Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/227

Rh adds, "Truly, Satan hath given them what he offered unto Christ in the desert. All the dainties and all the riches of America hath he given unto them in that desert because they daily fall down and worship him." Is it so yet? Doth wilderness temptation supplant wilderness faith? Then will like desolations follow that have followed here, and in all the famous abbeys of the world, even the wasting of their treasures and the ruin of their palaces. Those twenty lamps, of ten thousand dollars' value and upward, where now? And the treasures, and gifts, and luxuries, and soliciting of prayers and masses, where are they?

The monks became aware of the perils this popularity was bringing, and withdrew to a remoter seclusion, farther up the mountain. Even there their mission failed, and the head of this convent was one of the first of those who rejected Romanism; though he has since returned to his old vows, not, I trust, to abide therein.

As we wander about these vacant cells and close-walled paths we fall into sympathy with their vanished life, and repeat with too much inward approval Southey's lines:

Yet there was not much of mortification or of reading, as we have seen. Little as there was, however, it probably surpassed that of the surrounding people. They kept alive what little literature did exist, and performed most of the penances that were inflicted. So we come back to this present, and say:

Or, with piety and poetry surpassing Emerson, should we say, with Wesley: