Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/207

Rh fancy that it is simply a hill enlarged, but a glance from this spot will change that theory. It covers over forty acres, and is two hundred and three feet high. So the measurements by Lieutenant Beauregard attest; and he was a good scholar then, if not a good citizen afterward. But he has become that also lately, and makes his beginning and end harmonious in patriotism.

Mr. Beecher says somewhere that one can understand the labor involved in making a mountain by shoveling and wheeling and dumping a few barrows of earth in his own lot. The Cholulans shoveled, wheeled, and dumped (though, indeed, they did not wheel, but carried it on their shoulders and heads) not less than a score or two of millions of such barrow-loads, to make a temple for their chief god, and on which many of those who built it, or their children, were offered in sacrifice. It is a big as well as a bad faith that would thus make multitudes erect joyfully their own funeral pyre.

This pyre, with a base of forty acres, is of the size of Boston Common. Conceive of those free-religion Puritans leveling off that sacred place, and bringing loads of earth from Brighton, Brookline, Dorchester, and Somerville to erect the whole leveled square into a pyramid as high as the pine-apple knob of its State-house! Up, up, up slowly creeps the mighty plateau, growing narrow as it grows tall, like many uplifted men. Yet when above the tallest house of Beacon Street, it is twenty acres across; and when it reaches the dome of the Capitol, it is ten acres across; and when it stops at the pine-apple knob, it is two or three acres across. And all this for faith, and a faith which involved their own immolation, or that of their nearest friends and kindred! How happens it that Boston goes to Buddha for its god? He lies nearer home on these Aztec plains; he is a native American, the better suiting their national conceit; he shows us a faith that makes Buddha's nirvana tame, for suicide is always baser than submission to another's knife. The pyramid of Cholula is the shrine that should draw these worshipers. Here is the eleventh religion that should swallow up all their ten, for it is more majestic than any save the One that builds its temple in the skies, and offers up its one Victim, the