INDIAN IDOLS. 89 
are greatly exaggerated, so as to make them deformed and hideous. If 
their worship was a worship of pure propitiation, they seem to have 
adopted the idea of the Chinese, and prayed rather to the Evil principle 
of things than to the Good. "God is too good," said a Chinese fo me 
once — " God is too good to hurt us, but Ki — ^the Devil — will ; I therefore 
pray to the devil to let me alone !" 
It may be readily imagined that people, in the dawn of religious ideas, 
will personify every ill that assails them under the shape in which it 
becomes most annoying. They imagine when they are assailed by ser- 
pents, that the Evil principle vexes them in that form ; when their houses 
are overrun with lizards, that the demon has attacked them in another 
shape ; and thus, according to their simple reasoning, it was wise to mani- 
fest their ideas of this wicked Spirit in statues of the disguises he had 
himself selected, and under those forms to appease him by worship 
and offerings. It is by imagining a system of this nature, that we can 
alone account for the extraordinary and fanciful creations of Mexican 
art which have been preserved until our day and generation. 
