THE PIONEER MISSIONARIES.

To pretend to tell the story of the Spanish pioneering of the Americas without special attention to the missionary pioneers, would be very poor justice and very poor history. In this, even more than in other qualities, the conquest was unique. The Spaniard not only found and conquered, but converted. His religious earnestness was not a whit behind his bravery. As has been true of all nations that have entered new lands, and as we ourselves later entered this, his first step had to be to subdue the savages who opposed him. But as soon as he had whipped these fierce grown-children, he began to treat them with a great and noble mercy, a mercy none too common even now, and in that cruel time of the whole world almost unheard of. He never robbed the brown first Americans of their homes, nor drove them on and on before him; on the contrary, he protected and secured to them by special laws the undisturbed possession of their lands for all time. It is due to the generous and manly laws made by Spain three hundred years ago, that our most interesting and advanced Indians, the Pueblos, enjoy to-day full security in their lands; while nearly all others (who never came fully under Spanish dominion) have been time after time ousted from lands our government had solemnly given to them.

That was the beauty of an Indian policy which was ruled, not by politics, but by the unvarying principle of humanity. The Indian was first required to be obedient to his new government. He could not learn obedience in everything all at once; but he must at least refrain from butchering his new neighbors. As soon as he learned that lesson, he was insured protection in his rights of home and family and property. Then, as rapidly as such a vast work could be done by an army of missionaries who devoted their lives to the dangerous task, he was educated to citizenship and Christianity. It is almost impossible for us, in these quiet days, to comprehend what it was to convert a savage half-world. In our part of North America there have never been such hopeless tribes as the Spaniards met in Mexico and other southern lands. Never did any other people anywhere complete such a stupendous missionary work. To begin to understand the difficulties of that conversion, we must look into an appalling page of history.

Most Indians and savage peoples have religions as unlike ours as are their social organizations. There are few tribes that dream of one Supreme Being. Most of them worship many gods, “gods” whose attributes are very like those of the worshipper; “gods” as ignorant and cruel and treacherous as he. It is a ghastly thing to study these religions, and to see what dark and revolting qualities ignorance can deify. The merciless gods of India, who are supposed to delight in the crushing of thousands under the wheels of Juggernaut, and in the sacrificing of babes to the Ganges, and in the burning alive of girl-widows, are fair examples of what the benighted can believe; and the horrors of India were fully paralleled in America. The religions of our North American Indians had many astounding and dreadful features; but they were mild and civilized compared with the hideous rites of Mexico and the southern lands. To understand something of what the Spanish missionaries had to combat throughout America, aside from the common danger, let us glance at the condition of affairs in Mexico at their coming.

The Nahuatl, or Aztecs, and similar Indian tribes of ancient Mexico, had the general pagan creed of all American Indians, with added horrors of their own. They were in constant blind dread of their innumerable savage gods, for to them everything they could not see and understand, and nearly everything they could, was a divinity. But they could not conceive of any such divinity as one they could love; it was always something to be afraid of, and mortally afraid of. Their whole attitude of life was one of dodging the cruel blows of an unseen hand; of placating some fierce god who could not love, but might be bribed not to destroy. They could not conceive a real creation, nor that anything could be without father and mother: stones and stars and winds and gods had to be born the same as men. Their “heaven,” if they could have understood such a word, was crowded with gods, each as individual and personal as we, with greater powers than we, but with much the same weaknesses and passions and sins. In fact, they had invented and arranged gods by their own savage standards, giving them the powers they themselves most desired, but unable to attribute virtues they could not understand. So, too, in judging what would please these gods, they went by what would please themselves. To have bloody vengeance on their enemies; to rob and slay, or be paid tribute for not robbing and slaying; to be richly dressed and well fed, these, and other like things which seemed to them the highest personal ambitions, they thought must be likewise pleasing to “those above.” So they spent most of their time and anxiety in buying off these strange gods, who were even more dreaded than savage neighbors.

Their ideas of a god were graphically expressed in the great stone idols of which Mexico was once full, some of which are still preserved in the museums. They are often of heroic size, and are carved from the hardest stone with great painstaking, but their faces and figures are indescribably dreadful. Such an idol as that of the grim Huitzilopochtli was as horrible a thing as human ingenuity ever invented, and the same grotesque hideousness runs through all the long list of Mexican idols.

These idols were attended with the most servile care, and dressed in the richest ornaments known to Indian wealth. Great strings of turquoise, the most precious “gem” of the American aborigines, and really precious mantles of the brilliant feathers of tropic birds, and gorgeous shells were hung lavishly upon those great stone nightmares. Thousands of men devoted their lives to the tending of the dumb deities, and humbled and tortured themselves unspeakably to please them.

