Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/506

498 observed that they are again becoming what they were before the adverse decrees of twenty years or so ago,—the holders of the moneys of the people, especially of the poorer classes.

But their confiscated property? They are rapidly gaining back a goodly portion of it, or its equivalent. The average Mexican is superstitious; he is valiant in times of peace, vainglorious before a battle, but craven and knock-kneed when the time of trial comes. Consequently, when sick and like to die, he will probably—no matter how he may have apostatized and fought the Church—send for the priest. Mindful of the fact that all things of this world belong to the Lord, and that the Catholic Church, as the chosen of the Lord, possesses a lien upon these worldly goods, the priest refuses to administer the sacrament without some restitution. If the dying man has bought confiscated church property, he must restore its value, with interest, or if he has even owned it at second or third hands, and fairly paid for it, he must pay again its value to the Church before he can get a clear title to heaven, or his heirs a title to his temporal possessions. With a persistence characteristic of these priests, they are following up and ferreting out their lost effects; and it may not take more than a decade, at farthest, for them to be as strongly intrenched as in the palmiest days of their glory.

The great cathedral of Puebla is not so large as that of Mexico, nor has it the merit of being built upon the site of an Indian teocalli, as has the other; it lacks some years of being as old, also; but, to supply all deficiencies of this sort, the priests promulgated the story of the repeated visits of the angelic hosts. Yes, right here was the last recorded and verified visit of those heavenly messengers to the inhabitants of this sphere of ours. When they came, why they came, and how they came, is it not all entered in ecclesiastical records and sworn to? It is. And do not the faithful believe it, every word, and do they not point out to you the very place where the angels roosted, the very towers of the cathedral they came down to assist in building, and the very stones they placed in position? They do. As the workmen slept, the angels descended, and added stone