torium. The dome of wood and glass lifted itself over the once open patio, erected by the first purchaser for his circus performers. Screens inclosed the area behind the pillars. The desk and platorm and melodeon, with its simple style of sacred service, reminded the auditors that a new day had dawned in Mexico, or, at least, that a new hour of the day had struck. That day began to dawn and to shine before this glad hour arrived. Other men labored, and we were entering into their labors, not in any spirit of envy or strife, but with a desire for their enlargement, and with a purpose to unite with them in common love and labor for the recovery of this heritage to our common Lord and Master.
The Church planted by Cortez on the ruins of the Aztec superstition, with its horror of human sacrifices, existed unchallenged, so far as organized effort went, over three hundred years. From 1523, when Zaragossa, appointed to the headship of the Mexican Church, two years after the subjugation of the state, had exterminated the ancient worship, unto 1823, there had not been an organized, hardly a visible protesting to the absolute sovereignty of that Church. Men had been burned at the stake, but more because they were Jews and Portuguese than as heretics, though heresy was the charge under which they were slain. The native had no disposition in his peonage to assert his religious liberty, not even his civil. And but few Spaniards ever emerged into the heights of faith and of martyrdom; though undoubtedly some, brethren of those whom Torquemada burned in Spain, avowed here like precious faith, and received like honored torture and burning.
Out of sheer malice they slew those that dared profess a higher and better faith; nay, they slew them on suspicion of such faith. The history of the Inquisition in Mexico remains to be written. We hope some missionary or native Christian will give to the world the story of this tribunal from year to year, its victims and its crimes.
In 1811 the Curé Hidalgo raised the standard of independence from Spain; but though of the priesthood, he had no countenance from the Church; and so, after terrible slaughter, his enterprise fail-
