ring the cross to virgin lands; the light of
Christianity blazing forth from the folds of the national banner to shed
its illuminating rays throughout the earth.

And as if this hymn to enlightening Christianity, chanted by an orator
who could now hardly see across the gloomy hall, had been a signal, the
electric lights went on; and the statues, the escutcheons, and the
harsh, blatant figures painted on the cupola, sprang forth from
obscurity.

Rafael could hardly contain his joy at the facility with which his
speech was developing. That wave of light which was shed over the hall,
in the middle of the afternoon, while the sun was still shining, seemed
to him like the sudden entrance of Glory, approaching to give him the
accolade of renown.

Caught up now in the real torrent of his premeditated verbosity, he
continued to relieve himself of all that he had learned by cramming
during the past few days. "In vain does _su senoria_ fatigue his wits.
Spain is and will remain a profoundly religious country. Her history is
the history of Catholicism: she has survived in all her times of storm
and stress by tightly embracing the Cross." And he could now come to the
national wars; from the battles in which popular piety saw Saint James,
on his white steed, lopping off the heads of the Moors with his golden
cutlass, to the uprising of the people against Napoleon, behind the
banner of the parish and with their scapularies on their bosoms. He did
not have a word to say about the present. He left the pitiless criticism
of the old revolutionist intact. Why not? The dream of an ideologue! He
was absorbed in his song of the past, affirming for the hundredth time
that Spain had been great because she had been Catholic and that when
for a moment she had ceased to be Catholic, all the evils of the world
had descended upon her. He spoke of the excesses of the Revolution, of
the turbulent Republic of '73, (a cruel nightmare to all right-thinking
persons) and of the "canton" of Cartagena (the supreme recourse of
ministerial oratory),--a veritable cannibal feast, a horror that had
never been known even in this land of _pronunciamientos_ and civil wars.
He tried his best to make his hearers feel the terror of those
revolutions, whose chief defect had been that they had revolutionized
nothing.... And then came a panegyric on the Christian family, on the
Catholic home, a nest of virtues and blessings, whereas in nations where
Catholicism did no