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
Cordoba, 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