Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/60

40 I am afraid there was a little fraud in the purchase — thy followers, William Penn, are said to think cheating in a quiet, sober way no mortal sin.

The verbal skirmish continues in this vein, and concludes thus:

Ask thy heart whether ambition was not thy real motive, and zeal the pretence?

Ask thine whether thy zeal had no worldly views, and whether thou didst believe all the nonsense of the sect at the head of which thou wast pleased to become a legislator. Adieu, self-examination requires retirement.

The author does not allow for any clearing of the human perceptions in the spirit world, and it is probable that had Fernando Cortes and William Penn been contemporaries and able to discuss their respective systems of dealing with Indians, and founding settlements, they would have found more points of agreement than their loquacious ghosts were able to discover. The flaccid defence advanced by Cortes's shade betrays some deterioration of mental power, for in his lifetime the conqueror was hardly less formidable in polemics than he was on the battle-field, but, in the feeble discourse put in the mouth of this pale spirit, we find nothing of the fierceness of the lion or the subtlety of the serpent which Friend Penn attributed to Cortes in the flesh.

Penn's ghost professes to find Cortes's religious motives suspect, yet there are not more proofs of his presence in Mexico than there are of his absolute belief in himself as a divinely chosen instrument for the conversion of souls. Purging the human soul from the taint of idolatry or heresy by means of physical torments is a familiar blot on the pages of the history of religions.

More than a century after the conquest of Mexico the New England Puritans were torturing and killing by process of law, — not savage enemies who threatened