Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/58

38 their honesty may be reasonably impugned by none. Had the influence of his faith on his morals been proportionate to its strength, he would have merited canonisation.

Sixteenth century Spain produced a race of Christian warriors whose piety, born of an intense realisation of, and love for a militant Christ, was of a martial complexion. beholding in the symbol of salvation — the Cross-the standard of Christendom, around which the faithful must rally, and for whose protection and exaltation swords must be drawn and blood spilled if need be. They were the children of the generation which had expelled the last Moor from Spain, and had brought centuries of religious and patriotic warfare to a triumphant close, in which their country was finally united under the crown of Castile. From such forebears the generation of Cortes received their heritage of Christian chivalry. The discovery of a new world, peopled by barbarians, opened a new field to Spanish missionary zeal, in which the kingdom of God upon earth was to be extended, and countless souls rescued from the obscene idolatries and debasing cannibalism which enslaved them. This was the "white man's burden" which that century laid on the Spaniard's shoulders. To the scoffing philosopher of the eighteenth century, these crusading buccaneers in whose characters the mystic and the sensualist fought for the mastery seemed but knaves clumsily masquerading as fools. The fierce piety, which furnished entertainment to the age of Voltaire, somewhat puzzles our own. Expeditions now set forth into dark continents unburdened with professions of concern for the spiritual or moral welfare of the natives. Indeed, nothing is deemed more foolish than attempts to interfere with the religious beliefs and practices of barbarians, and the commander in our times, who would overturn an idol merely to set up a wooden cross, thereby exposing his followers to the risk of being massacred, would be court-martialled and degraded, if