recollections, what transporting hopes! Have we a _right_ to rouse him from these blessed delusions? This is indeed the ignorance that is bliss. Is it not folly to wish him wise? But, alas! this is only one side of the picture! for, however soothing, however charming the contemplation of contented ignorance may be to the imagination, in the eye of reason the moral influence of such a system is baneful in the extreme. All error is evil; and the error which substitutes the external forms of worship for its internal influence on the heart, is a colossal evil. Here we have a religion, if such it may be called, that is purely ceremonial. Its duties are not discharged in the daily walk of life, not by the cultivation of pure and pious and benevolent affections, but by attending masses, by reciting Paternosters and Ave Marias, by pecuniary offerings for souls in purgatory, and by a thousand childish observances, which affect remotely, if they affect at all, the conduct and the character. The Spaniard attends his parish church to hear a service in an unknown tongue; {6c} he bends his knees and beats his bosom at certain sounds familiar to his ear, but not to his sense; he confesses and communicates with undeviating regularity; {6d} and sometimes, perhaps, he listens to a sermon in the eloquent style and beautiful language of his country, not, indeed, instructing him in the moral claims of his religion, but celebrating the virtues and recounting the miracles of some saint or martyr to whom the day is dedicated. He reads his religious duties, not in a Bible, but an Almanack; and his Almanack is but a sort of Christian mythology. His saints are more numerous than the deities of the pantheon; and, to say the truth, there are many of them little better than these. {7a} He is told, however, that his country exhibits the proudest triumphs of orthodox Christianity. Schism and heresy have been scattered, or at least silenced: and if in Spain the eye is constantly attracted, and the heart distressed, by objects of unalleviated human misery; if the hospitals are either wholly unprotected, or abandoned to the care of the venal and the vile; if the prisons are crowded with a promiscuous mass of innocence and guilt, in all its shades and shapes of enormity {7b}—what does it matter? Spain, Catholic Spain, has preserved her faith unadulterated and unchanged, and her priests assure us that an error in creed is far more dangerous, (or to use their own mild language,) far more damnable, than a multitude of errors in conduct. A depraved heart may be forgiven, but not an erring head. This is, in fact, the fatal principle, whose poison spreads through this strongly-cemented system. To this we may attribute its absurdities, its errors, its crimes. This has created Dominicks and Torquemadas.