But gifts and care were not enough. Treachery to his friends was still to be feared from such a god. He must still further be bought off; everything that to an Indian seemed valuable was proffered to the Indian’s god, to keep him in good humor. And since human life was the most precious thing an Indian could understand, it became his most important and finally his most frequent offering. To the Indian it seemed no crime to take a life to please a god. He had no idea of retribution after death, and he came to look upon human sacrifice as a legitimate, moral, and even divine institution. In time, such sacrifices became of almost daily occurrence at each of the numberless temples. It was the most valued form of worship; so great was its importance that the officials or priests had to go through a more onerous training than does any minister of a Christian faith. They could reach their position only by pledging and keeping up unceasing and awful self-deprivation and self-mutilation.

Human lives were offered not only to one or two principal idols of each community, but each town had also many minor fétiches to which such sacrifices were made on stated occasions. So fixed was the custom of sacrifice, and so proper was it deemed, that when Cortez came to Cempohual the natives could think of no other way to welcome him with sufficient honor, and in perfect cordiality proposed to offer up human sacrifices to him. It is hardly necessary to add that Cortez sternly declined this pledge of hospitality.

These rites were mostly performed on the teocallis, or sacrificial mounds, of which there were one or more in every Indian town. These were huge artificial mounds of earth, built in the shape of truncated pyramids, and faced all over with stone. They were from fifty to two hundred feet high, and sometimes many hundreds of feet square at the base. Upon the flat top of the pyramid stood a small tower, the dingy chapel which enclosed the idol. The grotesque face of the stone deity looked down upon a cylindrical stone which had a bowl-like cavity in the top, the altar, or sacrificial stone. This was generally carved also, and sometimes with remarkable skill and detail. The famous so-called “Aztec Calendar Stone” in the National Museum of Mexico, which once gave rise to so many wild speculations, is merely one of these sacrificial altars, dating from before Columbus. It is a wonderful piece of Indian stone-carving.

The idol, the inner walls of the temple, the floor, the altar, were always wet with the most precious fluid on earth. In the bowl human hearts smouldered. Black-robed wizards, their faces painted black with white rings about eyes and mouth, their hair matted with blood, their faces raw from constant self-torture, forever flitted to and fro, keeping watch by night and day, ready always for the victims whom that dreadful superstition was always ready to bring. The supply of victims was drawn from prisoners taken in war, and from slaves paid as tribute by conquered tribes; and it took a vast supply. Sometimes as many as five hundred were sacrificed on one altar on one great day. They were stretched naked upon the sacrificial stone, and butchered in a manner too horrible to be described here. Their palpitating hearts were offered to the idol, and then thrown into the great stone bowl; while the bodies were kicked down the long stone stairway to the bottom of the great mound, where they were seized upon by the eager crowd. The Mexicans were not cannibals regularly and as a matter of taste; but they devoured these bodies as part of their grim religion.

It is too revolting to go more into detail concerning these rites. Enough has been said to give some idea of the moral barrier encountered by the Spanish missionaries when they came to such blood-thirsty savages with a gospel which teaches love and the universal brotherhood of man. Such a creed was as unintelligible to the Indian as white blackness would be to us; and the struggle to make him understand was one of the most enormous and apparently hopeless ever undertaken by human teachers. Before the missionaries could make these savages even listen to much less understand Christianity, they had the dangerous task of proving this paganism worthless. The Indian believed absolutely in the power of his gory stone-god. If he should neglect his idol, he felt sure the idol would punish and destroy him; and of course he would not believe anything that could be told him to the contrary. The missionary had not only to say, “Your idol is worthless; he cannot hurt anybody; he is only a stone, and if you kick him he cannot punish you,” but he had to prove it. No Indian was going to be so foolhardy as to try the experiment, and the new teacher had to do it in person. Of course he could not even do that at first; for if he had begun his missionary work by offering any indignity to one of those ugly gods of porphyry, its “priests” would have slain him on the spot. But when the Indians saw at last that the missionary was not struck down by some supernatural power for speaking against their gods, there was one step gained. By degrees he could touch the idol, and they saw that he was still unharmed. At last he overturned and broke the cruel images; and the breathless and terrified worshippers began to distrust and despise the cowardly divinities they had played the slave to, but whom a stranger could insult and abuse with impunity. It was only by this rude logic, which the debased savages could understand, that the Spanish missionaries proved to the Indians that human sacrifice was a human mistake and not the will of “Those Above.” It was a wonderful achievement, just the uprooting of this one, but worst, custom of the Indian religion, a custom strengthened by centuries of constant practice. But the Spanish apostles were equal to the task; and the infinite faith and zeal and patience which finally abolished human sacrifice in Mexico, led gradually on, step by step, to the final conversion of a continent and a half of savages to Christianity.