et centumgeminus Briareus, ac belua Lernæ
horrendum stridens, flammisque armata Chimæra,
Gorgones Harpyiæque et forma tricorporis umbræ."
Ancient geographers affirmed that the heat of the torrid zone was intolerable, that men and ships entering it would shrivel. This belt of consuming heat presented an impenetrable barrier between the known and the unknown.
What wonder that intellect was stunted, civilization dwarfed, restricted as was human knowledge to the narrow grave-like walls of western Europe! No sooner were these ancient boundaries burst, and the black and dreadful fog-banks which lay upon primeval ocean pierced, than fancy, like a freed bird, bounded forth, swept the circumference of the earth, soared aloft amid the stars, and dared even to ask of religion a reason.
EUROPE AND AMERICA.
One glance westward. On either side of an unswept sea, a Sea of Darkness it was called by those that feared it, there rested at the opening of this history two fair continents, each unknown to the other. One was cultivated; its nations were well advanced in those arts and courtesies that spring from accumulated experiences; the other, for the most part, unmarred by man, lay revelling in primeval beauty, fresh as from the Creator's hand. The leaven of progress working in one, brought to its knowledge the existence of the other; the Sea of Darkness with its uncouth monsters was turned into a highway, and civilized Europe stood face to face with sylvan America. This world newly found was called the New World; though which is the new and which the old; which, if either, peopled the other, is yet undetermined. One in organism and in the nature human, the people of the two worlds were in color, customs, and sentiment several. The barbarous New World boasted its civilizations, while the civilized Old World disclosed its barbarisms; on Mexican and Peruvian highlands were nations of city-builders as far superior in culture to the islanders and coast-dwellers seen by Columbus, as were the European discoverers superior to the American highlanders. Of probable indigenous origin, this lesser civilization shows traces of high antiquity; even the ruder nations of the north leave far behind them absolute primevalism.
I do not say with some that in America were seen in certain directions marks of as high culture as any in Europe. There were no such marks. But this unquestionably is true; that, as in Europe, we here find that most inexplicable of phenomena, the evolution of civility; man's mental and spiritual necessities, like his physical wants, appear everywhere the same. The mind, like the body, craves nutriment, and the dimmed imprisoned soul a higher sympathy; hence we see men of every clime and color making for themselves gods, and contriving creeds which shall presently deliver them from their dilemma. The civilizations of America, unlike well-rooted saplings of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, were sensitive-plants which collapsed upon the first foreign touch, leaving only the blackness of darkness; hence it was the wild tribes, far more than the cultivated nations, that influenced the character of subsequent American societies.
In her civil and religious polities America was every whit as consistent as Europe. Neither was altogether perfect or wise; and we wonder at the blindness and stupidity of one as of the other. Although we could catch but a glimpse of the Americans before they vanished, yet we might see that intellect was not stationary, but growing, and that society was instinct with intelligent and progressional activity.
COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS.