So far, well!  The riots were at an end, and the more sensible and law-abiding people were satisfied that the ground stealthily gained by the Jesuits had been cut from under their feet as soon as the full light of day had been let in on their proceedings.  Then came the extraordinary excitement caused by Galdos’s play.  To a stranger reading it, it is obvious that the public mind must have been in a strange condition of alarm and distrust to have had such an effect produced upon it by a drama which has no great literary worth, and which appears commonplace and harmless to an outsider.  The story is simply that of a young orphan girl, who, according to Spanish ideas, is extremely unconventional, though nothing worse.  There is nothing of the emancipated young woman about her as the type is known in England; in fact, she has a perfect genius for those domestic virtues which “advanced” English women regard with disdain.  The villain of the piece, is a certain Don Salvador, who, though the fact is never mentioned, is obviously a Jesuit, and the interest of the play consists in the efforts made by this man, first by fair means and then by foul, to separate Electra from her fiance, and immure her in a convent.  He succeeds, to all appearance, by at last resorting to an infamous lie, which reduces the girl to a state of insanity, in which she flies to the convent from the lover whom she has been led to believe is her own brother.  Finally, by the action of a nun who leaves the convent at the same time as Electra, the truth is made known, and the girl is rescued.

“You fly from me, then?” exclaims Don Salvador.

“It is not flight, it is resurrection!” replies the lover, in the last words of the play.

This drama ran an unprecedented number of nights in Madrid, over fifteen thousand copies of the book were sold in a few weeks, and it is still running in the provinces.  Some of the bishops and the superior clergy have had the folly to denounce the play and to forbid their congregations to witness or to read it.  There is not an objectionable word or idea in it from first to last, except such as may be disagreeable to the Church—­as that women should be educated so as to be the intellectual companions of their husbands, and should not be entrapped into convents by foul means and against their will.  The action taken by the clergy in this matter has not only largely advertised the play, but has led to angry demonstrations against them, and has strengthened the temper of the people to resist all clerical domination in temporal matters.

There have not been wanting from time to time signs, especially in the large manufacturing towns, of a spirit of revolt against all religion.  Socialism, atheism, and even anarchism are all in the air, and if these are to be counteracted by religious teaching at all, it will certainly not be by the narrow dogmatism of the old school.  There is a deep fund of religious feeling in the Spanish character which it would take a great deal to uproot, but it must be a wide-spirited and enlightened faith which will retain its hold over the people, who are everywhere breaking their old bonds and thinking for themselves.