The warlocks, in that earlier instance of which Benito had knowledge, were alleged to be a party of Jews who had fled from Spain on the first institution of the Inquisition in Seville in 1482. They had repaired to France bent upon the destruction of all Christians, to the end that the Children of Israel might become lords of the land, and that the Law of Moses might prevail. For the sorcery to which they proposed to resort they required a consecrated wafer and the heart of a Christian child. These were to be reduced to ashes to the accompaniment of certain incantations, and scattered in the rivers of the country, with the result that all Christians who drank the waters must go mad and die. Having obtained the wafer, they now approached an impoverished Christian with a large family, and tempted him with money to sell them the heart of one of his numerous children. The Christian, of course, repudiated the monstrous proposal. But his wife, who combined cunning with cupidity, drove with the Jews the bargain to which her husband refused to be a party, and having killed a pig she sold them the heart of the animal under obviously false pretences. As a consequence, the enchantment which the deluded Jews proceeded to carry out had no such effect as was desired and expected. Armed with his full knowledge of what had happened, Benito now proposed to his friends that they should have recourse to the same enchantment in Spain, making sure, however, that the heart employed was that of a Christian boy. He promised them that by this means, not only the inquisitors, but all the Christians would be destroyed, and the Israelites would remain undisputed lords of Spain. [Illustration: + EXURGE DOMINE ET JUDICA CAUSAM TUAM. PSALM 73. _Photo by Donald Macbeth._ BANNER OF THE INQUISITION. From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”] Amongst those who joined him in the plot was a man named Juan Franco, of a family of carriers of La Guardia. This man went with Benito to Toledo on the Feast of the Assumption, intent upon finding a child for their purpose. They drove there in a cart, which they left outside the city while they went separately about their quest. Franco found what he sought in one of the doorways of the Cathedral, known as the Puerta del Perdon--the door, adds Moreno, through which the Virgin entered the church when she came from heaven to honour with the chasuble her votary St. Ildefonso. The Jew beheld in this doorway a very beautiful child of three or four years of age, the son of Alonso de Pasamontes. His mother was near at hand, but she was conveniently blind--_i.e._ conveniently for the development of Moreno’s story, this blindness serving not only the purpose of rendering the child’s undetected abduction easily possible, but also that of affording the martyred infant scope for the first miraculous manifestation of his sanctity.