Already the signs are full of promise. The ancient barriers of
superstition have already given way in many places. A Protestant can not
only live in Spain, but, what was once a more important matter, he can
die and be buried there. This is one of the conquests of the revolution.
So delicate has been the susceptibility of the Spanish mind in regard to
the pollution of its soil by heretic corpses that even Charles I. of
England, when he came a-wooing to Spain, could hardly gain permission to
bury his page by night in the garden of the embassy; and in later days
the Prussian Minister was compelled to smuggle his dead child out of the
kingdom among his luggage to give it Christian burial. Even since the
days of September the clergy has fought manfully against giving
sepulture to Protestants; but Rivero, alcalde of Madrid and president of
the Cortes, was not inclined to waste time in dialectics, and sent a
police force to protect the heretic funerals and to arrest any priest
who disturbed them. There is freedom of speech and printing. The
humorous journals are full of blasphemous caricatures that would be
impossible out of a Catholic country, for superstition and blasphemy
always run in couples. It was the Duke de Guise, commanding the pope's
army at Civitella, who cried in his rage at a rain which favored Alva,
"God has turned Spaniard;" like Quashee, who burns his fetish when the
weather is foul.
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