On a building at the side of the causeway we notice “Estación de Méjico” (Mexico Station) painted in large letters. As far as we could observe, this very suggestive sign-board is the whole plant of the Railway Company at this end of the line. A range of hills ends abruptly in the plain, at a place which the Indians called Tepeyacac, “end of the hill” (literally “at the hill’s nose”). Our causeway leads to this spot; and there, at the foot and up the slope of the hill, are built the great cathedral and other churches and chapels, altogether a vast and imposing collection of buildings; and round these a considerable town has grown up, for this is the great place of pilgrimage in the country.
The Spaniards had brought a miraculous picture with them, Nuestra Señora de Remedios, which is still in the country, and many pilgrims visit it; but Our Lady of Guadalupe is a native Mexican, and decidedly holds the first rank in the veneration of the people.
In the great church there is a picture mounted in a gold frame of great value. Its distance from the altar-rails, and the pane of glass which covers it, prevent one’s seeing it very well. This was the more unfortunate, as, according to my history, the picture is in itself evidently of miraculous origin, for the best artists are agreed that no human hand could imitate the drawing or the colour! It appears that the Aztecs, long before the arrival of the Spaniards, had been in the habit of worshipping—in this very place—a goddess, who was known as Teotenantzin, “mother-god,” or Tonantzin, “our mother.” Ten years after the Conquest, a certain converted Indian, Juan Diego (John James) by name, was passing that way, and to him appeared the Virgin Mary. She told him to go to the bishop, and tell him to build her a temple on the place where she stood, giving him a lapful of flowers as a token. When the flowers were poured out of the garment, in presence of the bishop, the miraculous picture appeared underneath, painted on the apron itself. The bishop accepted the miracle with great unction; the temple was built, and the miraculous image duly installed in it. Its name of “Santa Maria de Guadalupe,” was not, as one might imagine, taken from the Madonna of that name in Spain (of course not!), but was communicated by Our Lady herself to another converted Indian. She told him that her title was to be Santa Maria de Tequatlanopeuh, “Saint Mary of the rocky hill,” of which hard word the Spaniards made “Guadalupe,”—just as they had turned Quauhnahuac into Cuernavaca, and Quauhaxallan into Guadalajara, substituting the nearest word of Spanish form for the unpronounceable Mexican names. This at least is the ingenious explanation given by my author, the Bachelor Tanco, Professor of the Aztec language, and of Astrology, in the University of Mexico, in the year 1666. The bishop who authenticated the miracle was no less a person than Fray Juan de Zumarraga, whose name is well known in Mexican history, for it was he who collected together all the Aztec picture-writings that he could find, “quite a mountain of them,” say the chroniclers, and made a solemn bonfire of them in the great square of Tlatelolco. The miracles worked by the Virgin of Guadalupe, and by copies of it, are innumerable; and the faith which the lower orders of Mexicans and the Indians have in it is boundless.
On the 12th of December, the Anniversary of the Apparition is kept, and an amazing concourse of the faithful repair to the sanctuary. Heller, a German traveller who was in Mexico in 1846, saw an Indian taken to the church; he had broken his leg, which had not even been set, and he simply expected Our Lady to cure him without any human intervention at all. Unluckily, the author had no opportunity of seeing what became of him. The great miracle of all was the deliverance of Mexico from the great inundation of 1626, and the fact is established thus. The city was under water, the inhabitants in despair. The picture was brought to the Cathedral in a canoe, through the streets of Mexico; and between one and two years afterwards the inundation subsided. Ergo, it was the picture that saved the city!
For centuries a fierce rivalry existed between the Spanish Virgin, called “de Remedios,” and Our Lady of Guadalupe; the Spaniards supporting the first, and the native Mexicans the second. A note of Humboldt’s illustrates this feeling perfectly. He relates that whenever the country was suffering from drought, the Virjen do Remedios was carried into Mexico in procession, to bring rain, till it came to be said, quite as a proverb, Hasta el agua nos debe venir de la Gachupina—“We must get even our water from that Spanish creature.” If it happened that the Spanish Madonna produced no effect after a long trial, the native Madonna was allowed to be brought solemnly in by the Indians, and never failed in bringing the wished-for rain, which always came sooner or later. It is remarkable that the Spanish party, who were then all-powerful, should have allowed their own Madonna to be placed at such a disadvantage, in not having the last innings. I need hardly say that the shrine of Guadalupe is monstrously rich. The Chapter has been known to lend such a thing as a million or two of dollars at a time, though most of their property is invested on landed security. They are allowed to have lotteries, and make something handsome out of them; and they even sell medals and prints of their patroness, which have great powers. You may have plenary indulgence in the hour of death for sixpence or less. We drank of the water of the chalybeate spring, bought sacred lottery-tickets, which turned out blanks, and tickets for indulgences, which, I greatly fear, will not prove more valuable; and so rode home along the dusty causeway to breakfast.
