Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/167

Rh of the multitude the moment their vow is pronounced at the altar. The world believes that they part with human nature in assuming the gown, and become in reality, the divines they are called in the fashionable nomenclature of the age.

The priest, whether Protestant, Catholic, Mahomedan or Chinese, is ever an important, and often an omnipotent, member of the social world. And it behooves society in the nineteenth century to cherish Christianity instead of Flamens and Soothsayers.

It has been our principle through life to cultivate a genial feeling of toleration towards all the various sects into which the great Christian church is divided. We have resisted bigotry in all its shapes, and in all its manifestations, from whatever source. Trusting in the essential faith and discarding the external form, we have regarded all men who knelt at the altar which was cemented with the blood of the Nazarine, as a great brotherhood devoted to the religious regeneration and consequent civilization of the world. In waiting, therefore, of the Catholic church in Mexico we have been pained to speak disparagingly of a part of the priesthood, whose members, in our own country, we had early in life learned to reverence for their virtuous piety, and admire for their profound learning. We know that the great theoretical dogma of that powerful church is its unity, and that its tenets, principles and practices are universally the same throughout the world. For opinions given and examples cited, in another work, we have been severely rebuked, by one of the most learned theologians in the Roman church, who argues our wilful error, upon this assumption of theoretical identity. But we have the satisfaction to know, not only from Mexicans themselves, but from American Catholics who visited the country since that criticism was issued, that our descriptions, in no instance, surpassed the reality, and that if the tenets, be in fact, the same as those entertained by the church at Rome and in the United States, the principles, and, especially, the practices of many of its ministers, vary extraordinarily from the principles and practices of its ministers here. In another portion of this work we may, probably, notice some of those practices more fully.

The facts we have been obliged to state in regard to some of the materiel of the present Mexican ecclesiastical establishment do not touch the dogmas of the Catholic church though they certainly indicate so great a degree of laxity in the administration of a