“I do not deny it; they were two extraordinary men, but they killed Spain for ever.  They were two foreigners, two Germans; Philip II. clothed himself with a false Spaniardism to continue the German policy of his father.  This masquerading caused us great harm, because there are many men now who think of him as the noblest representation of a Spaniard.  The absurd inventions and lapses from truth to which those times give rise are enough to drive one mad.  Many Catholics dream of canonising Philip II. for the cold cruelty with which he exterminated heretics, but such a king had really no Catholicism but his own; he was heir to the German Caesarism, that eternal hammer of the Popes.  Driven by pride, he was always sailing to the windward of schism and heresy; that he did not break with the Pontificate was solely that this latter feared that the Spanish soldiery, who had twice entered Rome, would remain there for ever, and that it would have to submit to all their extortions.  The father and son robbed us with dissimulation of our nationality, and dissipated our life for their purely personal plans of reviving the Caesarism of Charlemagne and forming the Catholic religion to their own imagination and taste.  They nearly destroyed the ancient religious feeling of Spain, so cultivated and tolerant from its continual intercourse with Mahomedanism and Judaism; that Spanish Church, whose priests lived peacefully in the towns with the alfaqui and the rabbi, and who punished with moral penalties those who from excess of zeal disturbed the worship of the infidels.  That religious intolerance which foreign historians consider a purely Spanish product was really imported by the German Caesars.  It was the German friar who came with his devout brutality and his crazy theology, not tempered as in Spain by Semitic culture.  With their intolerance and impracticability they provoked the revolution of the Reformation in the northern countries, and, driven out of them, they came here to plant afresh their ignorance and fanaticism.  The ground was well prepared.  When the free towns whose municipalities were republics fell, the people also languished; the foreign seed produced in a short time an immense forest, the forest of the Inquisition and the fanaticism which still exists; the modern woodmen cut and lop, but they soon fall off wearied; the arms of one man can do little against a trunk that has grown for centuries.  Fire, nothing but fire, can exterminate that cursed vegetation.”

Don Antolin opened his eyes in horror.  He was not angry now, he seemed quite thunderstruck by Luna’s words.

“Gabriel, my son!” he exclaimed; “you are ‘greener’ than I thought.  Just think where you are; remember what you are saying.  We are in the Holy Metropolitan Church of all the Spains.”

But Luna was fairly launched by the renewal of his historical remembrances and he was not to be stopped, driven on as he was by his propagandist zeal.  He was fired by the old oratorical fervour, and he spoke as at those meetings when he could scarcely continue his speech for the applause, and the protests and surging of the multitude obstructing the police.