As means of learning what sort of books the poorer classes in Mexico preferred, we overhauled with great diligence the book-stalls, of which there are a few, especially under the arcades (Portales) near the great square. The Mexican public have not much cheap literature to read; and the scanty list of such popular works is half filled with Our Lady of Guadalupe, and other miracle-books of the same kind. Father Ripalda’s Catechism has a large circulation, and is apparently the one in general use in the country. Zavala speaks of this catechism as containing the maxims of blind obedience to king and pope; but my more modern edition has scarcely anything to say about the Pope, and nothing at all about the government. Of late years, indeed, the Pope has not counted for much, politically, in Mexico; and on one occasion his Holiness found, when he tried to interfere about church-benefices, that his authority was rather nominal than real. On the whole, nothing in the Catechism struck me so much as the multiplication-table, which, to my unspeakable astonishment, turned up in the middle of the book; a table of fractions followed; and then it began again with the Holy Trinity.
To continue our catalogue; there are the almanacks, which contain rules for foretelling the weather by the moon’s quarters, but none of the other fooleries which we find in those that circulate in England among the less educated classes. It is curious to notice how the taste for putting sonnets and other dreary poems at the beginnings and ends of books has survived in these Spanish countries. What used to be known in England as “a copy of verses” is still appreciated here, and almanacks, newspapers, religious books, even programmes of plays and bull-fights, are full of such dismal compositions. We ought to be thankful that the fashion has long since gone out with us (except in the religions tract, where it still survives). It is not merely apropos of sonnets, but of thousands of other things, that in these countries one is brought, in a manner, face to face with England as it used to be; and very trifling matters become interesting when viewed in this light. The last item in the list comprises translations, principally of French novels, those being preferred in which the agony is “piled up” to the highest point. German literature is represented by the “Sorrows of Werter.” Of course, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is widely circulated here, as it is everywhere in countries not given to the “particular vanity” attacked in it.
One need hardly say that both literature and education are at a very low ebb in Mexico. Referring to Tejada again, I find that he reckons that in the capital, out of a population of 185,000, there are 12,000 scholars at primary schools; but of course, as in other countries, a large proportion of these children attend so irregularly that they can hardly learn anything. For the country generally, he estimates one child receiving instruction out of thirty-seven inhabitants, a very significant piece of statistics. Efforts are being made, especially in the capital, to raise the population out of this state. Mr. Christy took much trouble in investigating the subject, with the assistance of our friend Don José Miguel Cervantes, the head of the Ayuntamiento, or Municipal Council. This gentleman, with a few others, has been doing much up-hill work of this kind for years past, establishing schools, and trying to make head against the opposition of the priests and the indifference of the people, as yet with but small success.
It seems hard to be always attacking the Roman Catholic clergy, but of one thing we cannot remain in doubt,—that their influence has had more to do than anything else with the doleful ignorance which reigns supreme in Mexico. For centuries they had the education of the country in their hands, and even at this day they retain the greater share of it. The training which the priests themselves receive will therefore give one some idea of what they teach their scholars. Unluckily, their course of instruction was stereotyped ages ago, when learned men devoted themselves to writing huge books on divinity, casuistry, logic, and metaphysics; concealing their ignorance of facts under an affectation of wisdom and clouds of long words; demonstrating how many millions of angels could dance on a needle’s point; writing treatises “de omni re scibili,” and on a good many things unknowable also; and teaching their admiring scholars the art of building up sham arguments on any subject, whether they know anything about it or not. This is a very vicious system of training for a man’s mind, the more especially when it is supposed to set him up with a stock of superior knowledge; and this is what the Roman Catholic clergy have been learning, generation after generation, in Mexico and elsewhere. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, particularly among the higher clergy; but, so far as I have been able to ascertain, education in clerical schools has generally been of this kind. It is instinctive to talk a little, as one occasionally finds an opportunity of doing, to some youth just out of these colleges. I recollect speaking to a young man who had just left the Seminario of Mexico, where he had been through a long course of theology and philosophy. He was astonished to hear that bull-fighting and colearing were not universally practised in Europe; and, when his father began to question me about the Crimean war, the young gentleman’s remarks showed that he had not the faintest idea where England and France were, nor how far they were from one another.
I happened, not long ago, to visit a celebrated monastic college in South Italy, where they educated, not ordinary mortals, but only young men of noble birth; and here I took particular care in inspecting the library, judging that, though the scholars need not learn all that was there, yet that no department of knowledge would be taught there that was not represented on the library-shelves. What I saw fully confirmed all that I had previously seen and heard about the monastic learning of the present day. There were to be seen many fine manuscripts, and black-letter books, and curious old editions of great value, good store of classics (mostly Latin, however), works of the Fathers by the hundred-weight, and quartos and folios of canon-law, theology, metaphysics, and such like, by the ton. But it seemed that, in the estimation of the librarians, the world had stood still since the time of Duns Scotus; for, of what we call positive knowledge, except a little arithmetic and geometry, and a few very poor histories, I saw nothing. It is easy to see how one result of the clerical monopoly of education has therefore come about—that the intellectual standard is very low in Mexico. The Holy Office, too, has had its word to say in the matter. This institution had not much work to do in burning Indians, who were anything but sceptical in their turn of mind, and, indeed, were too much like Theodore Hook, and would believe “forty, if you pleased.” They even went further, and were apt to believe not only what the missionaries taught them, but to cherish the memory of their old gods into the bargain. It was three centuries after the Conquest, that Mr. Bullock got the goddess Teoyaomiqui dug up in Mexico; and the old Indian remarked to him that it was true the Spaniards had given them three very good new gods, but it was rather hard to take away all their old ones. At any rate, the functions of the Inquisition were mostly confined to working the Index Expurgatorius, and suppressing knowledge generally, which they did with great industry until not long ago.