Spanish Life in Town and Country | Page 7

and a standard of morality which has never been
surpassed. But they ruthlessly destroyed it all, desecrated the temples
where the sun was worshipped only as a visible representative of a God
"of whom nothing could be known save by His works," as their tenet
ran, and substituted the religion which they represented as having been
taught by Jesus of Nazareth; a religion which looked for its chief power
to the horrible Inquisition and its orgies called Autos da fé!
As regards the mysterious race of the Incas, who in comparison with
the native Indians were almost white, and who possessed a high
cultivation, it is curious to note that during the late troubles in China
records came to light in 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 Córdoba, 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