Which yields a life of peace below! SPA George Ticknor. BORN in Boston, Mass., 1791. DIED there, 1871. LITERATURE AND THE CHURCH IN SPAIN. [History of Spanish Literature. 1849.-Revised Edition. 1871.] PANIARDS had contended against misbelief with so implacable a hatred, for centuries, that the spirit of that old contest had become one of the elements of their national existence; and now, having expelled the Jews, and reduced the Moors to submission, they turned themselves, with the same fervent zeal, to purify their soil from what they trusted would prove the last trace of heretical pollution. To achieve this great object, Pope Paul the Fourth, in 1558,-the same year in which Philip the Second had decreed the most odious and awful penalties of the civil government in aid of the Inquisition,-granted a brief, by which all the preceding dispositions of the Church against heretics were confirmed, and the tribunals of the Inquisition were authorized and required to proceed against all persons supposed to be infected with the new belief, even though such persons might be bishops, archbishops, or cardinals, dukes, princes, kings, or emperors;-a power which, taken in all its relations, was more formidable to the progress of intellectual improvement than had ever before been granted to any body of men, civil or ecclesiastical. The portentous authority thus given was at once freely exercised. The first public auto da fé of Protestants was held at Valladolid in 1559, and others followed, both there and elsewhere. The royal family was occasionally present; several persons of rank suffered; and a general popular favor evidently followed the horrors that were perpetrated. The number of victims was not large when compared with earlier periods, seldom exceeding twenty burned at one time, and fifty or sixty subjected to cruel and degrading punishments; but many of those who suffered were, as the nature of the crimes alleged against them implied, among the leading and active minds of their age. Men of learning were particularly obnoxious to suspicion, since the cause of Protestantism appealed directly to learning for its support. Sanchez, the best classical scholar of his time in Spain, Luis de Leon, the best Hebrew critic and the most eloquent preacher, and Mariana, the chief Spanish historian, with other men of letters of inferior name and consideration, were summoned before the tribunals of the Inquisition, in order that they might at least avow their submission to its authority, even if they were not subjected to its censures. Nor were persons of the holiest lives and the most ascetic tempers beyond the reach of its mistrust, if they but showed a tendency to inquiry. Thus, Juan de Avila, known under the title of the Apostle of Andalusia, and Luis de Granada, the devout mystic, with Teresa de Jesus and Juan de la Cruz, both of whom were afterwards canonized by the Church of Rome, all passed through its cells, or in some shape underwent its discipline. So did some of the ecclesiastics most distinguished by their rank and authority. Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, after being tormented eighteen years by its persecutions, died, at last, in craven submission to its power; and Cazalla, who had been a favorite chaplain of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, was strangled at the stake as an indulgence for an unmanly recantation, and then burnt. Even the faith of the principal personages of the kingdom was inquired into, and, at different times, proceedings sufficient, at least, to assert its authority, were instituted in relation to Don John of Austria, and the formidable Duke of Alva; proceedings, however, which must be regarded rather as matters of show than of substance, since the whole institution was connected with the government from the first, and became more and more subservient to the policy of the successive masters of the state, as its tendencies were developed in successive reigns. The great purpose, therefore, of the government and the Inquisition may be considered as having been fulfilled in the latter part of the reign of Philip the Second,—further, at least, than such a purpose was ever fulfilled in any other Christian country, and further than it is ever likely to be again fulfilled elsewhere. The Spanish nation was then become, in the sense they themselves gave to the term, the most thoroughly religious nation in Europe; a fact signally illustrated in their own eyes a few years afterwards, when it was deemed desirable to expel the remains of the Moorish race from the Peninsula, and six hundred thousand peaceable and industrious subjects were, from religious bigotry, cruelly driven out of their native country, amidst the devout exultation of the whole kingdom,-Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and others of the principal men of genius then alive, joining in the general jubilee. From this time, the voice of religious dissent can hardly be said to have been heard in the land; and the Inquisition, therefore, down to its overthrow in 1808, became more and more a political engine, much occupied about VOL. V.-16 |