As this is the opinion of a perfectly unbiassed onlooker, and has nothing of the professional element about it, it may be taken as absolutely reliable.  In the towns, such as Bilbao, where there is a large English colony, there are various churches and chapels, and considerable numbers of communicants and Sunday scholars.  Looking back, as I am able to do, to the days when there was no toleration for an alien faith; when even Christian burial for the “heretic” was quite a new thing, and living people could tell of the indignities heaped on the corpse of any unlucky English man or woman who died in “Catholic” Spain; when to have omitted, or even hesitated about, any of the religious actions imposed by the Church would have exposed one to gross insult, and perhaps injury; the progress towards enlightened toleration of the opinions of others seems to have been remarkable.  It is, perhaps, more significant that the members of the new congregations should be generally of the lower classes, because it is precisely these people who have always been mere unthinking puppets in the hands of their priests.

Although there is at the present moment such a deep and widespread revolt against the Jesuits and some of the other orders, especially among the students and the better class of artisans and workmen, there is not, so far as a stranger may judge, a revolt against the Church itself, nor even against the parochial clergy.  It would seem rather that there is a fixed determination that the priests shall keep to their business, that of the service of religion, and shall not be allowed to interfere in secular education, or, by use of the confessional, to dominate the family; and, above all, that the convents shall not be filled by force, undue persuasion, or cajolery.  The state of the Roman Catholic religion and its priesthood in England is constantly being held up as the ideal of what the Church in Spain should be.

Almost all the modern novelists of Spain show us characters of priests with whom every reader must feel sympathy.  Valera, Galdos, Pardo Bazan, and others depict individual clerics who are simple, straightforward, pious, and in every way worthy men, the friend of the young and the helper of the sorrowful.  Sometimes they are not very learned, and not at all worldly-wise, but they show that the type is largely represented amongst the priesthood of Spain, and there are not wanting some of distinctly liberal tendencies.  There was a remarkable article in a Madrid paper of radical, if not socialistic, tendencies, the other day, by one who signed himself “A priest of the Spanish Catholic Church.”  Lamenting over the sentimentalism of modern religion, and the distance it had travelled from its old models, he says:  “Instead of the Virgen being held up to admiration as the Mother of Our Lord, and as an example of all feminine perfection, the ideal woman and mother, the people are called on to worship the idea of the Immaculate Conception,