nor put ourselves in the way of begging alms, for the honour of our cloth.  And besides, why should they keep us if we are of no practical use and cost the country so dear?  When the religious domination came to an end in Spain it was only we, the lower ones, who suffered in consequence.  The priest is poor, the temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no danger.  The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy; the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove, and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money.”

“It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains.  The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it, forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes, and that generation after generation pass between its death and burial.  Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen.  The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the philosophers despised it.  All the same Christianity required many years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed them.  Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their ceremonies to the religions that follow them.  We have been born in one of those times of transition, we are present at the death of a whole world of beliefs.  How long will the agony last?  Who knows?  Two centuries?  Possibly less may be wanted to crystallise in humanity a fresh proof of its uncertainty and of its fear of the great mystery of nature, but death is certain, inevitable.  But what religion has been eternal?  The symptoms of dissolution are visible everywhere.  Where is that faith that drove those warlike multitudes to the crusades?  Where is that fervour which continued building cathedrals for a couple of hundred years with angelic patience to shelter a host under a mountain of stone?  Who scourges themselves to-day, or tortures their flesh, or lives in the desert musing continually on death and hell?  Three centuries of intolerance and of excessive clerical severity have made our nation the most indifferent to all religious matters.  The ceremonies of worship are followed by routine, because they appeal to the imagination, but no one takes the trouble to understand the foundations of the beliefs they profess; they live as they please, certain that in their last hours it is sufficient to save their souls, to die surrounded by priests with a crucifix in their hands.  In former days the pressure from clergy, friars, and inquisitors was so great that the machine of faith burst into a thousand pieces, and there is no one now who can fit the pieces together, which require the co-operation of all.  And that was a piece of good luck, friend Don Martin; a century more of religious intolerance and we should have been like those Mussulmen in Africa, who live in barbarism on account of their excessive bigotry, after having been the civilising Arabs of Cordoba and Granada.”