“You are right, Gabriel.  The day of the all-powerful Church is past; she has still in her udders milk enough for all, but there are few who can fasten on to them and fill themselves to repletion, while others groan with hunger.  One could die of laughing when one hears of the equality and the democratic spirit of the Church.  It is all a lie; in no other institution does so cruel a despotism reign.  In early days Popes and bishops were elected by the faithful, and were deposed from power if they used it badly.  The aristocracy of the Church exists still; it may be a canon upwards, or one who succeeds in crowning himself with a mitre; from them no account is required.  Among the laity appointments are changed, ministers are turned out, soldiers are degraded—­even kings are dethroned; but who exacts responsibility from Pope or bishops once they are anointed and in more or less frequent intercourse with the Holy Spirit?  If you want Justice you are sent before tribunals equally formed by the aristocrats of the Church; there is no power more absolute on earth, not even the Grand Turk, who in a measure is responsible through fear of revolts in his seraglio.  Here, in the seraglio of the Church, we are all less than women.  If it happens that a priest, weary of persecution, feeling the man once more rising beneath his cassock, deals a heavy blow at his tyrant, he is declared mad; the climax of hypocrisy!  They try to demonstrate that in the Church one lives in the best of worlds, and it is only the lack of reason that causes any rebellion against its authority.”

Don Martin was silent for a long while as though he were searching in his memory; at length he continued: 

“You also laugh at the idea of the actual poverty of the Church in Spain.  She is like the great ruined noblemen, who still have enough to live upon in idleness, but who think themselves miserably poor compared to their former wealth; the Church has the nostalgia of those former centuries when she possessed half the wealth of Spain.  Poor she is if she thinks of those times, but if you compare her with the Catholicism of other modern nations you find that, as in former years, she is by far the most favoured and best paid establishment in the State.  She absorbs forty-one millions of the revenue, which is enormous in a country which only devotes nine millions to schools and teaching, and one million to the relief of the poor.  To maintain an intercourse with God costs a Spaniard five times as much as to learn to read.  But this forty-one millions is a blind.  My own poverty made me inquisitive, and I wished to know what the clergy in Spain really receive, and what comes to our hands, the rank and file.  The demands and pensions of the Church are an intricate tangle, apart from the forty-one millions.  There is not a single ministry in which the Church has not struck her roots; she is paid by the Ministers of State for foreign missions, which are no use to anyone,