dirty, boorish. You couldn't associate with them for a minute."
"But that Spanish pastor who called on us yesterday was entirely a gentleman," we remonstrated. "He has studied for seven years in Switzerland and Scotland, seems more open-minded and intelligent than most Spaniards we have met, and was so courteous and graceful in his bearing – not to mention the whiteness of his linen – and so entertaining in his talk, that the Spanish ladies in the room chorussed his praises, after he had bowed himself out, and declared him most delightful company."
The diplomat twirled his mustache and smiled, as only diplomats can. "And you owned up that he was a Protestant? And their faces darkened as if a storm-cloud had blown over from the Sierras?"
"Precisely so," we admitted, "and after that the best they could say for him was that they never would have thought it."
The diplomat claimed that he had made his point, while we protested that the incident only went to show how unreasonable was the prejudice of whose existence throughout Spain there can be no manner of doubt.
Perez Galdós, for instance, the most popular novelist of the day, stated to an American friend, who repeated it to us, that he frankly could not afford to introduce the figure of a Protestant into one of his stories. "It would not only kill that book," he said, "but it would hurt the sale of everything I have in the market and embarrass all my future undertakings. I should simply be risking the loss of my reading public." And yet Señor Galdós is the author of "Doña Perfecta," that artistic study of the conflict between new ideas and old in Spain. In this significant novel, a civil engineer, a man of thirty, whose scientific education in the large cities of Seville and Madrid has been supplemented by study in Germany and England, comes to one of those mediæval towns, or corpses of towns, that rise so spectre-like from the ash-colored plains of Old Castile. Crumbling walls and blackened towers jealously guard the life of ages since, that feudal life of high and low, pride of station, pride of animal prowess, pride of holiness, pride of idleness, pride of ignorance; the life of superstition, of family exclusiveness resulting in intermarriage to the point of insanity; of that fierce local bigotry, peculiarly Spanish, which dreads and hates all foreign intrusion. The streets, devoid of business activity, swarm with vigorous mendicants, who have no better shift, when times grow hard, than to deform the children who are born to them like kittens in their mud-walled hovels. The casino, where half the town smokes half its time away, hums with malicious gossip. The university languidly pursues the studies of Latin, scholastic divinity, Church history, and all that savors of the past. Under the gray vault of the cathedral women kneel before the image of the Christ Child, bringing Him a new pair of embroidered pantalets and entreating of His rosy simplicity what they would not dare ask from the "Ecce Homo"; or they kiss the satin-slippered feet of the miracle-working Virgin and vow her, if their prayer is granted, seven bright new swords of the finest Toledo workmanship to pierce her patient heart. The man of scientific training, fresh from the modern world, is brought into sharp collision with this dim old town. High principles and essential, spiritual Christianity count him for nothing; he is speedily denounced as no better than "a murderer, an atheist, or a Protestant," and his strong young life is actually beaten out by that blind, terrible force of Spanish fanaticism. So far the novelist can go; such a hero he dares paint; but not a Protestant.
The notions of Protestantism prevalent among the people, not the peasants only, but the gentry, are little short of ludicrous. A black-eyed lady of Cadiz was amazed at our assertion that Protestants prayed. A Madrid señorita asked us, in friendly confidence, if it were true that Protestants "denied Christ and spat on the Virgin." The popular identification of Protestantism with all that is impious and criminal we encountered as early as our second afternoon in Spain. We were visiting, in the picturesque fishing-hamlet of Pasajes, a gaunt Basque church, where the old dame who served as caretaker showed us a waxen image of a sleeping girl, said, not without probability, to have been brought from Rome. Beneath the figure is a burial stone, whose inscription would locate it in the Catacombs. When friends of ours were at Pasajes some three years before, the grandam's story ran that the image was the likeness of a Christian martyr, slain by her pagan father at Rome in the time of the Imperial persecutions; but the tale glibly recited to us was this: "Ay de mi! The poor young lady! Her father was a Protestant, and, of course, hated religion, and when his daughter, so beautiful, was on her way to her first communion, he hid behind a corner, with an axe, and of a sudden jumped out on her and struck her dead."
It is such prejudice that goes far toward justifying the maintenance by foreign societies of Protestant churches in Spain. They cannot stand alone, in face of all this hostility, and yet the country has need of them. No European nation can nowadays be shut in to any single channel of religious life, and doubtless, apart from all questions of creed, there are Spanish temperaments to which the simpler culto is more natural than the elaborate ritual of Rome; but, waiving discussion as to the relative gifts and graces of these two great divisions of Christ's fellowship, the new seems essential, not for itself alone, but as a stimulus and corrective to the old. Time may make it clear that a purified Roman Catholicism is better suited to the Latin races in general than plainer rites and less symbolic worship, but there are heavy counts against the Roman Catholic Church as it exists in Spain. The private lives of the clergy, as a class, have been so open to reproach that even the finger-games and nonsense songs of the little children, learned with their baby lispings, mock priestly immorality. The Church, steward of untold wealth, has endowed many charities, but the fundamental trust of knowledge it has most sluggishly and inadequately dispensed. Santiago de Compostela, for example, is a very nest of religious foundations. Thirty-six Christian fraternities are gathered there, yet we were told on good authority that not one peasant in a hundred of those within hearing of Santiago's fivescore and fourteen holy bells can read and write. In matters of State, the Church has utterly lost the allegiance of the progressive party and, to a large extent, the political confidence of the nation. As Spaniards study the history of their country, they realize more and more that her colossal mistakes and misfortunes have been due in large measure to Jesuit and Dominical policy – to the father confessor in the royal chamber, the inquisitor in shadow of the throne. With reference to the success of the Church in promoting spiritual life, a beautiful young nun, her eyes glistening like happy stars, assured us that there was more devotion in Catholic Spain than in all the rest of Christendom. A scientist of repute, his voice choking with grief and wrath, declared to us that the fetters of superstition had become hopelessly riveted, during these ages of Church control, on the Spanish mind. But call it what you will, devotion or superstition, and admitting, as the tourist must, that it is a most conspicuous and impressive feature of Spanish life, there are nevertheless thousands of Spaniards, especially the younger men, over whom it has lost sway. These are the indiferentes, many of whom might find, as some have found, in a fresh presentation of Christianity, the Godward impetus which they no longer gain from the Church of Rome.
The most cheerful indiferente I encountered in Spain was a whimsical old philosopher, well on his way to the nineties, yet so brisk and hardy as almost to vie with Borrow's Portuguese dame whose hair "was becoming gray" after a life of one hundred and ten years. His hair, indeed, is white, and extreme age has written its deforming marks on face and figure, yet he runs up the steepest stairs, reads the finest print, fills his days with a close succession of labors and amusements, and scoffs at religion as airily as if Death had passed him on the crowded way and would never turn back to look for him again.
At our first meeting he offered, with characteristic kindness, to come and read Spanish with me. As I had invaded Spain for the express purpose of studying the Spanish drama, I took a volume of Calderon from my trunk and hopefully awaited his visit. But it was a matter of several visits before I could open my Calderon. The jaunty old cavalier arrived, brimming over with chat and anecdote, and when at last I hinted at the reading, produced with pride from his inner coat pocket a little, paper-bound geografia that he had written himself for use in the Spanish schools, and proceeded to regale me with extracts from its pages. I looked severely at the little artist, whose eyes were dancing in a demure face, and endeavored to profit by this unexpected course of instruction. The author chuckled much over his sagacity in having arranged the subject-matter of his book in paragraphs
