The Inquisition Has Been Dead Half A Century,
But You Can See How Its Ghost Still Haunts The Official Mind Of Spain.
It Is Touching To See How The Broken Links Of The Chain Of Superstition
Still Hang About Even Those Who Imagine They Are Defying It.
As in their
Christian burials, following unwittingly the example of the hated Moors,
they bear the corpse with uncovered face to the grave, and follow it
with the funeral torch of the Romans, so the formula of the Church
clings even to the mummery of the atheists.
Not long ago in Madrid a man
and woman who belonged to some fantastic order which rejected religion
and law had a child born to them in the course of things, and determined
that it should begin life free from the taint of superstition. It should
not be christened, it should be named, in the Name of Reason. But they
could not break loose from the idea of baptism. They poured a bottle of
water on the shivering nape of the poor little neophyte, and its frail
life went out in its first wheezing week.
But in spite of all this a spirit of religious inquiry is growing up in
Spain, and the Church sees it and cannot prevent it. It watches the
liberal newspapers and the Protestant prayer-meetings much as the old
giant in Bunyan's dream glared at the passing pilgrims, mumbling and
muttering toothless curses. It looks as if the dead sleep of uniformity
of thought were to be broken at last, and Spain were to enter the
healthful and vivifying atmosphere of controversy.
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