Christianity seem uglier, in the imaginary
simplicity and unbroken gladness of the native races whose blood was
shed by Christian aggressors as if it had been water.

It would perhaps have been singular at a moment when men were looking
round on every side for such weapons as might come to their hand, if
they had missed the horrible action of Catholicism when brought into
contact with the lower races of mankind. There is no more deplorable
chapter in the annals of the race, and there is none which the historian
of Christianity should be less willing to pass over lightly. The
ruthless cruelty of the Spanish conquerors in the new world is a
profoundly instructive illustration of the essential narrowness of the
papal Christianity, its pitiful exclusiveness, its low and bad morality,
and, above all, its incurable unfitness for dealing with the spirit and
motives of men in face of the violent temptations with which the wealth
of the new world now assailed and corrupted them. Catholicism had held
triumphant possession of the conscience of Europe for a dozen centuries
and more. The stories of the American Archipelago, of Mexico, of Peru,
even if told by calmer historians than Raynal, show how little power,
amid all this triumph of the ecclesiastical letter, had been won by the
Christian spirit over the rapacity, the lust, the bloody violence of the
natural man. They show what a superficial thing the professed religion
of the ages of faith had been, how enormous a task remained, and how
much the most arduous part of this task was to make Catholicism itself
civilised and moral. For it is hardly denied that Christianity had done
worse than merely fail to provide an effective curb on the cruel
passions of men. The Spanish conquerors showed that it had nursed a
still more cruel passion than the rude interests of material selfishness
had ever engendered, by making the extermination or enslavement of these
hapless people a duty to the Catholic Church, and a savoury sacrifice in
the nostrils of the Most High.

It is true that a philosophic historian will have to take into account
the important consideration that the reckless massacres perpetrated by
the subjects of the Most Catholic King were less horrible and less
permanently depraving than the daily offering of the bleeding hearts of
human victims in the temples of Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipuk. He
would have to remember, as even Raynal does, that if the slave-drivers
and murder