with his approbation: and yet, God knows, even from this time the prospect towards Italy is very melancholy for many hundreds of years; which needs no other circumstances of proof, than the general confession, that after the year 1400 the Greek and Latin languages began to be received, after that whole region had been utterly unacquainted with those languages for the space of five hundred years before. So much was then that country, which is since looked upon as the garden of the world, and which would be reputed the mother of all arts and sciences, over-run with slaughters, barbarity, and ignorance; without producing in many ages one example of piety and learning, till it gave us St Bernard, who died after the year 1100, and was succeeded by the ignorance aforesaid for so many hundred years and for their present practice of Christianity, which is not only the best illustration, but the very life of religion; their proud, uncharitable, and illiterate condemning those who differ from them in opinions, which they dare not take the pains to understand; their uncontrouled wallowing in natural and unnatural lusts; and their cherishing all the degrees of the most bloody malice and revenge, and inculcating those passions into their children by industry and education, that they may be good Italians; all which are the avowed native and natural vices of their

climate, which all the precepts and judgment of our Saviour cannot so much as discountenance. I say, all this professed licence, and incorrigible practice of wickedness, will not suffer us to wish that their religion were transplanted into our country, and should make us more wary in sending our untaught youth to suck in the poison of that impure and unclean air.

Let us, in the next place, make a voyage into Spain, which looks upon its zeal for religion not inferior to Rome itself; and if it be erroneous, must impute it to her fallibility, since she neither doth, nor will believe any thing but what is prescribed by her. Here Christianity had its refuge, was rescued and vindicated from the corruption of Arius, when it had upon the matter covered all other churches; which shews of what value the integrity of a national church may prove to be, to redeem almost the universal from a contagious infection. Let us therefore enquire in this good air, to find that primitive time from which we may fetch examples and rudiments for our own instruction. Spain, that was so great a lover of antiquity as to draw over Tubal, the fifth son of Japhet, to inhabit and plant that country, would not be negligent in becoming Christians as soon as any body would come thither to instruct them; and therefore they have taken pains to invite St James to come to

them. But, however, their best authors do not give us any footsteps of their Christianity till about the year 400, when the first council at Toledo was held, and when the whole continent of Spain yielded but nineteen bishops, as Mariana confesses; though others will have a council two or three years sooner at Saragosa, against the heresy of the Priscillianists: but be it one or the other, their Christianity was very quickly covered by the inundation of the Goths, and the incursion of the Vandals, and other northern nations; and after the Goths had possessed that crown for the space of three hundred years, they were entirely subdued after the year 700 by the Moors, and the Christian faith upon the matter extinguished throughout Spain; the little light that was left of it being inclosed in the mountains, from whence they issued out with very little vigour for above one hundred years; and when they had afterwards recovered a good part of Castile, and Leon, and Galicia, so many kings possessed those parts, that the Moors in Portugal, Granada, and Andalusia, continued so strong, that sometimes they paid tribute to them, and were always inferior to them in power: so that the breviary and missal of the Goths was not abolished, and the Roman introduced, till the council of Burgos; which was called after the year 1076, under the reign of Alonso, the sixth king of

Castile, who reigned with our William the Conqueror and in this council it was that they revived the old ecclesiastical laws against the marriage of priests, when Mariana confesses, that the greater part of the clergy were married, and had wives and children. And it was this very King Alonso the Sixth, who, in the year 1085, took the city of Toledo from the Moors, after they had been in the possession of it not many years less than four hundred; and upon surrender of the town, the Moor king went to Valencia, and they who would remain in and about Toledo, enjoyed all their lands and goods; y la mesquita major, quede en su poder para hazer in ella sur ceremonias, as that historian confesses. And that catholic king afterwards, upon the death of his queen Constantia, married the daughter of the Moor King of Seville, who became a Christian, and changed her name Zayda into D. Maria, or, as others say, D. Isabella; and from this marriage issued the so much celebrated Don Zancho. And for some hundred of years after this time we know little more of the Christianity of Spain, than by their frequent and bloody battles against the Moors, and by their supine submission and reverence to the judgments and determinations of the bishops of Rome, who exercised a wonderful dominion over them; there being, besides the continual wars with the Moors, such jea

lousies between the Christian kings of Castile, Arragon, Navarre, and Portugal, that neither of them durst enter into any dispute with the pope, for whose authority their subjects had more reverence and devotion, than for that of their own natural kings and princes. Nor have they more clear records of the advancement of any doctrinal opinions in Christian religion, than they have of the trouble they received from the Waldenses and Albigenses; who, about the year 1200, or very soon after, told the people, that the priests had not power to pardon their sins; that the true body of our Saviour was not in the sacrament of the altar; and that the prayers which were usually made for the dead, did them no good: which opinions, Mariana confesses, were so much favoured by several persons of quality and condition both in France and Spain, and had that countenance from the King of Arragon himself, that if St Dominique, who was a great preacher at that time, had not converted many, and Simon Mounfort destroyed more by fire and sword, Pope Innocent the Third having given him all those cities and lands which he could take from those who cherished those opinions, these heresies would have spread themselves very far in the world. And it was looked upon, and is recorded as a signal act of zeal to catholic religion in Ferdinando, King of Castile, that he was so great