It is noteworthy that here there is no allusion to ecstasies or trances or to sexual aberrations, as in subsequent edicts, although Páramo, some twenty years later, in his frequent allusions to the Alumbrados, dwells especially on the latter and on the dangers to which they led in the confessional.[59] That this danger was not imaginary is indicated by the case of Fray Juan de la Cruz, a discalced Franciscan, so convinced of the truth of alumbrado doctrine that, in 1605, he presented himself to the Toledo tribunal with a memorial in which he argued that indecent practices between spiritual persons were purifying and elevating to the soul, and resulting in the greatest spiritual benefit when unaccompanied with desire to sin. He was promptly placed on trial and six witnesses testified to his teaching of this doctrine. Ordinary seduction in the confessional, as will be seen hereafter, when the culprit admitted it to be a sin, was treated with comparative leniency, but doctrinal error was far more serious, and the unlucky fraile, who maintained throughout the trial the truth of his theories, was visited with much greater severity. Humiliations and disabilities were heaped upon him; he received a circular scourging in a convent of his order and a monthly discipline for a year, with six years of reclusion.[60]
Simple mysticism, however, even without the advanced doctrines of Illuminism and Quietism, was becoming to the Inquisition an object of pronounced hostility. The land was being filled with _beatas revelanderas;_ mystic fervor was spreading and threatening to become a part of the national religion, stimulated doubtless by the increasing cult paid to its prominent exemplars, for Santa Teresa was beatified in 1614 and canonized in 1622, while San Pedro de Alcántara was beatified in the latter year. Apart from all moral questions, the mystic might at any moment assert independence; his theory was destructive to the intervention of the priest between man and God, and Illuminism was only a development of mysticism. The Inquisition was not wholly consistent, but its determination to stem the current which was setting so strongly was emphatically expressed in the trial of Padre Gerónimo de la Madre de Dios by the Toledo tribunal in 1616.