rals for a couple of
hundred years with angelic patience to shelter a host under a mountain
of stone? Who scourges themselves to-day, or tortures their flesh,
or lives in the desert musing continually on death and hell? Three
centuries of intolerance and of excessive clerical severity have
made our nation the most indifferent to all religious matters. The
ceremonies of worship are followed by routine, because they appeal
to the imagination, but no one takes the trouble to understand the
foundations of the beliefs they profess; they live as they please,
certain that in their last hours it is sufficient to save their souls,
to die surrounded by priests with a crucifix in their hands. In former
days the pressure from clergy, friars, and inquisitors was so great
that the machine of faith burst into a thousand pieces, and there
is no one now who can fit the pieces together, which require the
co-operation of all. And that was a piece of good luck, friend Don
Martin; a century more of religious intolerance and we should have
been like those Mussulmen in Africa, who live in barbarism on account
of their excessive bigotry, after having been the civilising Arabs of
Cordoba and Granada."

"Do you know," said the young curate, "why Catholicism has held up its
appearances of power? It is because from ancient times, in all Latin
countries, it has possessed itself of every avenue through which human
life must pass."

"It is true, no religion has been so cautious as ours, or has ambushed
itself better to entrap men. None has chosen with such certainty in
the time of power the positions it can hold strongly in its decadence.
It is impossible to move without stumbling against her. She knows of
old that man as long as he is healthy, in the plenitude of his vital
strength, is by instinct irreligious. When he lives comfortable the
so-called eternal life concerns him very little. He only believes in
God and fears Him in the hour of supreme cowardice, when death opens
before him the bottomless pit of nothingness, and his pride as a
rational animal revolts against the complete extinction of his being.
He wishes his soul to be immortal, and so he accepts the religious
phantasies of heaven and hell. The Church, fearing the irreligiousness
of health, has occupied, as you say, all the avenues of life, so that
no man shall accustom himself to live without her, appealing solely to
her in the hour of death. The dead provide much money, they are her