lves
back into their times and teach our hearts to feel as
they felt. We do not find in the language of the
voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
help at home, any of that weak watery talk of "protection
of aborigines," which as soon as it is translated
into fact becomes the most active policy for their
destruction, soul and body. But the stories of the
dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians,
which were widely known in England, seem to have
affected all classes of people, not with pious passive
horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and
down the pages of Hakluyt, who, with a view to make
them known, translated Peter Martyr's letters; and
each commonest sailor-boy who had heard them from
his childhood among the tales of his father's fire-side,
had longed to be a man, that he might go out and
become the avenger of a gallant and suffering people.
A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart;
seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is
given; and it was a point of honour, if of nothing more,
among the English sailors, to do no discredit by their
conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so
conspicuous in their dealings with their European rivals, either
failed to touch them in their dealings with uncultivated
idolaters, or the high temper of the aristocracy was
unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue,
to charge upon their religion the grievous actions
of men who called themselves the armed missionaries of
Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and bishops
were the loudest in the indignation with which they
denounced them. But we are obliged to charge upon
it that slow and subtle influence so inevitably exercised
by any religion which is divorced from life, and converted
into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or system,
which could permit the same men to be extravagant in
a sincere devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose
entire lower nature, unsubdued and unaffected, was
given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and sensuality.
If religion does not make men more humane than they
would be without it, it makes them fatally less so; and
it is to be feared that the spirit of the pilgrim fathers,
which had oscillated to the other extreme, and had
again crystallized into a formal antinomian fana