WE may well believe that the Spanish people were not originally by nature worse than the people of other nations. Like the Americans of to-day, they were made up of a mixture of peoples.
That they were brave was manifest in their long resistance to Rome. That they were inclined to the peaceable pursuits of commerce and agriculture also was manifest during the more than three centuries of their existence which followed their subjugation by Rome. Says Fernald: “For three hundred years Spain was the richest province of the Roman Empire. Education flourished, and famous schools and scholars arose. Among the distinguished authors that Spain gave to the Roman world were Martial, Seneca, Quintilian, and Lucan. Trojan, one of the greatest of the Roman emperors, was himself a Spaniard.”
Following this period of peace and prosperity came the various wars of hostile Vandals, Sueves, Alans, and Goths. Horrible cruelties characterized the earlier invasions, and these were followed by famine and pestilence.
Under the Vandal tribes Spain was nominally Arian. With the conquering Visigoths came the overthrow of the more tolerant Arians and the establishment of the Roman Catholic religion. King Recared, called “the first Catholic king of Spain,” came to the throne, and the nation accepted the Roman Catholic creed. All the documents and books containing Arian theology were destroyed. Says Fernald: “The opposition to the change was put down by force of arms and severely punished as rebellion, and the whole nation was compelled to abandon the Arian for the Catholic faith. In this period we thus find the beginning of that theological intolerance which has ever since been the especial characteristic of Spain. This intolerant spirit soon turned to the persecution of the Jews, the first expulsion of whom took place in A.D. 616.”
Following this came the conquest of the Mohammedan Arab-Moors, beginning A.D. 711. They ruled with greater justice and tolerance than Spain had known from her professed Christian rulers. Says one writer: “The very clemency of the Moslems robbed the Christians of argument. If their [the Moslems’] swords were sharp, their conduct after battle was far better than the inhabitants had any right to expect, far better than that of the Roman or Gothic conquerors had been when they invaded Spain. Their religion . . . was respected under easy conditions; their lives rendered secure and comfortable; they were under tribute, but a tribute no more exacting than Roman taxes or Gothic subsidies.”
Soon after this the little kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Navarre, and Aragon were established in the North of Spain, gradually pushing southward7and driving out the Mohammedans in the beginning of the thirteenth century. At the close of this century the larger part of the peninsula was under the control of the kingdom of Castile, Portugal holding the West, and Aragon the East. The little Moorish kingdom of Granada existed in the South, superior to all of the Catholic kingdoms of the North in everything which makes a kingdom truly great, save people and dominion. Granada fell before Castile in 1492.
On the overthrow of the Moors the Roman Catholic religion bore sway. The persecution of the Jews in the seventh century was renewed in the fifteenth. And during the closing years of this century the Spanish Inquisition was organized and established, largely under Ferdinand and Isabella, “the Catholics.” It was the transplanting of a shoot of the Papal Inquisition which was born nearly three centuries before.
Since that time Spain has been united, and in religion wholly Roman Catholic. It is to Roman Catholicism, therefore, that we must look for the foster mother and teacher of Spain, the moulder of Spain’s character. It was the Roman Catholic religion which made Spain the cruellest of persecutors, and perpetuates in her life the spirit of intolerance. Cruelty, craft, treachery, were essentials to the success of the Inquisition. They are essentials to every work of religious persecution, as every thoughtful mind will admit that contemplates its operations. The only reason why this spirit was not dominant through the centuries intervening between the first expulsion of the Jews and their persecution in the fifteenth century was because Roman Catholicism was not dominant.
Cruelty, craft, treachery, were inbred and became inborn in the Spanish race through this very spirit of religious intolerance and persecution, inherent in, and inculcated by, that perversion of Christianity known as Roman Catholicism, or the Papacy. That religion carried into Spain that spirit. It was manifest in the persecutions of Arians. It was manifest in the persecution and destruction of the Jews. It ripened in the fifteenth century into the Inquisition. It spread its desolating blight beyond the beautiful Iberian peninsula to the Western World, and the poor Aztecs and Incas of Mexico and Peru were swept away before it. It has blasted and blighted Spanish colonial rule wherever that rule has extended, until human nature could endure it no longer, and has rebelled, to throw off the intolerable yoke or to die in the attempt.
It is this same false religion (it is the religion not its devotees we condemn) that has made the Spanish nation what it has been in the last four centuries and what it is to-day.
In Spain, in the former Spanish colonies of South and Central America, in the Philippines, in the West Indies, Roman Catholicism has had a free hand and centuries of time to show what she could do for a nation, and to reveal just what kind of governments and nations Roman Catholicism could make, and what kind of a foster mother she was to the poor children of nature whom she found in the Western Continent and on the isles of the sea.
The world, and especially America, has the demonstration of the work of Roman Catholicism before them to-day. Nay, more, America has been brought into direct contact with it, that the most material may see from material things the utter failure of the papal religion to make or help a nation or people. Will America see it? Will Americans realize it? Will they look far enough to see that all of Spain’s effeteness, incapacity, senility, and utter rottenness as a government is not due to the native original Spanish race, but to that religion which has made the Spanish race what it is?
This is the lesson, we believe, that a merciful Providence which made America a cradle of liberty, would have Americans learn, and that speedily. Why?—Because of the danger that menaces this nation. A letter from the Vatican, presenting the plans of Leo XIII. respecting the United States, was published in the New York Sun, July 11, 1892. That letter said:—
“What the church has done in the past for others, she will now do for the United States.”
September 5, 1893, at the World’s Catholic Congress, in Chicago, Satolli, the papal ablegate to this country, delivered to the assembled Catholics of America a message from Leo XIII. In that message are these words to Catholics:—
“Bring your fellow-countrymen, bring your country into immediate contact with that great secret of blessedness—Christ and His church [the Roman Catholic]. . . . Here you have a country which will repay all effort not merely tenfold, but, aye! a hundred-fold.”
“What the [Roman Catholic] church has done in the past for others, she will now do for the United States,” is Rome’s declaration. Spain is a sample of her finished work. Spain has been brought and kept “into immediate contact with that great secret of all blessedness,” the Roman Catholic Church. The Philippines, the Pearl of the Antilles, Equador, Spain herself, is the result of that contact that, vampire-like, has sucked their very life-blood and left them as the United States now finds them.
Is this nation prepared to follow in Spain’s footsteps and be brought into immediate contact with this “secret of all blessedness”? Is there danger that she will?—Yea, verily. Of that more hereafter.