Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/168

142 moral, civil and religious engine endowed with immense resources, that they should attract the reforming notice of those pure branches of the Roman fraternity whose proximity will best afford them the occasion to counsel their brethren in an age of progress and competition not only in trade but in religion. Texas has already improved under the auspices of a new ecclesiastical administration since her union with the North American states and her religious alliance with their Roman Catholic Archbishopric. Nor is the importance of these ameliorations less demanded at the hands of republican ecclesiastics when we recollect that the federal constitution adopted in 1847, now the fundamental law of the land, declares in its first title, that the "religion of the Mexican nation is, and will be perpetually, the Catholic, apostolic, Roman. The nation protects it by wise and just laws, and prohibits the exercise of any other!" Men, in Mexico, must not only not pray as they please, but, constitutionally, they must not believe as they please. A priesthood which is thus indissolubly and exclusively welded to the state in a republic, should be, indeed, peculiarly sacred and pure. Sole, despotic ecclesiastical power, based upon numerical strength,—intolerant of all other modes of worship or modifications of Christianity,—is an anomaly in the nineteenth century, nor is it likely that the civil liberty of a nation can ever become secure or worthy, until religious liberty is, at least, permitted if not enjoined by its paramount law. These two elements of human right and progress have ever moved hand in hand. It is a mockery to separate them and tell the people they are free. The indefeisible rights of reason and judgment are sapped and stifled. When conscience, even, must struggle with legal shackles in its intercourse with God, what must be the conflict of the soul in its intercourse with man!

but we have confined our observations in this work, exclusively to those painful exhibitions which cannot fail to strike a stranger as disadvantageous both to intellectual progress and the pure and spiritual adoration of God. The mixture of antique barbaric show and Indian rites, may have served to attract the native population at the first settlement of the country; but their continuance is in keeping neither with the spirit of the age nor the necessities of a republic. While the priesthood has contrived, in the course of centuries, to attract the wealth of multitudes, and to make itself, in various ways, the richest proprietor of the nation, the people have been impoverished and continued ignorant. Not content with the