We have said, on the subject of the Inquisition’s introduction into Spain, that to an extent and after a manner this must be considered the most justifiable--by which we are to be taken to mean the least unjustifiable--of religious persecutions, inasmuch as it had no concern save with deserters from the fold of the Roman Church. Liberty was accorded to all religions that were not looked upon as heretical--_i.e._ that were not in themselves secessions from Roman Catholicism--and Jew and Moslem had nothing to fear from the Holy Office. It was only when, after having received baptism, they reverted to their original cults, that they rendered themselves liable to prosecution, being then looked upon as heretics, or, more properly speaking, as apostates. But this point of view, which satisfied the Roman See, did not at all satisfy the Prior of Holy Cross. His bitter, fanatical hatred of the Israelites--almost rivalling that of the Dean of Ecija in the fourteenth century--urged him to violate this poor remnant of equity, drove him to overstep the last boundary of apparent justice, and carry the religious war into the region of complete and terrible intolerance. The reason he advanced was that as long as the Jews remained undisturbed in the Peninsula, so long would a united Christian Spain be impossible. Despite penances, imprisonments, and burnings, the Judaizing movement went on. New-Christians were seduced back into the error of the Mosaic Law, whilst conversion amongst the Jews was checked by respect for the feelings of those who remained true to their ancient faith. Nor did the Hebrew offences against Christianity end there. There were the indignities to which holy things were subjected at their hands. There were criminal sacrileges in which--according to Torquemada--they vented their hatred of the Holy Christian Faith. Such, for instance, was the outrage upon the crucifix at Casar de Palomero in 1488. On Holy Thursday of that year, in this village of the diocese of Coria, several Jews, instead of being at home with closed doors at such a season, as the Christian law demanded, were making merry in an orchard, to the great scandal of a man named Juan Caletrido, who there detected them. The spy, moved to horror at the mere thought of these descendants of the crucifiers daring to be at play upon such a day as that, went to inform several others of what he had witnessed. A party of young Spaniards, but too ready to combine the performance of a meritorious act with the time-honoured sport of Jew-baiting, invaded the privacy of the orchard, set upon the Jews, and compelled them to withdraw into their houses. Smarting under this indignity--for, when all is said, they had been more or less private in their orchard, and they had intended no offence by their slight evasion of the strict letter of the law--they related the event to other members of the synagogue, including the Rabbi.