CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES AND IN MEXICO. 141 



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 Chi- 

 nese, 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. Trust- 

 ing 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 reve- 

 rence for their virtuous piety, and admire for their profound learn- 

 ing. 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 re- 

 buked, 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, pro- 

 bably, notice some of those practices more fully. 1 



The facts we have been obliged to state in regard to some of the 

 materiel of the present Mexican ecclesiastical establishment do not 

 touch the dogmas of the Catholic church though they certainly in- 

 dicate so great a degree of laxity in the administration of a power- 



1 See Mayer's Mexico as it Was and as it Is, 1844 ; and the review of it by the 

 Rev. Mr. Verot, in the United States Catholic Magazine for March, 1844: See also 

 the reply entitled Romanism in Mexico, published in Baltimore in the same year. 



