In Lisbon carelessness for religion of any kind seems to prevail. The people appear in general to have shaken off the old superstition and to feel no inclination to bend their necks to another yoke. Many of them have told me that the priests are the veriest knaves in the world, and that they have for many years subsisted by imposing upon them, and that they wished the whole body was destroyed from the face of the earth. I have enquired of many of the lower orders whether they ever confessed themselves, whereupon they laughed in my face and said that they had not done so for years, demanding what good would result to them for so doing, and whether I was fool enough to suppose that a priest could forgive sins for a sum of money. One day whilst speaking to a muleteer I pointed to a cross over the gate of a chapel opposite to us, and asked him if he reverenced it; he instantly flew into a rage, stamped violently, and spitting on the ground said it was a piece of stone, and that he should have no more objection to spit upon it than the stones on which he trod: 'I believe that there is a God,' he added, 'but as for the nonsense which the priests tell us I believe no part of it.' It has not yet been my fortune during my researches in Lisbon to meet one individual of the populace amongst the many I have addressed who had read the Scripture or knew anything of its contents; though many of them have assured me that they could read, which in many instances I have found to be the fact, having repeatedly taken from my pocket the New Testament in Portuguese which I constantly carry with me, and requested them to read a few verses, which they were able to do. Some of these individuals had read much in their own language, which indeed contains a store of amusing and instructive literature--for example, the chronicles of the various kings of Portugal and of the heroes who distinguished themselves in the various wars of India, after Vasco da Gama had opened the way into the vast regions of the East by doubling the Cape.