ned; but who exacts responsibility from
Pope or bishops once they are anointed and in more or less frequent
intercourse with the Holy Spirit? If you want Justice you are sent
before tribunals equally formed by the aristocrats of the Church;
there is no power more absolute on earth, not even the Grand Turk, who
in a measure is responsible through fear of revolts in his seraglio.
Here, in the seraglio of the Church, we are all less than women. If it
happens that a priest, weary of persecution, feeling the man once more
rising beneath his cassock, deals a heavy blow at his tyrant, he is
declared mad; the climax of hypocrisy! They try to demonstrate that in
the Church one lives in the best of worlds, and it is only the lack of
reason that causes any rebellion against its authority."

Don Martin was silent for a long while as though he were searching in
his memory; at length he continued:

"You also laugh at the idea of the actual poverty of the Church in
Spain. She is like the great ruined noblemen, who still have enough
to live upon in idleness, but who think themselves miserably poor
compared to their former wealth; the Church has the nostalgia of those
former centuries when she possessed half the wealth of Spain. Poor
she is if she thinks of those times, but if you compare her with the
Catholicism of other modern nations you find that, as in former years,
she is by far the most favoured and best paid establishment in the
State. She absorbs forty-one millions of the revenue, which is
enormous in a country which only devotes nine millions to schools and
teaching, and one million to the relief of the poor. To maintain an
intercourse with God costs a Spaniard five times as much as to learn
to read. But this forty-one millions is a blind. My own poverty made
me inquisitive, and I wished to know what the clergy in Spain really
receive, and what comes to our hands, the rank and file. The demands
and pensions of the Church are an intricate tangle, apart from the
forty-one millions. There is not a single ministry in which the Church
has not struck her roots; she is paid by the Ministers of State for
foreign missions, which are no use to anyone, by the Ministers of
War and Marine for military clergy, and by the Ministers of Public
Instruction and Justice. She is paid to support the pomp of the Roman
Pontiff, as we maintain his ambassador in Spain, which is as though
I allowed myself the luxury of keeping servants, and laid on my