THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



the people were goaded into insurrection, the fight was long 

 and bloody, and the victory dearly won. 



The strength of Spain was tremendous, crushing ; but there 

 was a canker in it, which, eating through, eventually proved 

 fatal to the life of the tall tree. The King of Spain, Philip II., 

 arbiter as he was of the fate of millions, mighty and feared as 

 he was, was the abject slave of another power. The priests of the 

 Roman Church were his masters, the Pope of Eome was his lord, 

 and the mind of the man was in perfect subjection to the rule 

 ->f his spiritual guides. So the interests, or supposed interests 



over. Protestants and freedom-loving Catholics learned in the 

 Low Countries, from the Duke of Alva, Requesens, and other 

 Spanish rulers, how that the tender mercies of the cruel are 

 cruel also. In the newly-discovered regions of America, which 

 the enterprise of Columbus had opened to Spain, the religious 

 system of the Spaniards was so unlike the religion of Him 

 whom " the common people heard gladly," that 



"the poor Indian, whose unlutor'd mind 

 Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind," 

 fled in horror from it, preferring death to conversion. 



dIR FKANCI3 DRAK.B. 



of the Roman-Catholic Church bccaino identified with those of 

 the Spanish crown. Wherever the Spaniard came, there came 

 the priest, and the two together represented pure despotism in 

 the *ate, and a Church system which waa carried out through 

 the medium of the Inquisition. Countries in which the Roman 

 Church was already deeply rooted viewed the approach of the 

 Spanish ecclesiastics with jealousy and dislike, though they 

 were not necessarily iu danger of injury at their hands. But in 

 countries where the Roman faith was not the faith of the 

 people, where the Protestant form of Christianity, or no 

 C hristianity at all, was the popular religion, the coming of the 

 paniards and tha Pope was a thing to be dreaded and grieved 



lain, the navigator, after whom the American lake of thafe 

 name is called, and who visited the West Indies in 1599-1602, 

 thus wrote of the Spanish priests and the Indians : " At the 

 commencement of his conquests, he (the King of Spain) had 

 established the Inquisition among them, and made slaves of, 

 or caused them to die cruelly in such great numbers, that the 

 sole recital would cause pity. This evil treatment was the- 

 reason that the poor Indians, for very apprehension, fled to- 

 the mountains in desperation, and as many Spaniards as they 

 caught they eat them ; and on that account the said Spaniards 

 were constrained to take away the Inquisition, and allow them 

 personal liberty, granting them a more mild and tolerable rule 



