What was the cause of the ignorance so general and so profound in Spain? The Catholic Inquisition. “The commissaries of the Holy office received orders to oppose the introduction of books written by the partisans of modern philosophy, as reprobated by Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and ordered information to be given against persons known to be attached to the principles of the insurrection.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 99.] “Theological censures attacked even works on politics, and on natural, civil and international law. The consequence is, that those appointed to examine publications condemn and proscribe all works necessary for the diffusion of knowledge among the Spaniards. The books that have been published on mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy and several other branches of science connected with those, are not treated with more favor.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 420.] “The Inquisition is, perhaps, the most active cause of that intellectual death that visited Spain at the close of the seventeenth century.... It encouraged ignorance, and instituted a censorship even for works on jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics, and for novels that reflected on the avarice and rapacity of the priests, their dissolute conduct, and their hypocricy.” [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 319 to 321.] “Lastly, if it be asked what has corrupted the morals both of the clergy and the laity of the former times and of the present day, the answer is still, Catholic superstition!” [Napoleon Roussell.] Infidels, who are noted leaders in “Free Thought,” as it is termed, are invariably men whose religious education was in the religious literature of the old creeds of centuries gone by, or otherwise in the religious literature of Roman Catholicism. They live in thought upon religious matters centuries behind the times, but, in scientific thought, are too well informed to adhere to their religious training. Such is the philosophy of infidel making. Let a man be trained in the obsolete religions of an hundred years or more ago, and otherwise well educated, and he is, at once, an infidel. No man is to blame for setting his face like a flint against old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, and high-toned Calvinism, nor for repudiating Papal and clerical authority known in the Spanish Inquisition with all its horrible, unscriptural and ungodly barbarities. But why it is that the infidel’s religious foot should set away back yonder in the smoke of the dark ages, and his scientific foot away down here with the railroad and telegraph, is rather difficult of solution. It is rather amusing, since all well-educated American Catholics condemn the Inquisition along with all the abominable cruelties of the dark ages. And, as for Calvinism, there is not enough left for seed if it was properly distributed—_it is old and thin._ “EVEN NOW ARE THERE MANY ANTI-CHRISTS.”