Spanish Life in Town and Country | Page 7

the Palace of Pekin showing that Chinese missionaries landed on the coast subsequently known as Peru, in ages long antecedent to the discovery of the country by the Spaniards, and established temples and schools there. No one who reads the minute accounts of the Incas from Garcilaso de la Vega--himself of the royal race on his mother's side, his father having been one of the Spanish adventurers--can avoid the conclusion that the religion of the Incas, thus utterly destroyed by the Spaniards, was much more nearly that of Christ than the debased worship introduced in its place. The whole story of these "Children of the Sun," told by one of themselves afterwards in C��rdoba, where he is always careful to keep on the right side of the Inquisition by pretending to be a "Christian after the manner of his father," is fascinatingly interesting as well as instructive.
It is almost impossible to speak of the Spanish Inquisition and its baneful influence on the people without seeming to be carried away by prejudice or even bigotry, but it is equally impossible for the ordinary student of history to read, even in the pages of the "orthodox," the terrible repression of its iron hand on all that was advancing in the nation; its writers, its singers, its men of science, wherever they dared to raise their voices in ever so faint a cry, ground down to one dead level of unthinking acquiescence, or driven forth from their native land, without ceasing to wonder at all at Spain's decadence from the moment she had handed herself over, bound hand and foot, to the Church. Wondering, rather, at her enormous inherent vitality, which at last, after so many centuries of spasmodic effort, has shaken off the incubus and regained liberty, or for the first time established it in the realms of religion, science, and general instruction.
It matters little or nothing whether the Inquisition, with its secret spies, its closed doors, its mockery of justice, and its terrible background of smouldering Quemadero, was the instrument of the Church or of the King for the moment. Whether a religious or a political tyranny, it was at all times opposed to the very essence of freedom, and it was deliberately used, and would be again to-day if it were possible to restore it, to keep the people in a gross state of ignorance and superstition. That it was admirable as an organisation only shows it in a more baneful light, since it was used to crush out all progress. Its effect is well expressed in the old proverb: "Between the King and the Inquisition we must not open our lips."
"I would rather think I had ascended from an ape," said Huxley, in his celebrated answer to the Bishop of Oxford, "than that I had descended from a man who used great gifts to darken reason." It has been the object of the Inquisition to darken reason wherever it had the power, and it left the mass of the Spanish people, great and generous as they are by nature, for long a mere mob of inert animals, ready to amuse themselves when their country was at its hour of greatest agony, debased by the sight of wholesale and cruel murders carried out by the priests of their religion in the name of Christ.
[Illustration: PEASANTS]
[Illustration: SEVILLE CIGARRERA]
Even to-day the Spaniard of the lower classes can scarcely understand that he can have any part or parcel in the government of his country. Long ages of misrule have made him hate all governments alike: he imagines that all the evils he finds in the world of his own experience are the work of whoever happens to be the ruler for the time being; that it is possible for him to have any say in the matter never enters his head, and he votes, if he votes at all, as he is ordered to vote. He has been taught for ages past to believe whatever he has been told. His reason has been "offered as a sacrifice to God," if indeed he is aware that he possesses any.
The danger of the thorough awakening may be that which broke out so wildly during Castelar's short and disastrous attempt at a republic: that when once he breaks away from the binding power of his old religion, he may have nothing better than atheism and anarchism to fall back upon. The days of the absolute reign of ignorance and superstition are over; but the people are deeply religious. Will the Church of Spain adapt itself to the new state of things, or will it see its people drift away from its pale altogether, as other nations have done? This is the true clerical question which looms darkly before the Spain of to-day.
To return, however. The Austrian