There Is A Large Party Which Actively Favors The Entire
Separation Of The Spiritual From The Temporal Power, Making Religion
Voluntary, And Free, And Breaking Its Long Concubinage With The Crown.
The Old Superstition, It Is True, Still Hangs Like A Malarial Fog Over
Spain.
But it is invaded by flashes and rays of progress.
It cannot
resist much longer the sunshine of this tolerant age.
Far up the mountain-side, in the shade of a cluster of chestnuts, is a
rude block of stone, called the "King's Chair," where Philip used to sit
in silent revery, watching as from an eyry the progress of the enormous
work below. If you go there, you will see the same scene upon which his
basilisk glance reposed, - in a changed world, the .same unchanging
scene, - the stricken waste, the shaggy horror of the mountains, the
fixed plain wrinkled like a frozen sea, and in the centre of the perfect
picture the vast chill bulk of that granite pile, rising cold,
colorless, and stupendous, as if carved from an iceberg by the hand of
Northern gnomes. It is the palace of vanished royalty, the temple of a
religion which is dead. There are kings and priests still, and will be
for many coming years. But never again can a power exist which shall
rear to the glory of the sceptre and the cowl a monument like this. It
is a page of history deserving to be well pondered, for it never will be
repeated.
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