The balcony on which we rest incloses an open court, and is wide, high, shaded, and enjoyable—very. It was a school or college in what devout Romanists feel were the good old days of convent and Church power, and therefore has a learned air about it even in its transformation. A sleep till late in the morning, a breakfast as good as the sleep, and we sally forth to take the town. That is not so easy a matter to do, for this town is the seat of the Church power of Mexico. And it happened on this wise:
When Cortez invaded the country, he found Cholula the sacred city. There were the chief priests, and the chief temples, and the chief gods. A population that he put at three hundred thousand thronged its mud-walled streets, and beggars by the myriad made it look like old Spain.
After the reduction of the country it was thought wise, in that wisdom which has always characterized the Roman Church, to get up a Christian city over against the heathen metropolis. So Puebla, or "The Town," was founded six miles from Cholula, and its walls were said to have been erected amidst the singing of angels, an improvement on Thebes of old, which only had Orpheus to harp up its walls. As a proof that this was actually the case, the full name of the town is Puebla of the Angels, "Puebla, de los Angelos." Is not that proof positive? Q. E. D.
Such a town, of course, is religious. It is nothing else. It was built for religion. It has been sustained these three hundred and fifty years on religion. Its churches are grander than those of Mexico, its convents and ecclesiastical institutions relatively far more numerous and wealthy. Of the twenty-five millions of its valuation a few years ago, twenty millions was the share which the Church possessed, almost a complete reversal of the tithe principle—four-fifths to the priest and one to the people. Then a gold and silver chandelier hung in its cathedral, and these materials were more common than brass. They were nothing reckoned of in those days of priestly glory, the Solomonic reign of this Church. The chandelier is gone—at least I did not see it—and the cathedral is shorn of much of its gold and its glory.
