Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/84

64 and creeds, we should set them in their own time and accept the sincerity of their believing or purposing in qualification of our condemnation of them, we must allow even the bloody devastators of the New World to explain to us their convictions and motives. Their age was one in which the Church which represented Christianity was most lofty and unchallenged in its claims, most ruthless in the sweep of its pretensions, and most utterly destitute and unconscious in its appreciation of the spirit of the gospel. A heathen was a child of the Devil, not of God; his certain and everlasting doom was in the pit of torments; he had no rights here or hereafter. The Christian, sure of heaven as he was, was all the more a rightful claimant to the earth and everything upon it; his own blessed lot and privilege involved no obligation of pity or mercy for the heathen. The Spaniards — from their monarch down to the humblest of their colonists — never made purchase of or paid price for a single foot of land on our continent or islands as Protestants did, whatever may have been the fairness or the meanness of their bargains. The right of conquest was supreme for the invaders: the opportunity of baptism was full payment to the natives. Conquest of heathendom and heathens was something even more sacred than a right: it was transcendently a solemn duty. “The earth is the Lord's;” He is its rightful owner, ruler, and disposer; the Pope is His vicegerent; the children of the one fold are his champions. True, the heathen whom the Spaniards encountered were idolaters, and some of them were believed to offer human sacrifices; the invaders frequently saw the mutilated remains of victims from those foul altars. Speaking of the brutish superstitions and the human sacrifices found among the Aztecs, Prescott adds these words: “The debasing institutions of the Aztecs furnish the best