Brought Forward

by R. B. Cunninghame Graham

It only fired their zeal, and yet all their solicitude to save the Indians’ souls was unavailing, and the hard-hearted savages, dead to the advantages that baptism has ever brought with it, clave to their images.

The good Franciscans made several more attempts to move the people’s hearts by preaching ceaselessly. All failed, and then they went to several islands in the lake, in one of which Father Orbieta hardly had begun to preach, when, as Lopez Cogulludo [114a] tells us, an Indian seized him by the throat and nearly strangled him, leaving him senseless on the ground.

At times, seated in church listening to what the Elizabethans called “a painful preacher,” even the elect have felt an impulse to seize him by the throat. Still, it is usually restrained; but these poor savages, undisciplined in body and in mind, were perhaps to be excused, for the full flavour of a sermon had never reached them in their Eden by the lake. Moreover, after he was thus rudely cast from the pulpit to the ground, Father Fuensalida, nothing daunted by his fate, stepped forward and took up his parable. He preached to them this time in their own language, in which he was expert, with fervid eloquence and great knowledge of the Scriptures, [114b] explaining to them the holy mystery of the incarnation of the eternal Word. [115] The subject was well chosen for a first attempt upon their hearts; but it, too, proved unfruitful, and the two friars were forced to re-embark.

As the canoe in which they sat moved from the island and launched out into the lake, the infidels who stood and watched them paddling were moved to fury, and, rushing to the edge, stoned them whole-heartedly till they were out of reach.

It is a wise precaution, and one that the “conquistadores” usually observed, to have the spiritual well supported by the secular arm when missionaries, instinct with zeal and not weighed down with too much common sense, preach for the first time to the infidel.

This first reverse was but an incident, and by degrees the friars, this time accompanied by soldiers, explored more of the islands in the lake. At last they came to one called Tayasal, which was so full of idols that they took twelve hours to burn and to destroy them all.

One island still remained to be explored, and in it was a temple with an idol much reverenced by the Indians. At last they entered it, and on a platform about the height of a tall man they saw the figure of a horse rudely carved out of stone.

The horse was seated on the ground resting upon his quarters, his hind legs bent and his front feet stretched out. The barbarous infidels [116a] adored the abominable and monstrous beast under the name of Tziunchan, God of the Thunder and the Lightning, and paid it reverence. Even the Spaniards, who, as a rule, were not much given to inquiring into the history of idols, but broke them instantly, ad majorem Dei gloriam, were interested and amazed. Little by little they learned the history of the hippomorphous god, which had been carefully preserved. It appeared that when Cortes had left his horse, so many years ago, the Indians, seeing he was ill, took him into a temple to take care of him. Thinking he was a reasoning animal, [116b] they placed before him fruit and chickens, with the result that the poor beast—who, of course, was reasonable enough in his own way—eventually died.

The Indians, terrified and fearful that Cortes would take revenge upon them for the death of the horse that he had left for them to care for and to minister to all his wants, before they buried him, carved a rude statue in his likeness and placed it in a temple in the lake.

The devil, who, as Villagutierre observes, is never slack to take advantage when he can, seeing the blindness and the superstition (which was great) of those abominable idolaters, induced them by degrees to make a God of the graven image they had made. Their veneration grew with time, just as bad weeds grow up in corn, as Holy Writ sets forth for our example, and that abominable statue became the chiefest of their gods, though they had many others equally horrible.