cruelty. Arian and catholic alike resorted to it. Euric, king of the Visigoths, who had embraced Arianism, persecuted the orthodox of Aquitain. Hunneric carried on the violence of his father Genseric. Both parties were unscrupulous in their measures: synods and councils of bishops were not spared. They only agreed when they could destroy the Manichæans. When Belisarius was overcome, then the Visigoths of Spain, who had held out the last of the followers of Arius, were reconverted to their original faith, and showed a zeal stronger than Nicene. We advance to the crusades. After the verdict of ages upon them, many sciolists now endeavour to question it. No movement is barren of all good, incidental and contingent. This never was denied to them; but scarcely has there existed a later evil, but which is their direct consequence. They nationalized persecution. They did worse: they banded nations in it, to fight with each other more fiercely, because of this bloody truce. The wolves hunted together after this quarry, and then tore each other. Innocent III. founded the Inquisition, such as has been described, during the fourth crusade. But was Spain prepared for it? From Recared, the first catholic king, to Witiza, the immediate predecessor of Rodoric, religion, in its presumptive purity and external discipline, was maintained. The Saracen irruption greatly weakened its influence, and infected its strictness. A disgust of their proximity and influence was felt. To roll back the tide would have delighted the people; but the Inquisition was too intolerant and oppressive for them, keen as were their propensities towards conflict. It was necessary to overcome the reiterated objections of Isabella, but her confessor in youth had bound her by a vow to support its operations. It was presented to her mind in shapes adapted to win her pious mind. The injustice was veiled in the garb of pity and zeal. It was necessary, also, to reconcile the people by awakening their common prejudice against the Jews. It was intimated that its only business was with that scattered race. But when it was formally established and legalized, it shocked public opinion. The Arragonese protested against it. Their Cortes petitioned Rome, as likewise Ferdinand, for its suppression. Exasperated at the refusal of their prayer, an extensive conspiracy was formed against it, and Arbues, the inquisitor of Saragossa, perished as its victim. His assassination before the high altar gave a martyrdom to his death, and produced a reaction, which as much helped the office as it had been previously withstood. The Castilians were equally averse to it, though they forbore violence. Ferdinand exercised an energy in its support, which his glorious queen did much to soften, and which her fanaticism at last only distantly approached. It was a plot of which both

were unconscious instruments. The design was to restore the Roman power. The hope was, that it would bind down the human intellect, which hourly manifested its impatience of prescription. Avarice and extortion found in its confiscations a full reward. Cruelty and injustice delighted in torture and oppression. Power, fell and trenchant, knew no such gripe as this on the whole man; it bound him hand and foot. Of nothing is the human heart so greedy as power; nothing so demonizes it, without great correctives, as the possession of power. Those who never looked into the workings of our nature, may not understand this greed but in connexion with sensual acquisition. To get wealth and honour by the use of power is its lowest game. But when it can strike the soul, can awe the heart, lay under itself thought and motion, and itself continue poor and unattended, bringing kings to its bar, ruling in palaces with a sway prouder than kings, then may we comprehend Schiller's Inquisitor,-may conceive of the blind, withered, sered, old man, a sepulchre, yet full of intensest life,-forgotten by all, but forgetting none,-from his wretched serge governing the ermined monarch,-from his narrow cell, controlling the cabinet of statesmen and the council of nations, -all inward sense, the soul, unseen and unfeared, the centre and spring of all. Such is the inquisitorial complication, and ubiquity, and secresy, and penetrativeness, and efficiency, and climax of power. We might take lower views. But these were the passions of Bernard, Hildebrand, Ximenes. The ancient and the modern forms sated the same spiritual lust. And what was the influence of this tribunal, which abused all the rules of evidence, all the methods of crimination, all the grounds of defence?-which always reminds us of the stealth, the spring, and the coil, of the serpent? It was a blight and a ruin upon all. Upon a nature, upon a heart, than which none could be more noble-upon the nature, upon the heart of Isabella, it stamped a crookedness and a sternness necessarily alien to them. She yields to the dictatorship, which is the essence of confession,-she bows to an ascendancy which the catholic must allow to be within the church, and still always beyond himself,-all with her is a reserved consent, an embarrassed concession, even to deprecations and tears, yet she is forced to handle the horrid brand! A people-two noble races now conjoined-which had risen up against the system, is so depraved in a little time by its glosses, and so stricken by its fears, that it boasts the galling yoke and glories in its shame. The censorship of the press immediately follows. Learning dies. The spirit of the mountains, an inde

* Don Carlos.

pendence lofty as that of any age and clime, embraces its corroding chains. The bibliographical triumph of Alcala awakens a general fear, and its six hundred copies, evidently intended only for the learned, were barely licensed by Leo X., and that after hesitation and five years' delay. The sovereigns and the nations were cajoled that their extirpation of heresy, in the banishment of the Jews and the expulsion of the Moslems, by espiery and fagot, was the cause of heaven's favour towards them in the magnificence of their new-won possessions. Extirpation! Ferdinand's eyes are just closed; the death-mist is hovering over those of Ximenes; they have done their utmost; their engine of extirpation has done its worst; there is but a year between their end; and Luther has already, at Wittemberg, published his thesis against the doctrine of indulgences, and, in five years more, Europe strains its ear that it might listen to him at the diet of Worms. Extirpation! The Reformation had begun already. Much of inefficiency might thus be charged on the Inquisition. Its sanguine cloud' could not 'quench the orb of day.' But locally it did answer its design. It destroyed inquiry, and overpowered conviction. It closed each clink against the admission of light. It drank the blood of the saints. The same bigotry launched its Armada against England, and met its reward. It provoked a signal reprisal in the sacking of Cadiz. And what is Spain? Torn by parties, convulsed by revolutions, its mighty colonies rent from it, with the exception of a single isle. Where is its once wide-wafted commerce, potent negotiation, and warlike state? Where is its navy, which swept the seas? Where is its banner, which was simultaneously unfurled on three continents? Where is its literature and its virtue? Where is the crown of Ferdinand and Isabella, with its streaming rays? For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled.'

