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Updated: May 21, 2025
In the next place, it occurred to me that although the usage they gave one another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me: these people had done me no injury: that if they attempted, or I saw it necessary, for my immediate preservation, to fall upon them, something might be said for it: but that I was yet out of their power, and they really had no knowledge of me, and consequently no design upon me; and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon them; that this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were idolators and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind.
"Either I am greatly deceived," said I, "or this is a missionary, a worthy servant of God, come into these remote regions to make Him known to the wretched idolators." We hastened to him. I was not wrong.
"Because we have so long recognized the other powers we have become idolators, and must now turn back to the only true God. 'If thou return to the almighty, thou shalt be built up, thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles.... For thou shalt have thy delight in the almighty and shalt lift up thy face unto God.
Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers. Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolators converted into NOMINAL Christians, that disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance.
The burghers, too, understand me; they regard as idolators all who go to Mass, who paint the walls of their churches, and put pictures and statues within them. Ha! it is far more easy for a people to demolish churches and palaces than to argue the question of justification by faith, or the real presence. Luther was an argufier, but I, I am an army! He was a reasoner, I am a system.
We shall have no more deifications of the axe, no more baptisms in blood, no more display of that horrid and fearful ceremonial with which France, like the ancient idolators, offered her children to Moloch, and drowned the shrieks and groans of the dying in the clangour of trumpets and the acclamations of the multitude. Those scenes were too terrible to be renewed.
The destruction of these idolators, who were burning their own sons and daughters in the fire, furnishes unbelievers and skeptics with a great deal of capital, which can be used with ignorance, but not with intelligence. What was the law governing in the case? The answer is in these words: The course of conduct which is for the greatest good of the greatest number is right.
It instructed the companions of Muḥammad to declare the following unto the infidels and idolators: “Ye oppress and persecute us, and yet, what else have we done except that we have believed in God and in the verses sent down unto us through the tongue of Muḥammad, and in those which descended upon the Prophets of old?” By this is meant that their only guilt was to have recognized that the new and wondrous verses of God, which had descended upon Muḥammad, as well as those which had been revealed unto the Prophets of old, were all of God, and to have acknowledged and embraced their truth.
That the people of Yucatan were idolators there is no possible doubt, and in connection with the magnificent shrines and temples erected by them, and rivalling or excelling the grand obelisks of Copan, might naturally be sought for, but in view of the facts it must be concluded that the Maya idols were very small, and that such as escaped the fatal iconoclasms of the Spanish ecclesiastics were buried by the natives as the only means of preventing their desecration.”
To idolators and infidels they put the alternative of the Koran or death; but allowed the Christians to retain their church organization, laying them, however, under severe contributions, and treating them to the ignominious appellation of Christian dogs." The Armenian and the Greek churches survived, and still exist in that portion of the world, but they have indeed been greviously tormented.
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