient completely to enslave the Spanish nation under
the baneful dominion of Rome, if