one being mainly political (showing signs of Alfonso's co-operation) and the other mainly religious, although in doctrine it does not go beyond a condemnation of prayers to the Virgin. But they were joined in one, and published with the Lactancio in 1529. We next hear of Juan in 1530, at Rome, where he presently became a papal chamberlain under Clement VII, by whom, according to Carnesecchi, he was much beloved. He was at Bologna with the Pope in January, 1533, but soon afterwards removed to Naples, where he remained, excepting for one visit to Rome, till his death in 1541.
At Naples he gave himself up to study, to religious meditation, and to the society of his friends. Between April, 1534, and September, 1536, he produced his Dialogo de la lengua, a valuable study of the Spanish tongue, and one of the most beautiful writings of its day. During the next few years he wrote and circulated amongst his friends, in manuscript, his CX Considerationes (subsequently translated into English by Nicholas Ferrar), his Catechism, Lac Spirituale, a large number of short treatises and commentaries, and translations of parts of the Bible from the original languages. His doctrine as contained in these works is certainly not distinctively Lutheran or Calvinist, but that of one whose thoughts turned ever inward rather than outward, a devout evangelical mystic who recommended frequent confession and communion, and had no desire to overturn the ordinances of the Church. His disciples were won by himself rather than by his doctrines; and even the element of his teaching which others seized upon most eagerly-justification by faith only-was not to him what it was to the Lutheran, the corner-stone of his whole system. To him it was the expression of the fact that only by self-abnegation could men receive the divine illumination, and thus conform to the image of God in which they were made. And the tract by means of which this doctrine was most widely diffused in Italy, the famous Beneßcio délia morte di Cristo, which has been called the Credo of the Italian Reformed, was not the work of Valdés himself, but of a disciple, the Benedictine monk Benedetto of Mantua, who wrote it in his monastery at the foot of Mount Etna, and at whose request Marcantonio Flaminio revised it and improved the style. It began to be spread broadcast in Italy about 1540, at first in manuscript and then in print, and made a deep impression wherever it went.
The personal influence of Valdés was very great, both amongst those who had known him at the Court of Clement VII and those who now saw him for the first time. In his unprinted life of Paul IV, written early in the seventeenth century, Antonio Caracciolo reckons the number of Valdés' adherents at over three thousand, of whom many were leading men. This is doubtless only a guess, but the number was certainly large. And since at this very time, in 1536, an edict had gone forth in Naples forbidding all commerce with heretics on pain of death and confiscation,
