were most cordially received by
their comrades.

For a short time everything went smoothly. The suspicion that they
were spies had now passed away, and the remembrance of their
courageous action made them popular among all classes in the town.
A cloud, however, began to gather slowly round them. Now that they
had declared their nationality, they felt that they could no longer
even pretend that it was likely that they might be induced to
forsake their religion; and they accordingly refused, positively,
to submit any longer to the teaching of the priests. Arguments were
spent upon them in vain and, after resorting to these, threats were
not obscurely uttered. They were told, and with truth that, only
two or three months before, six persons had been burned alive, at
Lima, for defying the authority of the church; and that, if they
persisted in their heretical opinions, a similar fate might fall
upon them.

English boys are accustomed to think with feelings of unmitigated
horror, and indignation, of the days of the Inquisition; and in
times like these, when a general toleration of religious opinion
prevails, it appears to us almost incredible that men should have
put others to death, in the name of religion. But it is only by
placing ourselves in the position of the persecutors, of the middle
ages, that we can see that what appears to us cruelty and
barbarity, of the worst kind, was really the result of a zeal; in
its way as earnest, if not as praiseworthy, as that which now
impels missionaries to go, with their lives in their hands, to
regions where little but a martyr's grave can be expected. Nowadays
we believe--at least all right-minded men believe--that there is
good in all creeds; and that it would be rash, indeed, to condemn
men who act up to the best of their lights, even though those
lights may not be our own.

In the middle ages there was no idea of tolerance such as this. Men
believed, fiercely and earnestly, that any deviation from the creed
to which they, themselves, belonged meant an eternity of
unhappiness. Such being the case, the more earnestly religious a
man was, the more he desired to save those around him from this
fate. The inquisitors, and those who supported them, cannot be
charged with wanton cruelty. They killed partly to save those who
defied the power of the church, and partly to prevent the spread of
their doctrines. Their belief was that it was better that one man
should die, even by the