Don Vincente Pazos, in his celebrated Letters on the United Provinces of South America, does not even stop at the clergy, in charging a large share of the miseries of his countrymen upon the ecclesiastical establishment, but confounds the creed with its unworthy ministers, and strikes even at the religion itself:
"Among the evils suffered by the Indians which have been a source of unhappiness to them, as well as to all South America, is the Roman Catholic religion, which was introduced among them by the Spaniards. This religion, in countries where it predominates or is connected with the government, is widely different from the same religion as it appears in the United States of North America. Instead of being employed as all religions ought to be, in directing the morals, purifying the hearts and restraining the vices of the people,--it is so prostituted in Spanish countries, that it has become nothing but a mass of superstitious ceremonies, and the instrument of avarice and oppression."
The error of the patriotic writer is so evident that it does not need exposure. The faith and the friar are different things. Yet how deep must be the corruption of a class whose vices force an intelligent man, born and educated in the bosom of the church, to denounce his religion for the sake of its worthless teachers.
We have dwelt upon this subject because the religion--and especially the protected state religion of a country--is always of deep interest when we estimate the resources and character of a nation. Priests of all creeds obtain a sacred character in the opinion of the multitude the moment their vow is pronounced at the altar. The world believes that they part with human nature in assuming the gown, and become in reality, the _divines_ they are called in the fashionable nomenclature of the age.
The priest, whether Protestant, Catholic, Mahomedan or Chinese, is ever an important, and often an omnipotent, member of the social world. And it behooves society in the nineteenth century to cherish Christianity instead of Flamens and Soothsayers.
It has been our principle through life to cultivate a genial feeling of toleration towards all the various sects into which the great Christian church is divided. We have resisted bigotry in all its shapes, and in all its manifestations, from whatever source. Trusting in the essential faith and discarding the external form, we have regarded all men who knelt at the altar which was cemented with the blood of the Nazarine, as a great brotherhood devoted to the religious regeneration and consequent civilization of the world. In writing, therefore, of the Catholic church in Mexico we have been pained to speak disparagingly of a part of the priesthood, whose members, in our own country, we had early in life learned to reverence for their virtuous piety, and admire for their profound learning. We know that the great theoretical dogma of that powerful church is its _unity_, and that its tenets, principles and practices are universally the same throughout the world. For opinions given and examples cited, in another work, we have been severely rebuked, by one of the most learned theologians in the Roman church, who argues our wilful error, upon this assumption of theoretical identity. But we have the satisfaction to know, not only from Mexicans themselves, but from American Catholics who visited the country since that criticism was issued, that our descriptions, in no instance, surpassed the reality, and that if the _tenets_, be in fact, the same as those entertained by the church at Rome and in the United States, the principles, and, especially, the _practices_ of many of its ministers, vary extraordinarily from the principles and practices of its ministers here. In another portion of this work we may, probably, notice some of those practices more fully.[36]