desecration of its
symbols, sacrifice of Christian infants,"[2] and other enormities.
Severe laws were passed against them, as in the old Gothic times, and
their freedom was grievously curtailed in the matters of dress,
residence, and profession. As a distinctive badge they had to wear
yellow caps.[3]

[1] Southey, "Roder.," i. p. 235, note.

[2] Prescott, "Ferd. and Isab.," pp. 134, 135.

[3] Al Makk., i. 116.

At the end of the fourteenth century the people rose against them, and
15,000 Jews were massacred in different parts of Spain. Many were
nominally converted, and 35,000 conversions were put to the credit of a
single saint. These new Christians sometimes attained high
ecclesiastical dignities, and intermarried with the noble families--the
taint of which "mala sangre" came afterwards to be regarded with the
greatest horror and aversion.

It was against the converted Jews that the Inquisition was first
established, and they chiefly suffered under it at first. In 1492, on
the final extinction of the Arab dominion in Spain, a very large number
of Jews were expelled from Castile,[1] the evil example being afterwards
followed in other parts of Spain. The story of the treatment of Jews by
Christians is indeed one of the darkest in the history of Christianity.

[1] Variously estimated at 160,000 or 800,000.

B.

SPAIN AND THE PAPAL POWER.

Perhaps no part of the history of Spain affords so interesting a study
as the consideration of those gradual steps by which, from being one of
the most independent of Churches, she has become the most subservient,
and therefore the most degraded, of all. The question of how this was
brought about, apart from its intrinsic interest as illustrating the
development of a great nation, is well worth investigating, from the
momentous influence which it has had upon the religious history of the
world at large. For it is not too much to say that Rome could never have
made good its ascendency, spiritual no less than temporal, over so large
a part of mankind, had not the material resources and the blind devotion
of Spain been ready to back the haughty pretensions and unscrupulous
ability of the Italian pontiffs.

In fact, Spain is the only country, apart from Italy, that as a nation,
has accepted the monstrous doctrines of Rome in all their
entirety--doctrines which the whole Christian East repudiated from the
first with scorn, and which the North and (with t