THE SPANISH INQUISITION AS AN ALIENIST. 291 



namesake, San Vicente Ferrer, at Vannes ; twice he had been to 

 Rome and once to Monte Cassino and Sicily, besides traversing 

 Spain and Portugal in all directions. About 1609 came the 

 shadow which darkened his subsequent life. Fray Francisco de la 

 Virgen, the master of the novices at Mataron, was Antichrist, 

 and had bewitched him, since when all men whom he met were 

 demons. He had ceased to attend mass or to confess and take 

 communion, for he could find no priest who was not a demon. 

 When, in the upper room of the prison, he was praying and heard 

 the bell that told of the elevation of the Host, it was revealed 

 to him that the officiating priest was a demon and the Host was 

 another. In doing what he did he performed a service to God, 

 and he would repeat it fifty millions of times if the occasion 

 required. This Carmelite Antichrist, moreover, had in 1606 killed 

 Philip III and his three children, and their places had since then 

 been filled by demons. There was also some wild talk about 

 Toledo being no longer Toledo, nor Madrid Madrid, for Saint 

 Joseph had changed them all. Barcelona is now La Imperial 

 de Santa Ana, and is on the Straits of Gibraltar, for Catalonia 

 has grown so that it is now larger than all Spain was formerly. 

 The emperor of La Imperial is Don Dalman de Queralt, who 

 daily sends him food in prison, so that he has not to accept it from 

 the demon alcaide and his attendants. The inquisitors have no 

 power to burn him, for they are all demons and he is in the hands 

 of God. With all this he was strictly orthodox in his replies to 

 the searching questions of the inquisitors as to his belief in tran- 

 substantiation and other points, except that he attributed five per- 

 sons to the Godhead — Michael and Gabriel being added to the 

 Trinity. Throughout the course of his prolonged trial nothing 

 could make him swerve from these hallucinations or modify his 

 story. He defied the inquisitors, for he had a revelation in prison 

 that they were demons and had no power to harm him. 



Anxious as were the inquisitors to push the trial to a conclu- 

 sion, they felt that evidence of his sanity was necessary. For this 

 they examined the alcaide of the prison and his assistant and 

 three fellow-prisoners confined in the same cell. All testified to 

 Benito's soundness of mind as evinced in his daily actions, though 

 he was silent and reserved and spent most of his time in prayer or 

 in reading his breviary. Then three physicians were made to 

 visit him several times, who reported that he talked sanely on 

 most subjects but wildly on others ; the insanity seemed feigned, 

 and according to the rules of the medical art he was sane. Thus 

 fortified, on November 23d, the inquisitors called together the 

 regular consulta, an assembly of experts, to decide on the case. 

 There were nine of them in all — the three inquisitors, the Vicar 

 General as representative of the Archbishop of Toledo, and five 



