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doomed a victim to Mexitli; but escapes through a national custom of allowing a great warrior to fight for his life at the altar-stone, by the timely arrival of his friends, and by the assistance of a native maiden, to whom also Hoel owes his rescue from the den of Tlaloc, where he was left to starve. The Azticas are defeated, and finally abandon their territory, going onward and founding Mexico: calling it after the name of their chief deity.

To quote all the passages which seem especially made for our purpose, would fill this volume; but I must select one or two. The description of the idol : On a huge throne, with four huge silver snakes As if the keeper of the sanctuary

Circled, with stretching neck and fangs displayed,
Mexitli sate; another graven snake

Belted with scales of gold his monstrous bulk.
Around his neck a loathsome collar hung

Of human hearts; the face was masked with gold;
His specular eyes seemed fire; one hand upreared
A club, the other, as in battle, held

The shield; and over all suspended hung

The banner of the nation.

The chief priest, Tezozomoc, when about to present little Hoel to the idol, and the child, terrified at his hideous appearance, shrieks and recoils from him :

His dark aspect,
Which nature with her harshest characters
Had featured, art made worse. His cowl was white;
His untrimmed hair, a long and loathsome mass,
With cotton cords entwisted, clung with gum,
And matted with the blood which every morn
He from his temples drew before the god,
In sacrifice; bare were his arms, and smeared
Black; but his countenance a stronger dread
Than all the horrors of that outward garb
Struck, with quick instinct, to young Hoel's heart.
It was a face whose settled sullenness
No gentle feeling ever had disturbed :

Which when he probed a victim's living breast,
Retained its hard composure.

The whole work is alive with the machinations, arts, and fanatic deeds of the priesthood. The king of the Azticas, in an early conference with Madoc, says, speaking of the priests,

Awe them, for they awe me :

and his queen, after he has been killed in battle, and she is about to perish on his funeral pile, calls out to his brother and successor,

Take heed, O king!

Beware these wicked men! They to the war

Forced my dead lord. . . Thou knowest, and I know,
He loved the strangers; that his noble mind,

Enlightened by their lore, had willingly

Put down these cursed altars ! As she spake

They dragged her to the stone... Nay: nay! she cried,
There needs not force! I go to join my lord!

His blood and mine be on you! Ere she ceased,
The knife was in her breast. Tezozomoc,
Trembling with wrath, held up toward the sun
The reeking heart.

When the war is terminated, Madoc declares,

No priest must dwell among us,-that hath been
The cause of all this misery!

And that, indeed, has been the cause of at least half the miseries in the world, as I shall hereafter shew. With this sentiment let us close this chapter.

CHAPTER VI.

EGYPT.

We have now traversed an immense space of country, and of time; and found one great uniform spirit of priestcraft, one uniform system of paganism, presiding over and oppressing the semi-barbarous nations of the earth; it remains for us to inquire whether the three great nations of antiquity, Greece, Egypt, and India, so early celebrated for their science, philosophy, and political importance, were affected by the same mighty and singular influence; and here we shall find it triumphing in its clearest form, and existing in its highest perfection.

The priest-ridden condition of Egypt is notorious to all readers of history. Lord Shaftesbury calls it, "the motherland of superstitions." So completely had the lordly and cunning priesthood here contrived to fix themselves on the shoulders of the people, so completely to debase and stupify them with an overwhelming abundance of foolish veneration, that the country swarmed with temples, gods, and creatures, which, in themselves most noxious, or loathsome, were objects of adoration. Juvenal laughs at them, as making gods of their onions; growing gods in their garden-beds by thousands

O sanctas gentes, quibus hæc nascunter in hortis

Numina!

and dogs, cats, lizards, and other creatures were

cherished with extraordinary veneration. Diodorus Siculus says, that a Roman soldier having by accident killed a cat, the common people instantly surrounded his house with every demonstration of fury. The king's guards were immediately dispatched to save him from their rage, but in vain; his authority and the Roman name were equally unavailing.

The accounts we possess, of the extreme populousness of ancient Egypt; of the number and splendour of their temples; of the knowledge and authority of their priests; and the mighty remains of some of their sacred buildings, sufficiently testify to the splendour and absolute dominance of this order in this great kingdom.

To shew that the priestcraft of this ancient realm was part of the same system that we have been tracing, a part of that still existing in India, will require but little labour. We shall see that the Greek philosophers themselves assert the derivation of their mythology from Egypt; and so strikingly similar are those of India and Egypt, that it has been a matter of debate amongst learned men, which nation borrowed its religion from the other. The fact appears to be, that neither borrowed from the other, but that both drew from one common source, a source we have already pointed out-that of the Cuthic tribes. Egypt was peopled by the children of Ham and by whomsoever India was peopled, the great priestly and military caste early found its way there, and introduced the very same superstitions, founded on the worship of Noah and his sons; and shadowed out with emblems and ceremonies derived from the memory of the flood. Both nations are of the highest antiquity; both arrived at extraordinary knowledge of astronomy, of architecture, of many of the mechanic arts, of government, and of a certain

moral and theologic philosophy, which the priests retained to themselves, and made use of as a mighty engine to enslave the people. Their knowledge was carefully shrowded from the multitude; the populace were crammed with all sorts of fabulous puerilities; and were made to feel the display of science in the hands of the priesthood, as evidence of supernatural powers.

Dr. Robertson, in his Disquisition on Ancient India, and in his History of America, has endeavoured to explain the uniformity of pagan belief, by supposing that rude nations would everywhere be influenced by the same great powers and appearances of nature;-by the beneficial influence of the sun and moon; of the fruitful earth; by the contemplation of the awfulness of the ocean, of tempests, and thunder; and would come to adore those great objects as gods. But this will, by no means, account for the striking identity of the great principles and practices of paganism, as we have seen them existing. Different nations, especially under the different aspects of widely divided climates, would have imagined widely different deities; and the ceremonies in which they would have adored them, would have been as infinite as the vagaries of the human fancy. But would they have all produced gods so positively of the same family, that, whoever went from one nation to another, however distant, amongst people of totally different habits and genius, would have immediately recognized their own gods, and have given them their own names? Would Cæsar and Tacitus have beheld Roman gods in Germany and Gaul? Herodotus, Pluto, and Pythagoras, have found those of Greece in Egypt? Would these gods be, in every country, attended by the same traditionary theory of origin,— the three sons of one great father, multiplying them

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