“There is no faith, that is the truth.  The Spaniard, after that religious fever that nearly killed him, lived in a state of perfect indifference, not from scientific reflection but from inability to think at all.  They know they will go either to heaven or hell; they believe it because they have been taught so, but they let themselves be carried on by the stream of life, without the strength to choose either one place or the other.  They accept the established, living in a sort of an intellectual somnambulism.  If now and then thought awakening suggests some criticism it is smothered at once by fear; the Inquisition still lives among us though we have no longer the bonfires, but we are terribly afraid of ‘what will be said.’  A stationary and narrow-minded society is our modern holy office.  He who raises his protest, rising above the general and common monotony, draws upon himself the stupid anger of scandalised man, and suffers punishment; if he is poor he is put to the proof of hunger, his means of life being cut away from him, and if he is independent he is burned in effigy, creating emptiness around him.  Everyone must be correct and agree to what is established, and hence it arises, that, bound to one another by fear, never an original thought arises, there is no independent thought, and even the learned keep to themselves the conclusions they draw from their studies.  As long as this goes on the task of the revolutionary is useless in this country; they may change the apparent nature of the soil, but when the pickaxe strikes they come at once on the stones of ages, solid and compact.  The national character though it has lost its religious faith is unchanged.  Faith is dead, but the corpse still remains with the appearance of life, occupying the same place and obstructing the pathway.  The Church is poor and driven into a corner compared to what it was formerly, Don Antolin, but do not fear, its situation will not be aggravated, the tide has risen to its full height and will not overflow; as long as the people in this country are afraid to say what they think, as long as they are scandalised by a new idea, and tremble at what their neighbours will say, so long will they laugh at revolutions, for however much they break out, none of these will bring the water to your mouths.”

Don Antolin laughed on hearing this.

“But Gabrielillo, man—­you must be mad.  All this reading and travelling has turned your head.  At first I was indignant, thinking you were among those who wished for another revolution to take away the little that is left to us, proclaiming the republic and suppressing all ecclesiastical things, but I see that you go much beyond this, that you conform to nothing, and that everything seems to you the worst; and this rather pleases me, because I see you are not a terrible enemy to be feared as you fire from too far.  It seems to me that your head is as much affected as your chest.  But do all these revolutions we have had seem as nothing to you?  Do you think the country is still as savage as you have described it in past years?  But I,” continued the priest ironically, “hear a great deal said about the progress of the country, and I know that we have railways, and that the long chimneys are arising in all the town suburbs, and many of the impious are delighted at this, comparing them to the church belfries.”