250 
GUATEMALA. 
religious history is pleasant reading; let us turn to other 
matters. 
The more artificial civilization becomes, the weaker 
is the desire for offspring; and we must relegate the 
Quiches, by this rule, to a very primitive state, for the 
burden of their prayers was “ Give unto us children,” 
and their faith was incarnate in ivorks. They believed, 
with the psalmist, that “ children are an heritage of the 
Lord; happy is the man that hath his quiver full of 
them.” Hence the birth of a child was a most auspi¬ 
cious event, to be celebrated with feasts and rejoicings, 
and each returning birthday was duly remembered. 
With the truest mercy, they put an end to all children 
born deformed or defective in mind or body; hence 
deformed or idiotic persons are exceedingly rare among 
their descendants. 
The Quiches possessed the art of writing, though in 
logographs or ideographs, and they were skilled in the 
use of colors. 1 I present some of the more common 
their gods ; the bloodthirsty Christian Spaniards spoke much in the same way 
of these sacrifices three centuries ago. While the Indios did what they hon¬ 
estly believed was right, and did it in a most merciful manner, without tor¬ 
ture, the cruel invaders, in the name of the gentle Jesus of Nazareth and ol 
the Mother of God, burned these poor Indios alive by hundreds (Las Casas 
says by thousands), or gave them to be torn in pieces by the dogs. Let the 
Christian nations hold their peace over the human sacrifices of Central Amer¬ 
ica, when they remember the Holy Inquisition, St. Bartholomew, and the 
tortures of Jews, Turks, witches, Quakers, and other heretics, sanctioned by 
the Christian Church, — murders so cruel, so unprovoked, that they make the 
sacrifices of the Indios seem no worse than justifiable homicide. Were the 
sacrifices to Tohil so much more sinful than the sacrifices so common in this 
enlightened nation of children born, or unborn, to the Molochs of Comfort or 
Deputation? 
1 The Spaniards found, according to Herrera (Decade III. lib. iv.), paint¬ 
ings done at Utatlan eight hundred years before the Conquest, in which were 
represented the three kinds of royal insignia, — indicating an antiquity greater 
than that of the Aztecs. 
