Thus, in a whirlwind of squandering waste, surrounded by pompous pride, unscrupulous dishonesty, and ecstatic devotion, Philip from his birth was pledged to the hopeless task of extirpating religious dissent from Christendom: the task that had been too great for the Emperor and his steadfast son, that had drained to exhaustion the wealth of the Indies, had turned Castile into a wilderness, and was to drag the Spanish Empire to ruin and dissolution under the sceptre of the babe whose christening we have witnessed. The life-story of the unhappy monarch which we have to tell is one of constant struggle amidst the antagonistic circumstances that surrounded his baptism; against the impossibility of reconciling the successful performance of the work, to which devotional pride and not national interest had bound him, with the poverty and exhaustion that had forced Philip III. and Lerma to seek peace with Protestants, and had made the victor of the Invincible Armada an honoured guest when the heir of Catholic Spain was dedicated to the ideal of Dominic. For, in good truth, it was from no lack of either devotion or pride that Philip III. had been forced to parley with the thing that he had been taught to look upon as accursed of God. Almost the only policy in which he was ever vehemently energetic was the attempt in the first days of his reign to invade Ireland in the interests of the Catholics, and to secure the control of the Crown of England by {12} means of the anti-Jacobite party.[14] He was, as Llorente truly says, more fit himself for a Dominican friar's frock than a regal mantle; and if rigid obedience to the directions of his spiritual guides had enabled him to root out Protestant dissent from Christendom, as he rooted out the Moriscos from his realms, Philip III. would have succeeded where his greater father and grandfather failed. [Sidenote: The Philips compared]