We remonstrated against their unfair proceedings, but to no purpose. They fabricated false accusations, and involved us reluctantly in a law-suit of two years’ continuance, which, to the honour of the judge of the district, the learned and respected Dr. Mata, was ultimately terminated by an equitable sentence.
These good people believed we were but Jews, whom the Spaniards greatly abominate; and they conceived that, if they did not get rid of our neighbourhood in time, other Englishmen, and therefore, as they ignorantly supposed, other Jews, would settle there after us; and by proceeding to disgust us with the place, and scare us away in due season, they acted in the spirit of the proverb, “El prevenido nunca es vencido,”—The wary is never foiled. But it is a subject of deep interest to reflect on the practical example thus afforded of the working of that sovereign maxim, “No faith with heretics.” We here see, that although a perverted sense of religion did not extinguish the perception of an obvious right, yet it overcame the sense of wrong towards the imagined Jew, and in this respect suppressed the moral feeling of equity.
Such banefully erroneous views must gradually give way before the spreading light of civilization, and a more extended international intercourse. The bad moral effect of seeing men, influential and respected while living, consigned to the indignity of a canine grave when dead, cannot but be perceived and felt by the surviving friends and countrymen of the deceased, whose religious persuasions are distinct from those of the people of the land in which they are sojourners.
We may mention, that the first English gentleman’s remains we were called upon to accompany to an unhallowed burying-place, were those of one who died in an inland city remarkable for the hospitality and kindness of its inhabitants; and, after answering a few questions regarding the religious creed of the deceased, the price of the interment was settled, we think, at fifty dollars, and then the good-natured bishop, with a degree of liberality seldom exercised towards dissenters from the Romish ritual in Catholic countries, yielded his sanction to let the corpse have Christian burial. But, subsequently to this permission, a mob was collected in the night, and the body was cast out from the church to the middle of the street, where our obliging friend Don Mariano Sanches told us it lay. On the following morning, in a city where humanity was subdued by the ugly suggestions of superstition, there were only two good Samaritans. These gave their attendance at the stranger’s funeral, when the only two or three Britons at that time in the place accompanied the body outside the city, to find it a grave under the shelter of an orangery, where its mouldering bones could not by any chance come into contact with those of the pious agitators, who would fain persuade themselves that, while they live in harmony with the living heretic, the mere sight of the worm that nibbles at his interred remains is quite sufficient to endanger their own eternal condition.