The most revolting uncleanness abounds, and we cannot help thinking of the scrupulous cleanliness that distinguished Cordova, for cleanness is one of the most rigorous injunctions and requirements with both the religion of Mohammed and the religion of Moses. Here, on the contrary, personal uncleanliness, the renunciation of every personal comfort, the branding of every effort for better surroundings, we are told, upon inquiry, has the highest sanction of the church. The sordid example set by the Ascetic monks has established the belief that cleanliness of the body leads to the pollution of the soul, that in the past those saints were most admired who had become one hideous mass of clotted filth. With a thrill of admiration a priest informs us that St. Jerome had seen a monk who for thirty years had lived in a hole, and who never washed his clothes, nor changed his tunic till it fell to pieces; that St. Ammon had never seen himself naked; that the famous virgin, named Silvia, had resolutely refused for sixty years, on religious principles, to wash any part of her body, except her fingers; that St. Euphraxia had joined a convent of 130 nuns, who shuddered at the mention of a bath; that an anchorite had once imagined that he was mocked by an illusion of the devil, as he saw gliding before him through the desert a naked creature black with filth and years of exposure; it was the once beautiful St. Mary of Egypt, who had thus during forty-seven years been expiating her sins of Asceticism. We have seen enough to lead us to the conclusion, that when we enter into an examination of the mental and moral and religious state of the people, whose personal and domestic life hold so low a rank in the history of civilization, we must not place our expectations too high. But low as we picture it to ourselves, the reality we find is infinitly lower than even our most lenient imagination had pictured it. Only a week ago we found Cordova proud, and distinguished, and peerless in the realm of culture, and art, and philosophy, and science, and now, during the same period of the world's history, we find a deep black cloud of appalling ignorance overhanging France, and Italy, and Germany and England, here and there only broken by a few, a very few, glimmering lights. Intellect, fettered hand and foot, lies bleeding at the feet of benighted barbarism, writhing in pain beneath the lashes of degrading superstitions, and groveling credulity. We search for the cause of this stupendous ignorance, and we soon find that to the clergy, more than to all other causes combined, belongs the very ignoble distinction of having ushered into Europe this stolid ignorance, and for being responsible for the unatonable crime of having retarded the advance of civilization by many centuries.