Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/451

 Rh the Church, as has always been the case in France and Spain, and, but for the very active Protestantizing of Italy, would be the case there also. The Church saw this, and took advantage of our civil war to revive her fallen fortunes. Maximilian and Carlotta, two bigoted Papists, were imported and upheld by the arms of Napoleon and Eugenie, the last the most bigoted of Papists, in order to bring the State again at the feet of the Church. Not Napoleon, but Pius IX., is the instigator of that war. He who alone of temporal sovereigns recognized our slave power as a nation, sought to help that rebellion to succeed by getting up this rebellion in a neighboring state, and fostered that for the sake of making this triumphant. He succeeded. The French army subdued the republican, and from Vera Cruz to Paso del Norte freedom in religion and in government went down. Rome was mistress of Mexico.

Not until our war was ended did the Papal dominion cease. Juarez enters, Maximilian is captured, and justly and wisely shot, and Mexico is delivered from Rome, as she had been nearly half a century before from Spain. Her progress from that hour has been steady and rapid. But this progress has been because of the increase of the leavening power of the Bible and the Church. This has a story of its own. Papers lie before me, prepared by a Mexican Protestant at the request of Rev. Dr. Riley, which give the story of the rise of the true Church. From this imprinted pamphlet I am permitted to make up this narrative.

It declares that Mexico was groaning under the hard yoke of the Roman clergy; that after a war of many years, and after long and cruel sufferings, the republican government was established, and freedom of religion. "How much blood was shed," it plaintively cries, "in settling these laws! How many families are still weeping for their fathers, how many mothers for their children, slain in the wars of the Reformation!"

After the first election of Don Benito Juarez to the Presidency, and before the last civil war, that is between 1858 and 1863, some clergymen, called Constitutionalists, established a new worship like