Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/107

Rh But time and change must have done much in the course of centuries to confuse the teachings of Quetzatcoatl. Notwithstanding such mutation, enough remained of them to impress the Spaniards of the sixteenth century with the belief that he must have been an early Christian missionary, as well as a native of Europe. They found that many of the religious beliefs of the Mexicans bore an unaccountable resemblance to those of Christians.

The religion of the Mexicans, as the Spaniards found it, was in truth an amazing and most unnatural combination of what appeared to be Christian beliefs and Christian virtues and morality with the bloody rites and idolatrous practices of pagan barbarians. The mystery was soon explained to the Spaniards by the Mexicans themselves. The milder part of the Mexican religion was that which Quetzatcoatl had taught to the Toltecs, a people who had ruled in Mexico some centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. The Aztecs were in possession of power when the Spaniards came, and it was they who had introduced that part of the Mexican religion which was in such strong contrast to the religion established by Quetzatcoatl. It appeared further that the Toltec rule in the land had ceased about the middle of the eleventh century. They were a people remarkably advanced in civilization and mental and moral development. They were well versed in the arts and sciences, and their astronomical knowledge was in many respects in advance of that of Europe. They established laws and regular government in Mexico during their stay in the country, but about the year a. d. 1050 they disappeared south by a voluntary migration, the cause of which remains a mystery.

It was not until the middle of the fourteenth century that the Aztecs acquired sufficiently settled habits to enable them to found states and cities, and by that time they seem to have adopted as much of what had been left of Toltec civilization and Toltec religion as they were capable of absorbing, without, however, abandoning their own ruder ideas and propensities. Hence the incongruous mixture of civilization and barbarism, mildness and ferocity, gentleness and cruelty, refinement and brutality presented by Mexican civilization and religion to the Spaniards when they entered the country two centuries later. "Aztec civilization was made up," as Prescott says, "of incongruities, apparently irreconcilable. It blended into one the marked peculiarities of different nations, not only of the same phase of civilization, but as far removed from each other as the extremes of barbarism and refinement."

The better that is, the Toltec side of this mixed belief included among its chief features a recognition of the existence of a Supreme God, vested with all the attributes of the Jehovah of the Jews. He was the creator and the ruler of the universe, and the Rh