* * * * * While, as we shall see, the pest of _beatas revelanderas_ and more or less conscious impostors continued to afflict the land, the cases recognized as Alumbrados are comparatively few during the remainder of the seventeenth century. In a Toledo record, commencing in 1648, the first one occurs in 1679, when the Franciscan Fray Francisco de Toledo was convicted. In this the offence is treated as formal heresy, requiring reconciliation, and the punishment was extremely severe. He was to receive a circular discipline in his convent; he was to be confined in a cell for two years and for two years more was to be recluded, during which time he was to be occupied in works of humility. In addition, he was perpetually suspended from orders, deprived of active and passive voice, and reduced to lay communion. It is possibly to this, or to some movement in which Fray Francisco bore a part, that Miguel Molinos refers, in a letter of February 16, 1680, to the Jesuit General Oliva, saying that when, in 1679, Satan sought to revive the sect of Illuminists in Spain, and they had applied to him, he had given an opinion so contrary to their follies that it frightened them and stopped the attempt.[83] * * * * * [Sidenote: _ITALIAN MYSTICS_] While Spain had thus been combatting Mysticism, Rome had remained comparatively indifferent, for in Italy it had not developed into a popular mania to be suppressed irrespective of the immoral extravagances to which it sometimes led. In the Edict of the Inquisition requiring denunciation of all offences subject to its jurisdiction, there is no mention of Mysticism or Illuminism.[84] The elaborate folios of the writers on the Holy Office--Carena, Del Bene, Lupo, Dandino--are silent as to its eccentricities. Yet these were by no means unknown to the Roman Holy Office, which took cognizance of them when brought to its notice. Occasionally some book too extravagant in its teachings was put upon the Index.[85] Cardinal Scaglia ([dagger symbol] 1639), a member of the Congregation of the Inquisition, in his little manual of practice, which was circulated only in MS., when treating of the troubles customary in nunneries, says that through giddiness of brain, or vain-glory, or illusion, nuns often claim to have celestial visions and revelations and intercourse with God and the saints when, if the confessor is imprudently given to spirituality, he reduces their utterances to writing and, if he is learned, he defends them, very often with propositions punishable by the Inquisition. Sometimes, he adds, sensuality is involved, leading to the assertion that carnal acts are not sinful but meritorious, when, if the confessor desires to take advantage of this, he seeks with revelations and false doctrines to prove that they are lawful. Cases of this kind have occurred in the Holy Office, when priests who so justify themselves become liable to the penalties of heresy.