"The tragic circumstances depicted in this sanguinary tale were used by the priests to 'point a moral.' The immolation of this unhappy youth was expounded to the people as a type of human destiny, which, brilliant in its beginning, often closes in sorrow and disaster.
"In this loathsome manner, if we may believe the account given, was the mangled body disposed of. It was delivered by the priests to the warrior who had taken the captive in battle, and served up by him at an entertainment given to his friends.
"This, we are told, was no rude cannibal orgy, but a refined banquet, teeming with delicious beverages, and delicate viands prepared with dainty art, and was attended by guests of both sexes, and conducted with all the decorum of civilized life. Thus, in the Aztec religious ceremonial, refinement and the extreme of barbarism met together.
"The Aztec nation had, at the time of the Conquest, many claims to the character of a civilized community. The debasing influence of their religious rites it was, however, that furnished the fanatical conquerors with their best apology for the subjugation of this people. One-half condones the excuses of the invaders, who with the cross in one hand and the bloody sword in the other, justified their questionable deeds by the abolishment of human sacrifice.
"The oppressions of Montezuma, with the frequent insurrections of his people," concluded the Antiquary, "when in the latter part of his reign one-half the forces of his empire are said to have been employed in suppressing the commotions of the other, disgust at his arrogance, and his outrageous fiscal exactions, reduced his subjects to that condition which made them an easy prey to Cortez, whose army at last overpowered the emperor and swept the Aztec civilization from the face of the earth."
"I find it strange," said the Journalist (in the little talk that followed Mr. Morehouse's able paper), "that civilized nations have held an idea so monstrous as the necessity of vicarious physical suffering of a victim to appease the wrath of a divine being with the erring creatures who, such as they are, are the work of his hands.
"That unenlightened races, from time immemorial, should have supposed that the shedding of blood propitiated their angry god, or gods, is but the natural outcome of ignorance and superstition; but, that in this twentieth century, civilized worshippers should sing—
'There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains'—
passes my understanding."
"In the ruins of Palenque there is," said the Antiquary, "a scene portrayed on its crumbling walls, in which priests are immolating in a furnace placed at the feet of an image of Saturn the choicest infants of the nation, while a trumpeter enlivens the occasion with music, and in the background a female spectator, supposed to be the mother of the victim, looks on."