142 CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION OF CATHOLICISM. 



ful moral, civil and religious engine endowed with immense re- 

 sources, that they should attract the reforming notice of those pure 

 branches of the Roman fraternity whose proximity will best afford 

 them the occasion to counsel their brethren in an age of progress 

 and competition not only in trade but in religion. Texas has al- 

 ready improved under the auspices of a new ecclesiastical adminis- 

 tration since her union with the North American states and her 

 religious alliance with their Roman Catholic Archbishopric. Nor is 

 the importance of these ameliorations less demanded at the hands 

 of republican ecclesiastics when we recollect that the federal con- 

 stitution adopted in 1847, now the fundamental law of the land, 

 declares in its first title, that the u religion of the Mexican nation 

 is, and will be perpetually, the Catholic, apostolic, Roman. The 

 nation protects it by wise and just laws, and prohibits the exercise 

 of any other! " Men, in Mexico, must not only not pray as they 

 please, but, constitutionally, they must not believe as they please. A 

 priesthood which is thus indissolubly and exclusively welded to the 

 state in a republic, should be, indeed, peculiarly sacred and pure. 

 Sole, despotic ecclesiastical power, based upon numerical strength, 

 — intolerant of all other modes of worship or modifications of 

 Christianity, — is an anomaly in the nineteenth century, nor is it 

 likely that the civil liberty of a nation can ever become secure or 

 worthy, until religious liberty is, at least, permitted if not enjoined 

 by its paramount law. These two elements of human right and 

 progress have ever moved hand in hand. It is a mockery to sepa- 

 rate them and tell the people they are free. The indefeisible rights 

 of reason and judgment are sapped and stifled. When conscience, 

 even, must struggle with legal shackles in its intercourse with God, 

 what must be the conflict of the soul in its intercourse with man ! 



" We speak not of mens' creeds — they rest between 

 Man and his Maker ; " — 



but we have confined our observations in this work, exclusively to 

 those painful exhibitions which cannot fail to strike a stranger as 

 disadvantageous both to intellectual progress and the pure and spi- 

 ritual adoration of God. The mixture of antique barbaric show 

 and Indian rites, may have served to attract the native population 

 at the first settlement of the country; but their continuance is in 

 keeping neither with the spirit of the age nor the necessities of a 

 republic. While the priesthood has contrived, in the course of 

 centuries, to attract the wealth of multitudes, and to make itself, in 

 various ways, the richest proprietor of the nation, the people have 

 been impoverished and continued ignorant. Not content with the 



