o a
kind of clearing-house, which wonderfully facilitates the transaction of
business in the funds of the ecclesiastical market.

A circumstance peculiar to the worship celebrated in favour of souls in
purgatory is the prodigality of lighted candles which are consumed on
those occasions. There is no doubt that the object of this practice is
to expose to the view of the faithful a lively image of the flames by
which these souls are tormented in their probationary state. A
traveller, worthy of credit, assures us that the wax consumed with this
object in the city of Granada alone (in which there are about forty
churches), on the day of All Souls, amounted, a few years ago, to the
incredible sum of 10,000 pounds.

The cenotaphs placed in the churches when the funeral rites of some rich
man are celebrated, are, in truth, nothing but perfect pyramids of
burning flames produced by wax candles. It is a common belief,
maintained in the pulpit and in the confessional, that the brighter these
candles burn the more efficacious will be the suffrages. The royal
family of Spain has had the good taste to avoid this error. In the
magnificent monastery of the Escurial, where the remains of deceased
members of the royal family are deposited, all show is reduced to a
sumptuous carpet of black velvet, worked with gold, and spread out upon
the floor, on the centre of which is a cushion of the same materials, and
upon that a royal crown of gold. At the extremities are placed four
immense candelabra of solid silver, called _blandones_, with their
corresponding wax candles of various diameters and sizes.

From what has been said in this chapter the reader may form some idea of
the immense sums of money which the clergy absorb by virtue of this
belief in the dogma of purgatory. When he reflects that those
contributions are upon a more liberal scale than any others which the
Spanish nation pays, and that the product is sunk by the most
unproductive of all the classes in society, he will then be able to
arrive at some conjecture as to who and what are the Roman Catholic
clergy of Spain. These contributions, be it remembered, are paid, on
every day in the year, in all parts of the Peninsula, and by persons of
every category in the nation, from the very meanest to the most elevated
in rank. The means employed to wring these sums from the contributors
are infallible in their effects. The attack is made, indiscriminately,
by appeals to ch