Here is magnificent praise from one who cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities to bias his judgment. He has studied the facts and not the prejudiced statements of his countrymen. The more carefully the work of the Spaniards in America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is studied, the more praise is bestowed upon them. The more a writer knows of actual conditions the more does he feel poignantly the injustice that has been done by the Protestant tradition which abused the good that was accomplished by the Catholic Spanish and which neglected, distorted and calumniated his deeds and motives. This bit of Protestant tradition is, after all, only suffering the fate that every other {344} Protestant position has undergone during the course of the development of scientific historical criticism. Every step toward the newer, truer history has added striking details to the picture of the beneficent influences of the Church upon her people in every way. It has shown up pitilessly the subterfuges, the misstatements and the positive ignorance which have enabled Protestantism to maintain the opposite impression in people's minds in order to show how impossible was agreement with the Catholic Church, since it stood for backwardness and ignorance and utter lack of sympathy with intellectual development. Now we find everywhere that just the opposite was true. Whenever the Reformation had the opportunity to exert itself to the full, education and culture suffered. Erasmus said in his time, "Wherever Lutheranism reigns there is an end of literature." Churches and cathedrals that used to be marvellous expressions of the artistic and poetic feeling of the people became the ugliest kind of mere meeting houses. Rev. Augustus Jessop, himself an Anglican clergyman, tells how "art died out in rural England" after the Reformation, which he calls The Great Pillage, and "King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries." The same thing happened in Germany, and education was affected quite as much as art. German national development was delayed, and she has come to take her place in world influence only in the nineteenth {345} century, after most of the influence of the religious revolt led by Luther in the sixteenth century has passed away. These are but a few of the striking differences in recent history that are so well typified by the contrast between what was accomplished for art and culture and architecture and education by the Catholic Spaniard and the English Protestant here in America during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Truth is coming to her own at last, and it is in the history of education particularly that advances are being made which change the whole aspect of the significance of history during the past 350 years. {346} {347} THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS {348}