CHAPTER IX. THE INQUISITION, ITS ALLIES AND ITS VICTIMS. HE year 1558 is memorable in the history of Spain. THE In that year was decided the question whether she was to join the intellectual movement of the north, or lag behind in the old paths of medieval faith; whether she was to be guided by the printing-press, or to hold fast by her manuscript missals. It was in that year that she felt the first distinct shock of the great moral earthquake, out of which had already come Luther and Protestantism, out of which were to come the Thirty years' war, the English commonwealth, French revolutions, and modern republics. The effect was visible and palpable, yet transient as the effect produced by the great Lisbon earthquake on the distant waters of Lochlomond. But to the powers that were it was sufficiently alarming. For some weeks a church-in-danger panic pervaded the court at Valladolid and the cloister of Yuste; and it was feared that while the most catholic king was bringing back his realm of England to the true fold, Castille herself might go astray into the howling wilderness of heresy and schism. The harvest of church abuses into which Luther and his band thrust their sharp sickles in Germany had long been rank and rife to the south of the Pyrenees. Nor were reapers, strong, active, and earnest, wanting to the field. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, not only laymen, but even friars, priests, and dignitaries of the church, had stood forth with voice and pen to make solemn protest against the vices of the various orders of the priesthood; against the greedy avarice and dissolute lives of monks; against the regular clergy, who preferred their hawks and hounds to their cures of souls; against oppressive prelates and chapters, who lived in open concubinage, and heaped preferment upon their bastards; and even against Rome itself, where all these iniquities were practised on an imperial scale, and whence Europe was irrigated with ecclesiastical pollution. In the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and during the infamous papacy of Alexander the Sixth, the disorders of the Franciscan mendicants had reached such a pitch of public scandal in Spain, that those of them who adhered to the party which was called cloisteral, in opposition to the reformed party of the observants, were suppressed by law, and actually expelled from their monasteries. But although this just and necessary measure was enforced by the strong hand of Ximenes, then provincial of the order and afterwards cardinal-primate, the cowled vagabonds who, refusing to purge and live cleanly, were driven from Toledo, had the audacity to file out of the Visagra gate in long procession, headed by a crucifix, and chanting the psalm which celebrates the exodus of the people of God from the bondage of Egypt.' Abundant proof of the demoralized state of the Spanish clergy, regular and secular, may be found in those collections of obscene songs and poems, still preserved as curiosities in libraries, and composed chiefly in the cloister, in an age when none but churchmen wrote, and few but churchmen read." 'Psalm cxiii. (in our version cxiv.): In exitu Israel de Egypto,' &c. See Eugenio de Robles: Vida del cardenal D. Fran. Ximenes de Cisneros, 4to. Toledo: 1604, p. 68, and Alvar. Gomez; De rebus gestis a F. Ximenio Cisnerio: 4to. Compluti: 1569, fol. 7. 2 See the curious essay on this subject, by Don Luis de Usoz y Rio, prefixed to the Cancionero de obras de burlas, 4to. Valencia: 1519; reprinted sm. 8vo. London : 1841. Similar evidence, perhaps still more convincing, exists in the proverbial philosophy of Spain, that old and popular record in which each generation noted its experience, where clerical cant, greed, falsehood, gluttony, and uncleanness are so frequently lashed, as to leave no doubt of the wisdom of the precept which said, Parson, friar, and Jew, friends like these eschew." These evils were so monstrous and so crying, that those who denounced them enjoyed for awhile the support of popular feeling, and even the good will of the secular power. But while all good men, both lay and ecclesiastic, deplored and even denounced the wickedness of churchmen, there is no reason to believe that they were shaken in their faith in the infallible church. They abhorred the hireling shepherd, not only because he was hateful in himself, but because they loved the true fold, of which he was the danger and the disgrace. Even the Inquisition was no enemy to reform, and although its chief business was to keep the Jew and the Moor under the yoke of enforced Christianity, it occasionally took cognizance of the grosser cases of clerical profligacy. Under the rule of Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards pope, and of cardinal Manrique, the holy office issued some decrees against the heresy of Luther and against the importation of heretical books into Spain. But the offenders condemned under these laws. were few, and principally foreigners; and the fires were usually kindled for victims who were supposed to pray with their faces turned to the east, to deal in astrology, and witchcraft, to keep the Sabbath, to circumcise their children, to hate the christian sound of bells, or to use the heathen luxury of the bath. It was not until near the middle of the century that the ''Clérigo, frayle, ó Judio, no lo tengas por amigo.' A de Castro; Los Protestantes Españoles: p. 39. seed cast by the wayside took root in the stony ground of Castille. Then it was that Spanish pens began to be busy with translations of the Scriptures. That such translations were as yet not forbidden, may be inferred from the fact that the first work of the kind, the Castillian new testament of Enzinas, printed at Antwerp in 1543, was dedicated to the emperor Charles the Fifth. In spite, however, of this judicious choice of a patron, the poor author very shortly found himself in prison at Bruxelles, as a heretical perverter of the text. Notwithstanding his ill-fortune, several versions of the psalms and other sacred books, and a new testament in verse, were put forth from the presses of Antwerp and Venice. Commentaries, glosses, dialogues, and other treatises of questionable orthodoxy, followed in rapid succession. Their circulation in Spain became so extensive that the inquisition interfered with fresh laws and increased severities. The stoppage of the regular traffic only stimulated public curiosity, and the forbidden tracts were soon smuggled in bales by the muleteers over the mountains from Huguenot Bearne, or run in casks by English or Dutch traders, on the shores of Andalusia. Something like public opinion began to gather and stir; strange questions were raised in the schools of Alcala and Salamanca; strange doctrines were spoken from cathedral pulpits, and whispered in monastic cloisters; and high matters of faith, which had been formerly left to the entire control of the clergy, were handled by laymen, and even by ladies, at Seville and Valladolid. No longer contented with pointing out the weather-stains and rents in the huge ecclesiastical fabric, reformers began to pry with inconvenient curiosity into the nature of its foundations. But no sooner had the first stroke fallen upon that venerable accumulation of ages than the chiefs of the black garrison Το at once saw the full extent of their danger. them the rubbish on the surface being far more productive, was at least as sacred as the eternal rock beneath. Wisely therefore, postponing their private differences to a fitter season of adjustment, they sallied forth upon the foe, armed with all the power of the state as well as with all the terror of the keys. The unhappy inquirers, uncertain of their own aims and plans, were not supported by any of those political chances and necessities which aided the triumph of religious reform in other lands. The battle was therefore short, the carnage terrible, and the victory so signal and decisive, that it remains to this day a source of shame or of pride to the zealots of either party, who still love the sound of the polemic trumpet. The protestant must confess that the new religion has never succeeded in eradicating the old, even amongst the freest and boldest of the Teutonic people. The catholic, on the other hand, may fairly boast, that in the Iberian peninsula the seeds of reform were crushed by Rome at once and for ever. What the new tenets were can hardly be made clear to us, since they were not clear to the unhappy persons who were burned for holding them. Protestant divines have assumed that these tenets were protestant, on account of the savage vengeance with which they were pursued by the church. In one feature these dead and forgotten dogmas have some interest for the philosopher, in the glimmering perception which appears in them, that tolerance is a Christian duty; that honesty in matters of belief, is of far greater moment than the actual quality of the belief; and that speculative error can never be corrected, or kept at bay, by civil punishment. Yet none of the so-called Spanish protestants have enunciated these sentiments so clearly as the Benedictine Virues in his treatise against the opinions |