The eloquence of the pulpit was checked by similar causes, but in a different way. The Catholic religion has maintained in Spain, down to a late period, more than it has in any other country, the character it had during the Middle Ages. It has been to an extraordinary degree a religion of mysteries, of forms, and of penance;--a religion, therefore, in which such modes of moving the understanding and the heart as have prevailed in France and England since the middle of the seventeenth century have been rarely attempted, and never with great success. If any exception is to be made to this remark, it must be made in the case of Luis de Leon and in that of Luis de Granada. Of the first we have already spoken. He printed, indeed, no sermons as such; but he inserted in his other works, and especially in his “Names of Christ” and in his “Perfect Wife,” long declamations, sometimes preceded by a text and sometimes not, but regularly divided into heads, and wearing the general appearance and attributes of religious discourses. These, since they were printed as early as 1584, may be accounted the earliest specimens of Spanish eloquence fitted for the pulpit, and, if not actually delivered, are still worthy of notice.[191] [191] The most remarkable, and perhaps the most beautiful, specimen is in the first book of “The Names of Christ”; the text being from Isaiah, ix. 6: “The everlasting Father.” The case of Luis de Granada is one more directly in point. That remarkable man was head of the Dominican order, or the order of the Preaching Monks, so that both his place and his profession led him to the cultivation of the eloquence of the pulpit. But, besides this, he seems to have devoted himself to it with the strong preference of genius, preaching extemporaneously, it is said, with great power and unction. In 1576, he published a Latin treatise on the subject of Pulpit Eloquence; and in 1595, after his death, his friends printed, in addition to those published during his lifetime, fourteen of his more formal discourses, in which he has been thought, not only to have given a full illustration of the precepts he inculcated, but to have placed himself at the head of the department of eloquence to which he devoted so much of his life.