Page:Vol 2 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/696

676 Englishman, and Agustin Boacio, a Genoese, after a long imprisonment, were conducted through the streets of Mexico, in the presence of thousands of spectators, and compelled in sambenito to do penance on a high scaffold on which they received sentence.

While officially constituted representatives of the inquisition were thus not immoderately exercising the terrible power with which they were invested, it is painful to note that friars, carrying out their aggressive system, laid hands upon its prerogatives. When from the gloom of the past the outline of a repulsive figure can be well marked, I cannot regard it as the shade of a companionless Frankenstein. The saintly Landa, provincial of the Franciscans, became aware in 1562 that the inhabitants of the ancient city of Maní in Yucatan still retained some veneration for the worship of their forefathers. But more than this, his investigations satisfied him that the bodies of renegades had been buried in consecrated ground. Their remains were disinterred and scattered in the neighboring woods. The idolatrous propensity must be stopped, and what more effective method could be adopted than the Spanish inquisition? So Landa determined to celebrate the event by a kind of informal rattling of the machinery, and called upon the sheriff and prominent Spaniards of the province to assist him. They readily responded and the ceremony was witnessed by a multitude of native Americans.