152) he adds: "Although I must
become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is
in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it
and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this
Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the
Spirit.
And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and
I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that
arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which
Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of
letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this
Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe,
the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the
American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this
Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the
sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it!
In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And
the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in
de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial
life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or,
rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the
dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.
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