meaning of this procedure, he replied that it was intended to carry out the proposition the king had made. ‘One cap,’ he observed, ‘is for your majesty, one for the Grand Inquisitor, and the third for myself.’ Stranger still, but equally certain, is the fact that secret Jews held posts of dignity, not in the State only, but the Church also. There were convents full of Jewish monks and Jewish nuns. Priests said mass at the altars, and received confessions, and pronounced absolution, who regarded all these rites as false and impious. Nay, secret Jews wielded the powers of the Holy Office itself. They saw men dragged before them, and tortured and condemned them to the stake, for holding precisely the same faith as themselves—pronounced, it may be, the sentence with their own lips, and then went to their homes to take part in the proscribed rites themselves. If anything could prove more clearly than has been already proved, the folly, no less than wickedness, of religious persecution, it would surely be this strange and startling history.[171] Nor ought we to quit this subject without remarking on the just and stern retribution with which the nation has been visited that did these things. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain was the leading power in Europe, containing forty millions of inhabitants, for which its rich and productive soil afforded ample subsistence. The empire of the New World, which was, as it were, committed to her care, poured wealth without limit into her lap. What is she now? Abroad, her name carries little respect; she has sunk to a secondary rank among the nations. Her voice is never heard in the settlement of European interests. At home, her population has diminished to little more than one-third of what it was four centuries before; her commerce is paralysed; her government unsettled. The poverty and ignorance of her people seem to be ever on the increase, and strife and anarchy continually distract the land. Who can doubt that her double sin—against the Indians of the New World, and the Jews of the Old—has brought down this heavy judgment on her? FOOTNOTES: [169] In the account given at the time of their conversion (1497), it is said that the Inquisition was not to be introduced ‘for twenty years,’ viz., till 1517. But it is plain that there must have been another promise for a longer period, though no record has been preserved of it. The Pope, indeed, Paul III., plainly said as much. [170] Charles, throughout his reign, was harsh and stern in his dealings with the Jews. His private secretary, Solomon Maleho, who had been an enforced convert to Christianity, afterwards returned to his old belief, and tried to convert the Emperor to it. The latter handed him over to the secular arm at Mantua, and he was burned at the stake.