Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/152

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142
OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR.

by him from that of Dr. Riley, and is entitled "El Culto de la Iglesia Reformada en Pachuca." It is orthodox and devout. But the service needs more liberty extemporaneously, and besides needs additions of prayer, and social and class meetings, and Sunday-schools. It is the seed, but not the flower nor fruit.

The conductor of the meeting is a Protestant against Romanism, and, like most of that class here, has not yet advanced much beyond the first principles of that protest.

The elaboration of the Christian system, independent of all the previous errors and formalities, into a life and being of its own—this work is yet to be done. It needs organization, Church order, breadth, life. It will come, and that speedily. It was delightful to find in this mountain town, and among this degraded and depraved population, a godly few casting off the shackles of a false culture, and forming a reformed Church. May they speedily regenerate the town.

We come back to our agreeable quarters across the plaza, which from our first crossing it in the morning until now has been crowded with sellers and buyers. The pavement is lined with rows of merchant-men and merchant-women with every sort of ware—fruit, fish, flesh, coal, grasses, trinkets, muslins, toys—a Vanity Fair of Sunday desecration. The stores under the arcade are equally busy. The church is open, and has its two services a day, but the crowds are in the market-place, and the devil holds his service all the day.

He is represented in a huge, gross picture in the church on the plaza with a smashing tail, a good deal longer than his body, driving the sinful ghosts to hell. He is out here in calico and cloth, in a white, dirty woolen blanket, dropping down before and behind, with a slit in the middle, through which the head is passed, in thin blue cloth mantillas that cover the woman's head and shoulders and mouth. Here he is buying and selling, and getting gain and loss. Let the true Church of Christ arise and abate this crime that smells to heaven.

I was not a little wearied with this long day's work. From