You Have Emerged From The Twilight Of The Past Into The Present
Day.
The sky above you bends over Paris and Cheyenne.
By this light
Darwin is writing, and the merchants are meeting in the Chicago Board of
Trade. Just below you winds the railway which will take you in two hours
to Madrid, - to the city of Philip II., where the nineteenth century has
arrived; where there are five Protestant churches and fifteen hundred
evangelical communicants. Our young crusader, Professor Knapp, holds
night schools and day schools and prayer meetings, with an active
devotion, a practical and American fervor, that is leavening a great
lump of apathy and death. These Anglo-Saxon missionaries have a larger
and more tolerant spirit of propaganda than has been hitherto seen. They
can differ about the best shape for the cup and the platter, but they
use what they find to their hand. They are giving a tangible direction
and purpose to the vague impulse of reform that was stirring, before
they came, in many devout hearts. A little while longer of this state of
freedom and inquiry, and the shock of controversy will come, and Spain
will be brought to life.
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.
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