than the houses. Many are empty, the houses, and people probably also. Hither come thousands from San Luis Potosi, Queretaro, Guadalajara, and other points, when revolutions roll; for the governor of this State will have peace if he has to fight for it. It is the State of Guanajuato, and that city gives the nerve that gives the peace.
The next morning I attended high mass. It was St. Joseph's day, and held in high remembrance. So the bishop is out in his full and faded costume. A large number receive the wafer. A red-jacketed boy, followed the priest who gave the wafer, presenting something like a love-feast ticket. Was it one? Have they revived that lost art of Methodism? When the bishop entered, the crowd, dreadfully ragged and poor as most of them were, kneeled down the whole length of the church, making a narrow lane each side of him, and he stretched out his hands for them to kiss as he moved up to the altar. How eagerly they clutched at them! I saw one old woman get the seal-ring to her lips. She looked as if she had touched heaven. I have seen others than uneducated papists overworship their minister, but never so believingly and devoutly as these.
The ceremony is after the usual spread-eagle sort. A great crowd kneel at the beginning, but they come and go, and the shifting performance moves forward before a more shifting congregation. This is the bishop who has since refused to obey the laws of the State enforcing toleration, and has called on his people to resist those laws. His ignorant followers could be easily worked up to persecution.[1] What would he have said had it been told him that among the spectators of his performances that morning was a minister of the anti-Roman Church, meditating on the coming establishment of his Church in this city, and the extinction of this ruin of-souls and faith in that purer doctrine and life? Had he suspected so much, or had our priest of the coach-top dreamed it, there would have been small chance of that minister's having had
- ↑ See Appendix A.
