pel was sufficient to induce
Spaniards to regard them as so many enemies of God, and as slaves and
worshippers of the devil. In the various forms of religious worship
which prevailed in those vast territories were embodied certain
principles which might, if carried out, have been of great service to the
conquered nation. In nearly all of those forms, the unity of God was
acknowledged, and also, in many of them, the necessity of a spiritual
regeneration. In Mexico, and that part of the country now called Central
America, was preserved a traditional remembrance of a severe chastisement
inflicted by the Supreme Creator on rebellious humanity, but accompanied
with a promise that the species should not be annihilated. That
tradition taught that God had sent into the world his Son, called
_Teot-belche_, in order to repeople the earth;--that this personage had
been shut up in a floating house during the time of the great flood, and
was afraid to venture out, until he had seen an eagle bringing in its
mouth a branch from a tree--a sign that the waters had abated, and that
vegetation had re-appeared. Other great coincidences with revealed truth
discovered themselves in the religious creeds of the people of Mechoacan,
Guatemala, and in those also of the inhabitants of Peru, where the dogma
had acquired a certain degree of elevation and purity, very different
from the sensual ideas so common among the ancient Asiatics. The
conquerors, therefore, whilst attempting to make proselytes to the true
faith might have availed themselves of those antecedents, and could
easily have corrected such notions, although founded on a tradition
having the weight of ancestral authority. The right moral ideas found
already impressed on the minds of these aborigines, especially those of
Peru, might have been encouraged and amplified. Instead of embracing the
system indicated by the mild and conciliatory spirit of Christianity, the
Americans, _en masse_, were considered, from that moment, as enemies of
God, and compelled, sometimes by force, to receive baptism, without any
previous explanation of the origin and design of that rite; at other
times they were tortured with the greatest cruelty, under a notion that
in the extremity of their agony they might be induced to renounce the
only creed which had come to their conviction. Many thousands of that
unhappy people were exterminated, for they did not even understand the
language in which doctrines