Augustus Adee to Señnor Civil, October 25, 1876

No. 255. Mr. Adee to Mr. Fish.

Sir: The religious question here seems to have reached another halting place, in the publication of two eagerly-expected royal orders, dated the 23d instant, one of which approves the action of the subgovernor of Minorca, and the other is a full and ably-written exposition of the standard of interpretation fixed for the eleventh article of the constitution by the government of Mr. Cánovas del Castillo.

It does not seem to me worth while to translate the first of these two papers, as the issue involved was quite limited, and the broader deductions of the government on which to base a rule of uniform action are embodied in the second order, of which I have prepared a careful translation for your perusal, which is hereto appended with the original.

The discussion in the press has been for some time working up to the point now reached, although on a rather narrow footing. The general principle of toleration as one of the bases of modern society seemed to be overlooked, and the debate went on as though the issue was whether or no English subjects (who are mainly interested in the question) had any right to claim toleration on the ground of like or superior toleration in England. In this aspect of the question, the Politica two nights ago triumphantly disposed of the argument by reprinting in English the text of the proclamation of the Queen, dated June 15, 1852, prohibiting wearing of religious habits, or the performance of any religious ceremony or demonstration, by the Eoman Catholic clergy or people in the streets.

The royal order now published by Mr. Cánovas accomplishes one marked result, in completely separating the church from the school-house; and while conceding to the former full inviolability and even protection within its walls, it brings the latter under the secular working of the existing educational acts. This result was a logical necessity of the issue presented at Mahon. The governor of that city, or rather, to give him his right title, the subgovernor of the island of Minorca, was charged with having entered a hall in which a number of dissenters were assembled on a week-day evening, and having commanded that singing then in progress should cease. The point on which the whole question turned was whether the hall in dispute was used for the secular purpose of instruction or for the religious purpose of worship; and the royal order annexed decides that it was not a church, but a schoolroom ) that the singing complained of was not religious, but merely a mnemonic device for fixing the multiplication-table and verbal conjugations on the minds of the pupils; and that the subgovernor had not infringed any law or acted unconstitutionally in doing as he did.

The circular of Mr. Cánovas, explanatory of the much controverted eleventh article of the constitution, may certainly be deemed to go as far in the direction of guaranteeing absolute inviolability for the dissenting church and cemetery as the language of the eleventh article can possibly stretch. The principle of religious propaganda, as doctrinal diffusion of ideas, comes, as Mr. Alonso Martinez has shown, (see my No. 344,) under a separate constitutional provision; and we now see that religious propaganda in the form of public instruction is brought within still another article, leaving the eleventh article to stand alone as simply securing freedom of religious opinion and of worship, and no more.

It remains to be seen how this decision of the government will affect the work of the evangelical establishments in Spain. Many of them, especially in the smaller towns, have the schemes of worship, instruction, and propaganda inextricably combined, one room serving alike for a chapel, for a school-room, and as a place of meeting for a lecture or some like secular social purpose. On the one hand, the local authority can hardly be expected to know at any precise day or hour whether such an apartment is clothed with constitutional inviolability or not; on the other, to confine the use of such room to the one specific purpose of worship would bear heavily on the poorer missions in the provinces.

In the cities, however, it would not be regretable if the whole matter should end by requiring the construction of decent church-edifices, templos in fact as well as in name, for dissenting worship—buildings whose outward form and specific use would leave no room for controversy, and the establishment of which in Spain would mark an era of permanence for the evangelical movement, which now rests on so feeble a native basis.

I have, &c.,