tion upon notes collected during a number of years, and in
writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded
it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions--apparent
contradictions, at any rate--like life and like me myself.

My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with
foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in
with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time.

A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain,
Jacob Boehme declared in his _Aurora_ (chap xi., Sec. 142) that he did not
write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself
had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy
strivings, and wherein he was often struck down to the ground like all
other men; and a little further on (Sec. 152) he adds: "Although I must
become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is
in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it
and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this
Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the
Spirit.

And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and
I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that
arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which
Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of
letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this
Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe,
the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the
American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this
Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the
sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it!

In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And
the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in
de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial
life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or,
rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the
dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.

And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially
unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by
hist