other with emeralds and the third with diamonds—are said to be worth three millions of dollars more. These imposing churches often stand in little villages of adobe huts, the homes of ignorance and squalid poverty. The contrast between the church and its surroundings is all the more striking when we remember that what the village is now it has always been since Rome took possession of Mexico, and nothing could better illustrate the perverted Christianity she has taught its people than these proud shrines, in whose unwholesome shadow they have been sitting for centuries. A picture of Mexico has been given by a visitor from this country in 1846: [1] "The things which most strike an American on his first arrival in Mexico are the processions, ceremonies and mummeries of the Catholic worship. As to any rational idea of true religion or any just conception of its divine Author, the great mass are little more enlightened than were their ancestors in the time of Montezuma. Their religion is very little less an idolatry than that of the grotesque images of stone and clay of which it has taken the place."
Mexico is still one of the darkest corners of the pope's dominions. Nor is this to be wondered at when the character of its priesthood is understood. The abbé Domenech, who accompanied Maximilian to Mexico, speaking of these blind leaders of the blind, says of the Roman Catholic Church as he found it there, "It fills no mission of virtue, no mission of mercy, no mission of charity. Virtue cannot exist in its pestiferous atmosphere. The code of morality does not come within its practice. It knows no mercy, and no emotion of charity ever moves the stony heart of that priesthood which, with an avarice that has no limit, filches the last penny from the diseased
- ↑ Recollections of Mexico, by Waddy Thompson.
