Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/124

 are greatly exaggerated, so as to make them deformed and hideous. If their worship was a worship of pure propitiation, they seem to have adopted the idea of the Chinese, and prayed rather to the Evil principle of things than to the Good. "God is too good," said a Chinese to me once—"God is too good to hurt us, but Ki—the Devil—will; I therefore pray to the devil to let me alone!"

It may be readily imagined that people, in the dawn of religious ideas, will personify every ill that assails them under the shape in which it becomes most annoying. They imagine when they are assailed by serpents, that the Evil principle vexes them in that form; when their houses are overrun with lizards, that the demon has attacked them in another shape; and thus, according to their simple reasoning, it was wise to manifest their ideas of this wicked Spirit in statues of the disguises he had himself selected, and under those forms to appease him by worship and offerings. It is by imagining a system of this nature, that we can alone account for the extraordinary and fanciful creations of Mexican art which have been preserved until our day and generation.