One more cause may be assigned why the Spanish monarchy, of then unprecedented extent, of then beneficent promise, failed: it was not only persecution in the genus, but a particular direction of it. The procedure of God in his ban upon the commonwealth of Israel, his pursuance of a fearful doom, involve no duty on our part. We are not the assessors of his judgment-seat. He does not commit the sentence to us for execution. He still avenges them on their oppressors. They may have blindly accomplished his purpose. He reckons with them according to their motives, The nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge,' said God. I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the affliction.' What power ever despoiled and

trod down this people, but itself suffered the curse? God is still round about them: he is mindful of them: he remembers them still. Peculiar hypocrisy was to be observed in Spanish outrage against them. Many of them had professed Christianity; they filled high offices and trusts. It was enough to bring them into the toils, if they retained an ancestral usage, if the tint and feature of their nation were not extinguished. It was but a foul extortion of their wealth. It was robbery and pillage. Then the spectacle of the auto-da-fé became indifferent, so that the flames were fed. Little care was there who might be the victims. Bonds were cancelled, and debts discharged, by the stake. The Jew was a large creditor: thus was he to be paid. His religion was but the pretext. Of one it is told that he seemed to waver as he was led in his benito to the scene of death. The crowd, fearing the loss of their amusement, actually encouraged his resolution in his heresy: Sta ferme, Mosè.'

All, all is lost-so far as we can see-of an apparatus of power and freedom beyond all account, and almost beyond all imagination! The glory is departed, the shield is vilely thrown away, the diadem of every arch and gem is broken-and persecution has done it all! The very land mourns! Yet this desolation will not be in vain, if we will hear and heed the voice which speaks to us from the majestic ruins. Unlike those of Babylon and Palmyra, the ruins are not of broken column, and wall, and tower; they are the fragments which can live-sunken character, humiliated mind, and blasted virtue. Yet patriotism heaves no contrite sigh, and weeps no elegiac tear!

Whatever attempts religious uniformity, by any secular means, is at core persecution. The principle of a civil incorporation of Christianity cannot avoid this consequence; there is civil privilege or loss as we adhere or dissent. It might be independent of general impost; if not, the case is absolutely unjust. Public money is exacted for an establishment which is already invidiously placed as to many of those who must contribute it. The scale of persecution has its degrees. Interference with personal inquiry and conscience-whether by death, by imprisonment, by deprivation, by contumely, by depression, by slight, by neglect is its root and sap. Ximenes as much persecuted by bribes as by tortures.

Our adorable Saviour, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession,' supplies the solution of all civil strifes and safeguards in the promotion of his cause. If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight.' He states an instance, but he legislates a principle. If his kingdom took hold of worldly interests and passions, if it were a thing of present

and secular jurisdiction, then would it, like all such organization, admit of force or of some worldly sanction; then might his servants fight for it as for any other social institution. But it is not from hence; it is wholly spiritual-it is the kingdom of God. There must be no lordship, no enthralment; none must rise by it in external advantage, nor suffer by it. It is entirely out of the battle-ground of earthly competition; therefore the servants of Christ do not fight for it. But Christianity, by its coalition with worldly passions and interests, became an adventure for the most unholy. It was an ensign for the soldier to follow, an emolument for the sordid, a distinction for the aspiring, a power for the ambitious. Why should they not fight for it as for any other prize? Attach but one worldly element to Christianity, and you give scope for every worldly disposition to contend for it. We want none other key.

We may be often tempted to despond, when we study great epochs like that which we have now surveyed. There seems a retrogradation in the affairs of men. Spain is reduced in its fame and in its power. But this is retribution. That fame was forfeited; that power, arrogantly vaunted and mercilessly abused, is taken from it. But did this reign exist for a vain show? It answered ends which have not yet run out, and many of its fruits we still may reap. What though that country seems only fading from us, shorn and dimming like a receding star,— its population dwindled, its soil languishing, its wealth wasted, its power disarrayed, its spirit fled? Let us stand on a higher watch-tower than its Pyrenees, and look forth on a world. Does it grow old? Does its mind stagnate? Are its movements theatrically frivolous? Are its inventions arrested? Do its hopes sicken? Do its inhabitants weary in their career? Nor need shame and despair be branded on Castile. Another Isabella sits upon the throne. Could she avoid the guilty policy of her great ancestress, she might retrieve the monarchy. Let her tread out the last ashes of the Inquisition; let her seek the constitutional freedom and moral regeneration of her people; let her explode superstitions far more corrupting than those which the Ante-Tridentine ages knew; let her exemplify religious liberty-the only security of civil, but by no means even its ordinary accompaniment; and then, though the Colossus which strode from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, while the Atlantic rolled between its feet, cannot again configure and exalt itself, yet may Spain lift up its brow once more, honoured and greeted by younger states. The same sun shines on it; why should it not send gladness over its fields and cities? The same rivers water it; why should they not refresh and fertilize