It would be strange enough if the religious fervor which doomed to death and torment so many tens of thousands of Semites in Spain should be itself of Semitic suggestion. It is hardly less strange that the Greek Renaissance, which revolutionized the Christian world, and whose anti-Semitic influence to the present day is nowhere more marked than in every department of religious thought, should by the irony of fate have been forestalled by a writer, at once Spanish and Semitic; and when, by the sixteenth century, the rest of modern Europe had been led by the teaching of Averroes to accept the philosophy of Aristotle, Spain, the earliest home of Hellenism, new born in Europe, had already turned again to a religious Philistinism or Phariseeism of the hardest and most uncompromising type, Semitic in its thoroughness, Greek only in its elaborate accessories, and Spanish in its uncompromising rigor. Thus it was that the Arab and the Jew, parents, in some sense, of the religious spirit of Ximenez and of Torquemada, became themselves the objects of persecution more bitter than is to be found in the annals of any other European nation. The rigors of the Spanish Inquisition, and the policy that inspired and justified it, are not to be fully explained by the rapacity of Ferdinand, the bigotry of Isabella, the ambition of Ximenez, or the cruelty of Torquemada. They were in a manner the rebellion or outbreak of the old Semitic spirit against the Semite, the ignorant jealousy of the wayward disciple against the master whose teaching has been but imperfectly and unintelligently assimilated--perverted, distorted, and depraved by the human or devilish element which is to be found in all religions, and which seems ever striving to destroy the better, and to develop the worser part of the spiritual nature of man. We now enter upon a period of European history which is but feebly characterized by the term interesting, and which has been too accurately chronicled and too severely investigated to be called romantic; when a well-founded jealousy, or fear of the growing power of France, alone supplies the key to the ever-changing foreign policy of the sovereigns of Spain. Genuine State papers of the fifteenth century are by no means numerous. In such of them, however, as are still extant, we find the fear expressed over and over again that the kings of France would render themselves “masters of the world,” would “establish a universal empire,” or “subject the whole of Christendom to their dictation.” The best means to avert such a danger appeared to contemporary statesmen to be the foundation of another European State as a counterpoise. Ferdinand the Catholic, ambitious, diplomatic, and capable, was the first prince who undertook the enterprise.