an abstract dogma of recent invention, and in place of showing us the perfect man in the Son of God, they are asked to worship a ‘bleeding heart,’ abstracted from the body, and held up as an object of reverence, apart from the living body of Jesus Christ.”  It is the reform of the national religion still ardently loved in spite of all the crimes that have been committed in her name, that the liberal-minded Spaniard wants, not the substitution of a foreign church; although no doubt the opportunity, now for the first time possible, of learning that there are people every whit as good and earnest as themselves, who yet hold religious opinions other than theirs, is bound to have a widening and softening effect on the narrowness of a creed which has hitherto been regarded as the only one.

The extraordinary outbreak against the Jesuits and the religious orders of the last year had many causes, and had probably long been seething, and waiting for something to open the floodgates.  That something came in the marriage of the Princess of Asturias, and the coincidence, accidental or otherwise, of the production of Galdos’s play of Electra.  The marriage was a love match; the two young sons of the Count of Caserta, who were nephews of the Infanta Isabel on her husband’s side, had been constantly at the Palace in Madrid, companions of the boy King.  An attachment sprang up between Don Carlos, the elder of the two, and the King’s elder sister, the Princess of Asturias.  In every way the projected marriage was obnoxious to the people.  The Count of Caserta himself had been chief of the staff to the Pretender, Don Carlos, and though he and his sons had taken the oath of allegiance to the young King, Spaniards have learned to place little reliance on such oaths.  Had not Montpensier sworn allegiance to his sister-in-law Isabel II.? and of how much was it worth when the time came that he thought he could successfully conspire against her?  To allow the heiress to the Crown to marry a Carlist seemed the surest way to reopen civil war, and upset the dynasty once more.  Moreover, the Jesuits were supposed to be behind it all.  The Apostolic party was apparently scotched and Carlism dead, but was not this one more move of the hated Jesuits to resuscitate both?  The Liberal Government refused to allow the marriage; the Queen Regent, actuated, it is said, solely by the desire to secure what she considered the happiness of her daughter, who refused to give up her lover, was obstinate; and rather than give in, Sagasta and his Ministers resigned.  A Conservative Ministry was formed—­the methods of manipulating elections must be borne in mind—­and the marriage was carried out.  Even before the wedding-day the storm broke, and things looked ugly enough.  Riots and disturbances occurred all over the country, as well as in Madrid itself; attacks were made on the houses of the Jesuits, who were credited with being the authors of the situation; and then followed the Government’s suicidal step of suspending the constitutional guarantees over the whole country.  Absolutism had once more raised its head!  The Conservative Ministers, or many of them, were accused of being mere tools in the hands of the Jesuits, and it was complained that the confessor of the young King was one of the hated order.