Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/403

Rh, being assisted only to a partial extent by the mission. He had, mainly by his own labor and resources, nearly completed a small chapel, which was about to be dedicated when death put the seal on his labors for the cause of Christ."

The history of this church enterprise is the counterpart of many another in Mexico. The good seed finds a scriptural variety of soil, but that which falls on good ground is wonderfully prolific. Little Bible-reading circles are found in out-of-the-way places in almost every missionary tour. The story of Don Denias Zitary is a case in point. He is a blacksmith working at his anvil all the week and preaching twice on Sunday to a thriving little church, which has been built up by his efforts. As he was walking out one evening with a visiting missionary he pointed to a large wooden cross on a hill near by. The ground around it was strewn with sharp flints, so common-in the country. The blacksmith said that when he was a young man several priests came to his neighborhood from Zacatecas on a collecting-tour, and also to exhort the people to penance for the salvation of their souls. The fervent appeals of these priests so excited the crowd that they all consented to walk barefoot in procession over these sharp stones, each with a crown of thorns pressed on his forehead and a rough rope around his neck; "and," said the narrator, "I was one of those who walked with bleeding feet around that cross."

Another layman, Don Mateo Goitia, a pure Spaniard, is doing a noble work for the Master in the same neighborhood. When young he was a bigoted Romanist. At one time, when looking over some old clothes and books which he had taken for debt, he came across a Spanish