dignitary in Christendom. His revenues, at the close of the fifteenth
century, exceeded eighty thousand ducats; while the gross amount of those
of the subordinate beneficiaries of his church rose to one hundred and
eighty thousand. He could muster a greater number of vassals than any
other subject in the kingdom, and held jurisdiction over fifteen large and
populous towns, besides a great number of inferior places. [80]

These princely funds, when intrusted to pious prelates, were munificently
dispensed in useful public works, and especially in the foundation of
eleemosynary institutions, with which every great city in Castile was
liberally supplied. [81] But, in the hands of worldly men, they were
perverted from these noble uses to the gratification of personal vanity,
or the disorganizing schemes of faction. The moral perceptions of the
people, in the mean time, were confused by the visible demeanor of a
hierarchy, so repugnant to the natural conceptions of religious duty. They
learned to attach an exclusive value to external rites, to the forms
rather than the spirit of Christianity; estimating the piety of men by
their speculative opinions, rather than their practical conduct.--The
ancient Spaniards, notwithstanding their prevalent superstition, were
untinctured with the fiercer religious bigotry of later times; and the
uncharitable temper of their priests, occasionally disclosed in the heats
of religious war, was controlled by public opinion, which accorded a high
degree of respect to the intellectual, as well as political superiority of
the Arabs. But the time was now coming when these ancient barriers were to
be broken down; when a difference of religious sentiment was to dissolve
all the ties of human brotherhood; when uniformity of faith was to be
purchased by the sacrifice of any rights, even those of intellectual
freedom; when, in fine, the Christian and the Mussulman, the oppressor and
the oppressed, were to be alike bowed down under the strong arm of
ecclesiastical tyranny. The means by which a revolution so disastrous to