A still fiercer tempest was gathering over the heads of the Jesuits at Saragossa. Instructive is the cause of the quarrel. The town of Saragossa was so full of convents and monasteries, that, to observe the rule which forbade any religious house to be built within a certain distance of another, it was impossible for the Jesuits to find a spot unforbidden. However, after thoroughly surveying the town, they imagined they had found a spot at the requisite distance. They there erect a house and a chapel, which is to be consecrated on Easter Tuesday 1555. Great preparations are made to make the pageant pompous and attractive, when, alas! Lopez Marcos, Vicar-general of Saragossa, on the complaint of the Augustine Friars, who pretend that the chapel was built on their grounds, intimated to Father Brama, the superior of the house, that the ceremony might be deferred. Brama refused to obey. Lopez, at the very moment the Jesuits were performing the solemn ceremony, issued a proclamation forbidding the chapel to be entered under pain of excommunication. Anathemas were poured upon the fathers, and the clergy, accompanied by a great crowd of people, march through the town, singing the 109th Psalm, the people repeating—“As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones;” and, to unite the ludicrous with the terrible, they carry along images with hideous faces, representing the Jesuits dragged to hell by a legion of demons still more hideous. A funeral procession, with the image of Christ covered with a black veil, singing lugubrious songs, march towards the house of the Jesuits. From time to time, the cry, “Mercy! Mercy!” burst from the crowd, as they wished to avert the curse of God from an interdicted city. The poor Jesuits, shut up in their own house, patiently wait for a fortnight, until the tempest should pass away. But this ignoble goblin representation, worthy only of Jesuits and of their opponents, not yet ending, Loyola’s disciples, as usual, gave way, feeling assured that, if actual force would be of no avail in making good their claim, intrigues and cunning would in the end win the day. Nor were they deceived.[75] In Portugal, dangers of another kind menaced the Society. It seemed as if Portugal were to be the theatre where the Jesuits were to perform the principal act of their ignoble drama.