else have the spiritual classes been so long in the ascendant; nowhere else are the people so devout, the churches so crowded, the clergy so numerous.  But the sincerity and honesty of purpose by which the Spanish people, taken as a whole, have always been marked, have not only been unable to prevent religious persecution, but have proved the means of encouraging it.  If the nation had been more lukewarm, it would have been more tolerant.  As it was, the preservation of the faith became the first consideration; and everything being sacrificed to this one object, it naturally happened that zeal begat cruelty, and the soil was prepared in which the Inquisition took root and flourished.  The supporters of that barbarous institution were not hypocrites, but enthusiasts.  Hypocrites are for the most part too supple to be cruel.  For cruelty is a stern and unbending passion; while hypocrisy is a fawning and flexible art, which accommodates itself to human feelings, and flatters the weakness of men in order that it may gain its own ends.  In Spain, the earnestness of the nation, being concentrated on a single topic, carried everything before it; and hatred of heresy becoming a habit, persecution of heresy was thought a duty.  The conscientious energy with which that duty was fulfilled is seen in the history of the Spanish Church.  Indeed, that the inquisitors were remarkable for an undeviating and uncorruptible integrity may be proved in a variety of ways, and from different and independent sources of evidence.  This is a question to which I shall hereafter return; but there are two testimonies which I cannot omit, because, from the circumstances attending them, they are peculiarly unimpeachable.  Llorente, the great historian of the Inquisition, and its bitter enemy, had access to its private papers:  and yet, with the fullest means of information, he does not even insinuate a charge against the moral character of the inquisitors; but while execrating the cruelty of their conduct, he cannot deny the purity of their intentions.  Thirty years earlier, Townsend, a clergyman of the Church of England, published his valuable work on Spain:  and though, as a Protestant and an Englishman, he had every reason to be prejudiced against the infamous system which he describes, he also can bring no charge against those who upheld it; but having occasion to mention its establishment at Barcelona, one of its most important branches, he makes the remarkable admission that all its members are men of worth, and that most of them are of distinguished humanity.

These facts, startling as they are, form a very small part of that vast mass of evidence which history contains, and which decisively proves the utter inability of moral feelings to diminish religious persecution.  The way in which the diminution has been really effected by the mere progress of intellectual acquirements will be pointed out in another part of this volume; when we shall see that the great antagonist of intolerance