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 of these faithful Japanese Catholics. In America also, that newly-discovered world, the light of the Gospel spread, and overthrew the most abominable idolatry with all its horrors and vices. No people on earth offered up more human sacrifices than the natives of America. The Mexicans sacrificed about twenty thousand human victims every year, and when they had no captives for this purpose, they did not spare even their own children. It is impossible to describe what the heroic missionaries suffered, and what dangers they incurred among those bloodthirsty men. They had to struggle not only against the cruelties and vices of the natives, but also against the insatiable avarice of the European settlers. Yet their labors were crowned with success, and the Christian faith was firmly and permanently established on this Continent. The mission of Paraguay, in South America, especially flourished. The brutish natives, who lived among the wild beasts in the forests, who thought of nothing but plundering, murdering, and revenge, who delighted only in eating human flesh, in voluptuousness and drunkenness, were transformed by the indefatigable missionary priests into devout Christians. They became models of modesty and charity, of innocence and piety, and by their untiring industry and labor changed their wild country into a delicious paradise.

46. The holy men who, with such indefatigable zeal,