The 59 represents a Spanish the outcome of this unfortunate policy, which sacrificed entire nations and countries.
We take it for granted that every reader knows the nature of such a scene, and we shall only state that our illustration is taken from a rare copperplate of an held at Madrid during the reign of Philip II. The name of each victim is engraved upon the original. The king and his courtiers viewed the scene from a gallery. Immediately beneath is represented a young priest who has been adjudged guilty of heresy. His sentence is being read to him, while a prelate places about him a cape illustrated with scenes of hell. The chalice which he has to resign is seen, in accordance with the manner used at that period, in the hands of a server or junior cleric. The other condemned persons move in a long procession out of the city-gates. One of the victims who had died during the trial is carried in her coffin. Mounted servants of the Holy Brother hood and knights of the order of Calatrava accompany the train. The victims, who are all members of noble families, have each an escort of honor, composed either of fellow-noblemen or of monks, for they are in their sad condition the property of the Church, and are to be solemnly delivered as a consecrated offering to the powers of hell.
[The religious persecutions of the sixteenth century had a double origin. They proceeded not merely from the struggle of the priesthood to
suppress the new claim to freedom of conscience, but from the efforts of monarchs to render their dominion absolute and to extirpate the germs of political liberty. Hence the resistance was in like manner twofold, and in the long and memorable contest between the Dutch provinces and their Spanish sovereigns the issue at stake was the right of a people both to think for itself and to govern itself. It was not, however, till long after this and similar conflicts had ended that the full results and necessary consequences of the principles thus established began to display them selves. Underlying the social transformations, the material improvements, and the intellectual achievements of the past century is that fermentation of ideas which began with the Reformation, and which, after a long period of apparent quiescence, sprang into renewed activity in the latter part of the eighteenth century, since which it has known no abatement. The establishment of the great American republic, the overthrow of the ancient monarchy in France, the fundamental changes in the political institutions of nearly all the countries of Christendom, and the abolition of slavery in the United States have been the chief steps in what must be regarded as a general movement of which the end is not yet.—ED.]