Note 39 — I SPANISH CHARACTER
Reading edition
The Inquisition was a tyranny universally feared, though in principle supported by the people. In Pepys we read of “the English and Dutch who have been sent for to work (in the manufacture of certain stuffs) being taken with a Psalm-book or Testament and so clapped up and the house pulled down; and the greatest Lord in Spayne dare not say a word against it if the word Inquisition be mentioned.” Cf. the groundless terror of the old woman in Quevedo’s El Buscón, or the story of the man who, when asked for a few pears by an Inquisitor, pulled up and presented him with the whole tree. Attacks on and ridicule of priests in Spain are not exclusively modern; the following verse of Juan Ruiz (14th century) is but one of countless instances throughout Spanish literature:
“Como quier que los frayles et clerigos disen que aman a Dios servir Si barruntan que el rico está para morir Quando oyen sus dineros que comienzan a retenir Qual de ellos lo levará comienzan luego a rennir.”
But recently the number of those believing in religion has diminished, and the anti-Clericals have been driven by certain abuses of the Church to a more or less crude parade of atheism. It is felt that the Church has crushed life rather than sought its fuller, nobler expression. Thus a writer, E. L. André (“Ética Española,” 1910), says: “We conceive life solely as a preparation for death,” and speaks of the slight espíritu territorial possessed by Spaniards. Cf. Berceo, in the 13th century: “Quanto aquí vivimos en ageno moramos”—our life on earth is a sojourn in a strange land.