cast into prison by their agents. His opponents attacked him in private conferences. But the aged doctor, finding that the best reasons were of no avail with his enemies, that they refused to listen to the truth, and had no regard for innocence, declared that he would hold no more discussion with Spaniards, and required them to summon learned men of other lands, capable of understanding the evidence laid before them. To the inquisitors this seemed to be horrible blasphemy. 'Would it not be said,' they exclaimed, 'that the holy fathers of the Inquisition may be in error, and that they are unable to comprehend a hundred others better than you?' They assailed him with insults, they plagued him in the prison, they threatened him with torture. The poor old man at last, enfeebled by age and by persecution, and not yet sufficiently established in the faith, as was usually the case with the converts of Erasmus, complied with the demands of his persecutors. He then withdrew to Burgos, his native place. Melancholy weighed him down. The energies of his soul were crushed. His hopes for the future of his people had vanished. He bowed down his head and suffered. Informed ere long that it was intended to arrest him, he fled to Flanders; then went to Paris, where he died dean of the Sorbonne, and professor of theology in that university. The preaching of the old man was not fruitless in Spain. Like John d'Avila and others, he was one of those Spanish evangelicals who did not make use of Luther's name, but asserted that they preached simply the primitive doctrines of the Apostles. This came to much the same thing. The tint was only a little softened and less powerful. [Sidenote: ARREST OF JOHN D'AVILA.] Louis of Cadena, one of his nephews, had succeeded him as chancellor of the university of Alcala. By his elegant Latinity, and his acquaintance with Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek, he acquired great reputation among men of letters. Convinced that if Spain were ever to become great, it was necessary to give her an impulse towards light and liberty, he undertook, notwithstanding the fate of his uncle, to bring to an end the reign of Scholasticism. Information was laid against him, as one suspected of Lutheranism, before the Inquisition at Toledo; and he was compelled to fly in order to escape the dungeons of the holy office. The Inquisition in those days lost no opportunity of putting an extinguisher over any light divinely kindled in Spain, of suppressing thought and checking its progress.[36] Louis betook himself likewise to Paris, where, like his uncle, he restrained his zeal to avoid exposure to fresh persecutions.[37]