consequence, “beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.” Imagine the Spaniards and the Portuguese to have been merely what they pretended to be,—men who had been taught in the divine law of the New Testament, that “God made of one blood all the nations of the earth;” men who, while they burned to “plant the Cross,” actually meant by it to plant in every new land the command, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself;” and the doctrine, that the religion of the Christian is, to “do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God.” Imagine that these men came amongst the simple people of the New World, clothed in all the dignity of Christian wisdom, the purity of Christian sentiment, and the sacred beauty of Christian benevolence; and what a contrast to the crimes and the horrors with which they devastated and depopulated that hapless continent! The historian would not then have had to say—“The bloodshed and attendant miseries which the unparalleled rapine and cruelty of the Spaniards spread over the New World, indeed disgrace human nature. The great and flourishing empires of Mexico and Peru, steeped in the blood of forty millions of their sons, present a melancholy prospect, which must excite the indignation of every good heart.”[1] If, instead of that lust of gold which had hardened them into actual demons, they had worn the benign graces of true Christians, the natives would have found in them a higher image of divinity than any which they had before conceived, and the whole immense continent would have been laid open to them as a field of unexampled and limitless glory and
- ↑ Mickle.
