"Pepita Ximenez."

It would be curious, and not inopportune, to explain here how it came
about that I succeeded in pleasing every one without intending it,
without knowing it, and, as it were, by chance.

There was in Spain, some years ago, a conservative minister who had sent
a godson of his to study philosophy in Germany. By rare good fortune
this godson, who was called Julian Sanz del Rio, was a man of clear and
profound intelligence, of unwearied application, and endowed with all
the qualities necessary to make of him a sort of apostle. He studied, he
formulated his system, he obtained the chair of metaphysics in the
University of Madrid, and he founded a school, from which has since
issued a brilliant pleiad of philosophers and statesmen, and of men
illustrious for their learning, their eloquence, and their virtues.
Chief among them are Nicolas Salmeron, Francisco Giner, Gumersindo
Azcarate, Federico de Castro, and Urbano Gonzalez Serrano.

The clerical party soon began to stir up strife against the master, the
scholars, and the doctrines taught by them. They accused them of
mystical pantheism.

I, who had ridiculed, at times, the confused terms, the pomp of words,
and the method which the new philosophers made use of, regarded these
philosophers, nevertheless, with admiration, and took up their
defense--an almost solitary champion--in periodicals and reviews.

I had already maintained, before this, that our great dogmatic
theologians, and especially the celebrated Domingo de Soto, were more
liberal than the liberal rationalists of the present day, affirming, as
they do, the sovereignty of the people by divine right; for if, as St.
Paul declares, all authority proceeds from God, it does so through the
medium of the people whom God inspires to found it; and because the only
authority that proceeds directly from God is that of the Church.

I then set myself to demonstrate that, if Sanz del Rio and his followers
were pantheists, our mystical theologians of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were pantheists also; and that, if the former had
for predecessors Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Krause, St. Theresa, St.
John de la Cruz, and the inspired and ecstatic Father Miguel de la
Fuente followed, as their model, Tauler and others of the Germans. In
saying this, however, it was not my intention to deny the claims of any
of these mystical writers as founders of their school in Spain, but only
to recognize, in th