During the first three months the government remained in the hands of three worthies, Serrano, Prim and Topete. The usual hypocrisy of all anti-Catholic governments betrayed itself immediately. There were outcries, mobs, rumors everywhere; but Catholic processions were forbidden. A crowd of corrupt apostates could travel from one end of Spain to the other preaching impiety, under the name of the "pure gospel," while they dispersed the conferences of St. Vincent de Paul and drove from their houses the defenceless nuns only to gather them together in places where they were delivered to the insults of the mob and every degrading humiliation. Books, newspapers filled with obscene pictures were spread gratuitously among the populace as a proof of the new civilization. _PERSECUTION OF CATHOLICS._ Religious and Catholic writings were held up as barbarisms and inimical to the interests of the country. Schools for the teaching of falsehood and iniquity were free and untrammelled, while the seminaries and Catholic schools were closed at Madrid, Seville and other places. Churches were destroyed and chapels burned to the ground without hindrance or protest. Catholics looked on in horror, but had to be silent while the terrors of an infidel government hung around them. The government itself encouraged its partisans to gather the spoils of victory, to satisfy their old punishments with terrible vengeance. To pay the national debt of forty millions of francs the property of the Church was again seized and sold. When the Revolution began, the motto of the rebels was "Spain and Honor;" now it had become a cry of irreligion and destruction. At Antequera the sectaries attacked a convent of nuns, sacked it and burned it to the ground. Through the streets of Madrid mobs of vile assassins rushed wildly, calling out "Down with the Concordat! Down with the tyrants of Rome!" The anti-Catholic press hurled maledictions upon the Catholic faith. The Espana declared that it would have no Catholic sovereign; the Nacion proposed Alfred of England because he was a Protestant. At Seville the Church of the Capuchins was turned into a powder magazine. The old revolutionary Aguirre abolished the religious communities, declaring that they were an integral and principal part of the shameful and oppressive regime which the nation had at last gloriously overturned. Bishops were ordered to leave their dioceses, and to cease all pastoral visits. At the same time, while Catholic churches were closed and religious communities dispersed, synagogues were inaugurated and Protestant temples opened.