revolting qualities ignorance can deify. The
merciless gods of India, who are supposed to delight in the crushing of
thousands under the wheels of Juggernaut, and in the sacrificing of
babes to the Ganges, and in the burning alive of girl-widows, are fair
examples of what the benighted can believe; and the horrors of India
were fully paralleled in America. The religions of our North American
Indians had many astounding and dreadful features; but they were mild
and civilized compared with the hideous rites of Mexico and the southern
lands. To understand something of what the Spanish missionaries had to
combat throughout America, aside from the common danger, let us glance
at the condition of affairs in Mexico at their coming.

The Nahuatl, or Aztecs, and similar Indian tribes of ancient Mexico, had
the general pagan creed of all American Indians, with added horrors of
their own. They were in constant blind dread of their innumerable savage
gods,--for to them everything they could not see and understand, and
nearly everything they could, was a divinity. But they could not
conceive of any such divinity as one they could love; it was always
something to be afraid of, and mortally afraid of. Their whole attitude
of life was one of dodging the cruel blows of an unseen hand; of
placating some fierce god who could not love, but might be bribed not to
destroy. They could not conceive a real creation, nor that _anything_
could be without father and mother: stones and stars and winds and gods
had to be born the same as men. Their "heaven," if they could have
understood such a word, was crowded with gods, each as individual and
personal as we, with greater powers than we, but with much the same
weaknesses and passions and sins. In fact, they had invented and
arranged gods by their own savage standards, giving them the powers they
themselves most desired, but unable to attribute virtues they could not
understand. So, too, in judging what would please these gods, they went
by what would please themselves. To have bloody vengeance on their
enemies; to rob and slay, or be paid tribute for not robbing and
slaying; to be richly dressed and well fed,--these, and other like
things which seemed to them the highest personal ambitions, they thought
must be likewise pleasing to "those above." So they spent most of their
time and anxiety in buying off these strange gods, who were even more
dreaded than savage neighbors.

Their ideas of a god w