“Who goes into our streets without meeting cofradias, {10b} processions or rosaries; without hearing the shrill voice of eunuchs, {10c} the braying of sacristans, the confused sound of sacred music, entertaining and instructing the devout with compositions so exalted, and imagery so romantic, that devotion itself is forced into a smile? In the corners of our squares, at the doors of our houses, the mysterious truths of our religion are commented on by blind beggars to the discordant accompaniment of an untuned guitar. Our walls are papered with records of ‘authentic miracles,’ compared to which, the metamorphoses of Ovid are natural and credible. “And ignorance has been the parent, not of superstition alone, but of incredulity and infidelity. The Bible, the argument and evidence of our Christian faith, has been shamefully abandoned, or cautiously buried beneath piles of decretals, formularies, puerile meditations, and fabulous histories. “Monkish influence has given to the dreams and deliriums of foolish women, or crafty men, the authority of revealed truth. Our friars have pretended to repair with their rotten and barbarous scaffolding, the eternal edifice of the gospel. They have twisted and tortured the moral law into a thousand monstrous forms, to suit their passions and their interests. Now they describe the path to heaven as plain and easy,—now it is difficult,—to morrow they will call it impassable. They have dared to obscure with their artful commentaries the beautiful simplicity of the Word of God. They have darkened the plainest truths of revelation, and on the hallowed charter of Christian liberty, they have even erected the altar of civil despotism! “In the fictions and falsehoods they have invented to deceive their followers, in their pretended visions and spurious miracles, they have even ventured to compromise the terrible majesty of heaven. They shew us our Saviour lighting one nun to put cakes into an oven; throwing oranges at another from the _sagrario_; tasting different dishes in the convent-kitchens, and tormenting friars with childish and ridiculous playfulness. They represent a monk gathering together the fragments of a broken bottle, and depositing in it the spilt wine, to console a child who had let it fall at the door of the wine-shop. Another, repeating the miracle of Cana to satisfy the brotherhood, and a third restoring a still-born chicken to life that some inmate of the convent might not be disappointed.