’With the Inquisition.... 
  Hush!  Silence!’

the sad epitaph of Spanish thought which preferred to perish as it could not speak the truth.  In order to live quietly and support themselves in those days of ignorance, many poets sought the shadow of the Church and wore its vestments.  Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode Molina, Miradamerscua, Tarriga, Argensola, Gongora, Rioja, and others were priests, many of them after stormy lives.  Montalban was a priest and employed in the Inquisition, and even the poor Cervantes, in his old age, had to take the habit of St. Francis.  Spain had eleven thousand convents, more than a hundred thousand friars, and forty thousand nuns, and to these must be added seventy-eight thousand priests and the innumerable servitors and dependents of the Church, such as alguaciles, familiars, jailors, and notaries of the Inquisition, sacristans, stewards, buleros,[1] convent door-porters, choristers, singers, lay brothers, novices—­and I know not how many other people.  In exchange, the nation from a population of thirty millions had shrunk to seven millions in less than two hundred years.  The expulsion of Jews and Moors by religious intolerance, the continual foreign wars, the emigration to America in the hopes of growing rich without work, hunger, the lack of sanitation, and the abandonment of agriculture, had brought about this rapid depopulation.  The revenues of Spain had fallen to fourteen million ducats, whereas the clerical revenue had risen to eight millions; the Church possessed more than half the national fortune!  What times!  Eh, Don Antolin?”

[Footnote 1:  Buleros—­One charged with distributing crusading bulls and collecting alms for them.]

Silver Stick listened coldly, as though he had formed some definite idea about Luna, and therefore did not make much account of his words.

“However bad they were,” he said slowly, “they could not be worse than they are at present.  At all events no one robbed the Church.  Everyone was contented in his poverty, thinking of heaven, which is the only truth, and the worship of God which corresponds to it.  Is it that you possibly do not believe in God?”

Gabriel avoided an answer, and went on talking of those times.

“It was a period of barbarism and stagnation, and while Europe was developing and progressing the people who had been foremost in all civilisation were now left far behind.  The kings, inspired by Spanish pride and the hereditary pretensions of the German Caesars, conceived the mad idea of mastering all Europe, with no more support than a nation of seven million of inhabitants, and a few companies of ill-paid and starving soldiers.  The gold from America had gone to fill the Dutchmen’s purses, and in this undertaking, worthy of Don Quixote, the nation received blow after blow.  Spain became more and more Catholic, poorer and more barbarous.  She aspired to conquer the whole world, yet in the interior she had whole provinces