instruction, were
enabled to mould the young and plastic mind according to
their own wills, and to train it early to implicit reverence
for religion and its ministers.

The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest of this
teaching:

To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed for the
maintenance of the priests. The estates were augmented by
the policy or devotion of successive princes, until, under
the last Montezuma, they had swollen to an enormous extent,
and covered every district of the empire.

And this concerning the frightful system of human sacrifices, whereby
the priestly caste maintained the prestige of its divinities:

At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486,
the prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the
purpose, were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly
two miles long. The ceremony consumed several days, and
seventy thousand captives are said to have perished at the
shrine of this terrible deity.

The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account of the
priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:

The ultimate source of all law being the deity himself, the
original legal tribunal was the place where the image or
symbol of the god stood. A legal decision was an oracle or
omen, indicative of the will of the god. The power thus
lodged in the priests of Babylonia and Assyria was enormous.
They virtually held in their hands the life and death of the
people.

And of the business side of this vast religious system:

The temples were the natural depositories of the legal
archives, which in the course of centuries grew to veritably
enormous proportions. Records were made of all decisions;
the facts were set forth, and duly attested by witnesses.
Business and marriage contracts, loans and deeds of sale
were in like manner drawn up in the presence of official
scribes, who were also priests. In this way all commercial
transactions received the written sanction of the religious
organization. The temples themselves--at least in the large
centres--entered into business relations with the populace.
In order to maintain the large household represented by such
an organization as that of the temple of Enlil of Nippur,
that of Ningirsu at Lagash, that of Marduk at Babylon, or
that of