We were looking at the statue of the patriot, Hidalgo. My young Mexican friend said: “Hidalgo is our patron saint, he freed us from Spain; who is yours?” I said that I was a protestant and had no patron saint. “But,” he said, “you must have one. We were subjects of Spain, and Hidalgo started the revolution that made us free. Therefore he was canonized and became our patron, and now we pray to him when we want favors. Your people were once slaves and got your freedom from the Americans, and you must have had a leader, else how could ten million slaves vanquish sixty million Americans?” “But,” I said: “you don’t read American history. We did not get our freedom by a revolution, but by a civil war with Americans fighting on both sides.” “But you were bound to have a leader, who was he?” “Oh!” I said, “it was Frederick Douglass.” A beam of satisfaction crossed his countenance as he handed me his hand: “We have both been in the toils and our good saints have made us free. Viva Douglass y Viva Hidalgo!”
And so these poor deluded people are taught that every good and perfect thing cometh from above, but—through the hands of a saint or the Mother of God, and the only honor that redounds to Christ and his Father is the fact that they are members of the same family as the Holy Virgin. And so by a system of black-mail, more tyrannical than was the brigandage of twenty years ago, priest-ridden Mexico has built three magnificent piles of rock and marble and alabaster and chalcedony with the blood of widows and orphans.
The world was shocked a few years ago because Mtesa did the same thing in Africa. The only difference I see is that Mtesa killed his victims outright and mixed mortar with the blood of young girls, but here the process is a lingering torture of body and mind, and a life of abject poverty and misery for the living that overwhelms the stranger with its omnipresence. The Catholic faith has changed these people’s ceremonies, but not their dogmas. The bowing to the statues and altars and images of the apostles, and the veneration of the shrines and the absolute faith in the incantations of the priests to the power they do not understand, is exactly what the Aztecs did in the temple of the war-god six hundred years ago.
His public ceremony is changed and he no longer offers human sacrifice upon the altars, but there are Indians in Mexico today who will secretly celebrate their ancient festivals, and slyly hang wreaths of flowers upon the huge idols on exhibition in the City of Mexico.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SHRINE OF GUADALUPE.
THREE miles north of the City is the Hill of Tepeyacac. Leading from the city is the ancient causeway built across the lake to Tepeyacac before the Conquest. A street car now traverses this causeway to the town of Guadalupe and the famous Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the holiest fane in Mexico. The chain of mountains which bound the Valley of Mexico on the north here project into the valley and terminate in the Hill of Tepeyacac, in the Aztec language, “the termination.” Before the Conquest, the Indians worshiped on this hill an idol called Tonantzin, “The Mother of the Gods.” This deity seemed to have corresponded to the Cybele of classical antiquity.
Father Florencia, who is the safest authority to follow on the apparition up to the year 1688, when he published his book, “The Northern Star of Mexico,” piously observes:—“The Virgin desired that her miraculous appearance should take place on this hill to dispossess the mother of false gods of the vain adoration rendered to the idol by the Indians, and to show the latter that she alone was the Mother of the true God, and the true mother of men, and that where crime and idolatry and human sacrifice had abounded, grace should still more abound.
THE LEGEND.