we desired,"
observed the Chief Inquisitor. "In capturing a few we must take care
that the rest do not escape us. Officers must be placed to watch all
those who come forth from the Cazalla palace, and they must be followed
to their homes and never again lost sight of. Meantime, messengers must
be despatched forthwith throughout the kingdom, and all the
ramifications of this most accursed heresy traced out, so that on a
given day all the heretics which exist in it may be seized together and
brought to punishment. We must surround the whole brood with our nets,
and let not one escape."

The proposal was thoroughly in accordance with the wishes of most of the
council. No time was lost in carrying out the proposed plan. Through
the assistance of the artful Maria, who continued, in spite of his
caution, to worm out some important secrets from Juan Garcia, every
Protestant in Valladolid was discovered and marked for destruction.
Officers and familiars of the Inquisition were also placed on the
highways leading to the frontiers, so that any suspected person
attempting to escape from the country might be captured.

The Protestants, meantime, continued to preach the truth, and hold their
meetings as before, not, however, without a sense of the danger in which
they were placed. How the feeling came on them they were not aware.
Still it did not make even the most timid wish to abandon their
principles, but rather drew them nearer to God, and made them more and
more sensible of their entire dependence on Him. The difficulties
encountered by those attempting to escape from the country were very
great. Few persons experienced greater than did the monks of San
Isidoro, near Seville. Nearly all the convents in its neighbourhood had
been leavened with the reforming principles. They had been originally
introduced into that of San Isidoro by the celebrated Doctor Blanco, who
afterwards for a time abandoned them, or rather, it may be said that a
timid disposition made him conceal them. He taught his brethren that
true religion was very different from what it was vulgarly supposed to
be; that it did not consist in chanting matins and vespers, or in
performing any of those acts of bodily service in which their time was
occupied, and that if they desired to have the approbation of God, it
behoved them to have recourse to the Scriptures to know His mind. After
a few years a still more decided change took place in the internal sta