The horror of the priest only seemed to excite him more.

“Philip II.,” he continued, “was a foreigner, a German to the very bones.  His grave taciturnity, his slow and penetrating mind, were not Spanish, they were Flemish.  The impassibility with which he received the reverses which ruined the nation was that of a foreigner who was bound by no ties of affection to the country.  ’It is better to reign over corpses than over heretics,’ he said, and corpses the Spaniards really were, condemned not to think, but to lie in order to conceal their thoughts.  All the ancient offices had disappeared.  Outside the Church there was no future for any adventurous soul, except in America—­which ceased to be of any use to the nation after it became converted into the treasure chest of the king—­or to be a soldier fighting in Europe for the rehabilitation of the Holy German Empire, for the subjection of the Pope to the Emperor or the extinction of the reformed religion, undertakings that in no way concerned Spain, but were all the same very blood-letting affairs, even for those who escaped with their lives.  All the handicraftsmen disappeared, carried away to the armies, and the towns became filled with invalids and veterans, carrying their rusty swords, their only proof of personal valour.  All the middle-class guilds were suppressed; there only remained nobles proud of being servants to the king and a populace who only asked for bread and entertainments, like the Romans, and contented themselves with the broth from the convents and the burning of heretics organised by the Inquisition.

“After this, ruin overwhelmed us; after the great Caesars, so fatal to Spain, came the little ones—­Philip III., who gave the final blow by expelling the Moors; Philip IV., a degenerate with literary fancies, who wrote verses and courted nuns, and the miserable Charles II.

“Spain had never been so religious, Don Antolin,” said Luna.  “The Church was mistress of everything; the ecclesiastical tribunals judged even the king himself, but secular justice could not touch even the hem of a garment of the lowest sacristan, even though he committed the greatest crimes in the public streets.  Only the Church could judge its own; as Barrioneuva relates in his memoirs, friars armed to the teeth wrested from the king’s justice at the foot of the scaffold, in broad daylight in the midst of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, one of their own brothers condemned for murder.  The Inquisition, not satisfied with burning heretics, judged and punished gangs of cattle-lifters.  Men of letters, terrified, took refuge in ornamental literature as the last refuge of thought, confining themselves to the production of witty novels or plays, in which a fantastic honour was exalted which only existed in poets’ imagination, while the greatest corruption of morals reigned.  The great Spanish genius ignored or feigned to ignore what the religious revolution beyond the frontiers was saying.  Quevedo only, who was the most daring, ventured to say: