But perhaps a larger class, which would include too the majority of the learned clergy of Spain, are they whose honest opinions are made up of heresy and infidelity; but their worldly interests are so inwrought with the existing system, that the thought of sacrificing those interests to the higher claims of right, has never occurred to them; or, if it has occurred, has never obtained a moment’s attention. To them it is a glorious and gold-giving superstition. If they can persuade themselves that, on the whole, it is harmless, they are satisfied. They do more—they say it is beneficial, and they have repeated this so often, that they, perhaps, almost believe it is true. Would they look round them they might see the melancholy effects which superstition and intolerance have produced in their hapless country. What is Seville—the once renowned Seville, with its hundred and twenty-five churches and convents? The very shrine of ignorance. It was there that the Spanish chart of liberty was trampled under foot, amidst ten thousand shouts of “Live the King and the Inquisition!” “Perish the Constitution!” Or Cordoba, so long the cradle of the arts, the favourite seat of retiring wisdom? It is become the chosen abode of vice and barbarism! The press, which was established there in the short era of Spanish liberty, has been torn in pieces by a frantic mob, who, excited by the monks, paraded the streets of this unfortunate capital, threatening death to every individual whose name had been connected with that of liberty. How many a town and city, once illustrious, has sunk into nothingness! [9a] “What remains of their ancient glory? The ruins of palaces, of fabrics, of store-houses and dwellings; and undilapidated churches and monasteries and hospitals, outliving the misery of which they have been the cause.” [9b]
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.
“Our universities [10a] are the faithful depositaries of the prejudices of the middle age; our teachers, doctors of the tenth century. Beardless noviciates instruct us in the sublime mysteries of our faith; mendicant friars in the profound secrets of philosophy; while barbarous monks explain the nice distinctions of metaphysics.
“Who goes into our streets without meeting cofradias, [10b] processions or rosaries; without hearing the shrill voice of eunuchs, [10c] the braying of sacristans, the confused sound of sacred music, entertaining and instructing the devout with compositions so exalted, and imagery so romantic, that devotion itself is forced into a smile? In the corners of our squares, at the doors of our houses, the mysterious truths of our religion are commented on by blind beggars to the discordant accompaniment of an untuned guitar. Our walls are papered with records of ‘authentic miracles,’ compared to which, the metamorphoses of Ovid are natural and credible.
“And ignorance has been the parent, not of superstition alone, but of incredulity and infidelity. The Bible, the argument and evidence of our Christian faith, has been shamefully abandoned, or cautiously buried beneath piles of decretals, formularies, puerile meditations, and fabulous histories.
“Monkish influence has given to the dreams and deliriums of foolish women, or crafty men, the authority of revealed truth. Our friars have pretended to repair with their rotten and barbarous scaffolding, the eternal edifice of the gospel. They have twisted and tortured the moral law into a thousand monstrous forms, to suit their passions and their interests. Now they describe the path to heaven as plain and easy,—now it is difficult,—to morrow they will call it impassable. They have dared to obscure with their artful commentaries the beautiful simplicity of the Word of God. They have darkened the plainest truths of revelation, and on the hallowed charter of Christian liberty, they have even erected the altar of civil despotism!
“In the fictions and falsehoods they have invented to deceive their followers, in their pretended visions and spurious miracles, they have even ventured to compromise the terrible majesty of heaven. They shew us our Saviour lighting one nun to put cakes into an oven; throwing oranges at another from the sagrario; tasting different dishes in the convent-kitchens, and tormenting friars with childish and ridiculous playfulness. They represent a monk gathering together the fragments of a broken bottle, and depositing in it the spilt wine, to console a child who had let it fall at the door of the wine-shop. Another, repeating the miracle of Cana to satisfy the brotherhood, and a third restoring a still-born chicken to life that some inmate of the convent might not be disappointed.
“They represent to us a man preserving his speech many years after death, in order to confess his sins; another throwing himself from a high balcony without danger, that he might go to mass. A dreadful fire instantly extinguished by a scapulary of Estamene. They shew us the Virgin feeding a monk from her own bosom; angels habited like friars, chanting the matins of the convent, because the friars were asleep. They paint the meekest and holiest of men torturing and murdering the best and the wisest for professing a different religious creed.
“We have indeed much religion, but no Christian charity. We hurry with our pecuniary offerings to advance any pious work, but we do not scruple to defraud our fellow-men. We confess every month, but our vices last us our lives. We insist (almost exclusively) on the name of Christians, while our conduct is worse than that of infidels. In one concluding word, we fear the dark dungeon of the inquisition, but not the awful—the tremendous tribunal of God!” [11a]
This is the representation of a Spaniard. Though the colouring is high, it is a copy from nature, and the shades might have been heightened had he witnessed the conduct of numbers of the monastic orders during the late convulsions of Spain. There are, indeed, few examples of such infamous want of principle as was exhibited by many of them on the king’s return. Those who had gone about preaching the rights of man, proclaiming the wisdom and exalting the blessings of the new constitution; exhorting their hearers, often with a vehemence little becoming their situation, to live and die for its preservation, and hurling their bitterest anathemas against those who dared to question the wisdom of a single article,—when the king refused to sign that constitution, became the eulogists of every act of tyranny, the persecutors of the liberales, and the chosen friends of Ferdinand. [11b] They have had their reward: and though a few of them have occupied the vacant sees, and have been caressed and recompensed with no sparing hand, the finger of hatred and of scorn points them out to the execration of betrayed and suffering millions, while their names will go down to posterity, accompanied with reproaches, curses and infamy. If those be forgiven who have gone on in one consistent career of servitude and degradation; who have betrayed no cause of liberty—for they are by habit and by election slaves; who have sacrificed no manly principles—for manly principles they had none;—still no charity can wash away the stains of those traitors to freedom, to humanity, to Spain, who so atrociously deserted the banners of their country’s welfare, to range themselves around the standards of a profligate and unexampled tyranny.
The most notorious of those, however, who co-operated to establish that fatal and ferocious despotism which now degrades and oppresses Spain, have already become its victims. In their sorrow and suffering and exile, let the unshaken friends of constitutional liberty, who are scattered over Europe, console themselves with remembering that their personal fate is no more severe than that of the base tools of a wretched monarch, who have nothing to accompany their wanderings but sadness, shame and self-reproach, dark and barren prospects, and desolate remembrances; while those shall receive from all around them, the smiles and the praises of the wise and good. They may look back on the “bread” of virtue which they have “cast on the waters,” and forward in the confident hope that they “shall find it again after many days:” but they who sacrificed their country to their cold-hearted and selfish avarice, have wholly erred in their calculations. Their country is fallen indeed, but they, too, have been buried in its ruins. Ferdinand, who has just as much of gratitude as of any other virtue, [12] has already trampled on the miserable tools of his early tyranny. It were well if those who “put their trust in princes,” would study the many impressive lessons which the reign of the Spanish tyrant affords.
It is consolatory to turn from the profligacy and vice so often prominent amidst extraordinary political revolutions, to the spirit of truth and liberty which they always elicit; and Spain has had a most triumphant list of patriots. Their names must not be recorded: for, to receive the tribute of affection and gratitude from any hater of a tyrant, would be sufficient to subject them to his merciless ferocity. How wretched that country where no meed of applause may follow the track of talent or of virtue—where knowledge and the love of freedom are pursued and persecuted as if they were curses and crimes! Otherwise, with what delight should I speak of some who, buried in the obscurity of the cloister, or retiring into solitude from the noisy crowd, sigh in secret and silence over the wretched fate of the land of their birth, their admirable powers of body and mind fettered and frozen by the hand of despotism! All around them is slavery and ignorance; to them remain alone the joy of holding converse with the wise and the good of departed time, and the ecstatic hope that their country will one day burst from its death-like slumbers, and spring forth “into liberty and life and light.”
And let those illustrious exiles, the martyrs of truth and freedom, who have been driven by an ungrateful and cruel tyrant from their homes and their country, and doomed “to wander through this miserable world,” take heart; for a brighter and better day is about to dawn upon Spain. I have expressed a hope, it should rather be a conviction, that this period cannot linger long. If the extreme of evil brings with it its own remedy; if human endurance will only support a certain weight of despotism; if “there is a spirit in man;” if there is a strength in virtue or in liberty—the intolerable fetters must be broken.
¿Que es esto, Autor eterno
Del triste mundo? tu sublime nombre
Que en el se ultraja á moderar no alcanzas?
—¿ á infelices venganzas
Y sangre y muerte has destinado el hombre?
¿A tantas desventuras
Ningnu termino pones? ¿ó el odioso
Monstruo por siempre triunfará orgulloso?Melendez.
The object, for which the foregoing observations were written, made it necessary to exclude some particulars, which perhaps deserve record.
A correct idea of the state of learning in Spain might be formed from the general decline of the public colegios and universities, and the almost universal ignorance of those to whom the important business of education is intrusted. At Alcalá de Henares, where there were formerly four or five thousand students, there are now less than three hundred, and the number is yearly declining. A similar decay may be observed elsewhere. I found every thing in a melancholy state of derangement and dilapidation at Bergara, though this, I believe, is now the only public school which has been able to maintain itself. The philosophical and mathematical instruments had been destroyed by rust, or rendered useless by violence, and every thing connected with instruction appeared conducted as if the dreadful apprehension that too much wisdom might be communicated, were constantly present to the enlightened directors.