Observations on the State of Religion and Literature in Spain

Transcribed from the 1819 George Smallfield edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
MADE DURING
A JOURNEY THROUGH THE PENINSULA
In 1819.
London :
Printed by George Smallfield Hackney .
1819.
It is no novel observation, that the most cruel and intolerant persecutors have often been men wholly devoid of religious principle; men, who consider the religion of the state only as a part of its civil policy, and who treat the denial of a national creed with the same severity as the infraction of an established law, or rather as a species of treason against the supreme authority. No plea of modest inquiry, of conscientious doubt, or honest difference of opinion, is allowed to oppose for a moment their sanguinary and despotic sway. There are no terms of safety but those of unresisting, instant, absolute prostration. Such men are generally the prime movers of the gagging engine of religious intolerance; and such men are to be found too abundantly in Spain. Others there are who imagine they see in the pomp and parade of the Romish ritual, a system of delusion admirably adapted to beguile, or even to bless the ignorant. They fancy themselves beings of a higher and nobler order, and that, while they bask in the sunshine of intellect and knowledge, they may be well content that the uninstructed mass should trudge on in darkness below. Why should they throw their pearls to senseless swine; or shower down truth and virtue on those who fatten on vice and error?
One might surely expect that in a country possessing eight archbishops, more than fifty bishops, and more than a hundred abbacies, with a jurisdiction almost episcopal; “in which,” to use the language of a Spanish writer, “there are more churches than houses, more altars than hearths, more priests than peasants;” in which every dwelling has its saint, and every individual his scapulary;—one might expect to see some benefits, some blessings resulting from this gigantic mass of ecclesiastical influence. Let us, then, look upon a picture drawn by the hand of an acknowledged master.