Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode Molina, Miradamerscua, Tarriga, Argensola, Gongora, Rioja, and others were priests, many of them after stormy lives.

Montalban was a priest and employed in the Inquisition, and even the poor Cervantes, in his old age, had to take the habit of St.Francis.Spain had eleven thousand convents, more than a hundred thousand friars, and forty thousand nuns, and to these must be added seventy-eight thousand priests and the innumerable servitors and dependents of the Church, such as alguaciles, familiars, jailors, and notaries of the Inquisition, sacristans, stewards, buleros,[1] convent door-porters, choristers, singers, lay brothers, novices--and I know not how many other people.

In exchange, the nation from a population of thirty millions had shrunk to seven millions in less than two hundred years.

The expulsion of Jews and Moors by religious intolerance, the continual foreign wars, the emigration to America in the hopes of growing rich without work, hunger, the lack of sanitation, and the abandonment of agriculture, had brought about this rapid depopulation.
The revenues of Spain had fallen to fourteen million ducats, whereas the clerical revenue had risen to eight millions; the Church possessed more than half the national fortune! What times! Eh, Don Antolin ?" [Footnote 1: _Buleros_--One charged with distributing crusading bulls and collecting alms for them.] Silver Stick listened coldly, as though he had formed some definite idea about Luna, and therefore did not make much account of his words.
"However bad they were," he said slowly, "they could not be worse than they are at present.

At all events no one robbed the Church.