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Here live the lineal descendants of Thor, christianised to human industries. Here the great hammer of the Scandinavian Thunderer descended, took nest, and hatched a brood of ten thousand little iron beetles for beating iron and steel into shapes and uses that Tubal Cain never dreamed of. Here you may hear their clatter night and day upon a thousand anvils. O, Vale of Vulcan! O, Valley of Knives!
I confess I thought that possible, for I did not particularly like the appearance of Mr Heliogabalus. My father employed a number of blacks on his estate, as did my uncle; for they found them far more trustworthy and industrious than the so-called Christianised natives.
Then the Spaniards, having Christianised the Indians, made slaves of them, and ground them to the dust with merciless cruelties and overwork, which quickly depopulated whole towns and districts. The presence of the cross in Central America greatly astonished the Spanish discoverers. In Yucatan and throughout the Aztec Empire it was the emblem of the "god of rain."
In the hut of a Christianised but ignorant native near Anadyrsk, I once saw an engraved portrait, cut from Harper's Weekly, of Major General Dix, framed, hung up in a corner of the room and worshipped as a Russian saint!
Whenever they became Christianised, they began to appreciate life like other men, and ceased, of course, to be the troublers they had once been.
Thus, still confining ourselves to the American continent, we have the ancient hymns of the Zuñis, in no way Christianised, and never chanted in the presence of the Mexican Spanish, These hymns run thus: 'Before the beginning of the New Making, Awonawilona, the Maker and container of All, the All-Father, solely had being. He then evolved all things 'by thinking himself outward in space. Hegelian! but so are the dateless hymns of the Maoris, despite the savage mythology which intrudes into both sets of traditions.
They professed to have carried with them into their mountains the traditions and the nationality of that very important portion of the Christianised Roman Empire which was called Britannia.
Who can read the accounts of the populous towns of Mexico and Central America in the time of Montezuma, with their magnificent buildings and squares; their gardens both zoological and botanical; their markets, attended by merchants from the surrounding countries; their beautiful cloth and feather work, the latter now a lost art; their picture writing; their cunning artificers in gold and silver; their astronomical knowledge; their schools; their love of order, of cleanliness, of decency; their morality and wonderful patriotism, without feeling that the conquest of Mexico was a deplorable calamity; that if that ancient civilisation had been saved it might have been Christianised and purified without being destroyed, and to-day have stood one of the wonders and delights of the world.
Be cast into the stormy deep; buffet the waves manfully, and succeed in struggling exhausted to the shore. The savages there, if not Christianised, will haul you out of the sea, roast you, and eat you! They do this in compliance with a humane little law which maintains that all who are shipwrecked, and cast on shore, are thus to be disposed of. Ha! you need not smile.
Up to this place they had been journeying through a complete wilderness the only exceptions being some missionary stations, in each of which a monkish priest holds a sort of control over two or three hundred half christianised Indians.
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