Albert Réville

“ Peru, in the sixteenth century, had become one enormous convent, in which everything was mechanically regulated, in which no one could take the smallest initiative, in which everything depended absolutely upon the will of the reigning Inca; so that the moment Pizarro succeeded in laying hold of this Inca, this "father Abbé," everything collapsed in a moment, and nothing was left of the edifice constructed with such sagacity but a heap of sand. And indeed this is the fatal result of every theocracy, for it can never really be anything but a hierocracy or rule of priests. ”

“ If we search history for light in politics and the higher interests of our fatherlands, and learn thereby to understand, to appreciate, to love them more, let us turn to history no less for light on the path which we must tread in that order of sublime realities, necessities and aspirations, in which the soul of each one of us becomes a temple and a sanctuary, lying open to the Eternal Spirit that fills the universe. ”

“ Philosophy and science may guide religion, may reveal its true object in ever-growing purity, may cleanse it from the pollutions in which ignorance and sin still plunge it, but they cannot replace and they cannot destroy it. There is a Dutch proverb, the profundity of which it would be difficult to exaggerate, "De natuur gaat boven de leer"—Nature is too strong for doctrine. The evolutions of philosophy may seem to make the heavens void, and inspire man with the idea that all is over with the poetic or terrific visions that rocked the cradle of his infancy. ”

“ Only let me say at once, that, while retaining my own very marked preferences, I place religion itself, as [6] a faculty, an attribute, a tendency natural to the human mind, above all the forms, even the most exalted, which it has assumed in time and space. I can conceive a Templum Serenum where shall meet in that love of truth, which at bottom is but one of the forms of love of God, all men of upright heart and pure will. To me, religion is a natural property and tendency, and consequently an innate need of the human spirit. ”

“ The last word of religious history is, that there exists an affinity, a mysterious relationship, between our spirit and the Spirit of the universe; that this nobility of human nature embraces in itself all the promises, all the hopes, all the latent perfections, all the infinite ideals of the future; that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the Supreme Will is good to each one of the beings which it summons and draws to itself ”

“ Is it not passing strange, Gentlemen, that this mode of divination, which appears so absurd to us, which has no rational basis whatever, which rests on a singularly subtle conception of the relations between the creature sacrificed and the being to whom it is offered, has secured the prolonged confidence of the peoples of the Old World, and appears again in Peru, where it cannot have been imitated from any one? ”

“ Those thousands of functionaries who spent their lives in superintending the furniture, the dress, the work, the very cookery, of the families under their charge, and inflicting corporal chastisement on those whom they surprised in a fault, might succeed in forming a correct and regular society, drilled like the bees in a hive, might form a nation of submissive slaves, but could never make a nation of men; and this is the deep cause that explains the irremediable collapse of this Peruvian society under the vigorous blows of a handful of unscrupulous Spaniards. ”

“ Some few men and women of the highest rank might rejoice in the same distinction, but only if they had obtained the Inca's sanction. In the same way, it was only the members of the Inca family and the nobles of most exalted rank who were allowed to wear their hair long, for this was a distinctive sign of the favourites of the Sun. None could enter the presence of the reigning Inca save bare-footed, clad in the most simple garments and bearing a burden on his shoulders, all in token of humility; nor must he raise his eyes throughout the audience, for no man looks upon the face of the Sun. ”

“ It was the theocratic and sacerdotal conception that maintained and enforced the religious butchery of which you have heard in Mexico, and which transformed Peru into one enormous convent, where no one had any will or any initiative of his own. For the same reason, asceticism, the principle that confuses, through an illusion we can easily understand, the moral act itself with the suffering that accompanies it, shows itself in both religions, but especially in that of Mexico; and convents that startle us by their resemblance to those of Buddhism and Christianity rise in either realm. ”

“ And in the domain of Religion, more especially, we can never lose our confidence that, if historical [5] research may sometimes compel us to sacrifice illusions, or even beliefs that have been dear to us, it gives us in return the right to walk in the paths of the Eternal with a firmer step, and reveals with growing clearness the marvellous aspiration of humanity towards a supreme reality, mysterious, nay incomprehensible, and yet in essential affinity with itself, with its ideal, with its all that is purest and sublimest. ”

“ The history of religion is not only one of the branches of human knowledge, but a prophecy as well. After having shown us whence we come and the path we have trodden, it shadows forth the way we have yet to go, or at the very least it effects the orientation by which we may know in which direction it lies. ”

“ And when the natives saw the fearful tribunal at work, when the fires of the autos-da-fé were kindled on the plain of Mexico and consumed by tens or hundreds the victims condemned by the Holy Office, do you suppose that the new converts felt well assured in their own hearts that the God of the Gospel was, after all, much better than Uitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca? [38]
But we are stepping beyond the domain of history we have marked out for ourselves. The religion of Mexico is dead, and we cannot desire a resurrection for it. ”

“ Let us apply the same test to religion. The horrors it has caused cannot weigh against the final and overmastering good which it produces; and its annals, too often written in blood, should teach us how to guide it, how to purify it from all that corrupts and debases it. We shall see at the close of our Lectures what that directing, normalizing, purifying principle is that must hold the helm of religion and guide it in its evolution. ”

“ It has been asked whether the native religion of Peru rested any system of elevated morals on its fundamental principles. Gentlemen, I am persuaded that religion and morals unite together and interpenetrate each other in the higher regions of thought and life. Perhaps the most distinct result of our Christian education is the full comprehension of the fact that what is moral is religious, and that immorality cannot on any pretext be allowed as legitimately religious. ”

“ But the surprise we experience in noting all these points of resemblance to the religious institutions of the Old World, perhaps reaches its culminating point when we learn that the Mexican religion actually had its convents. These convents were often, but not always, places of education for both sexes, to which all the free families sent their children from the age of six or nine years upwards. There the boys were taught by monks, and the girls by nuns, the meaning of the hieroglyphics, the way to reckon time, the traditions, the religious chants and the ritual. ”

“ Sometimes a very rich man would go so far as to have his chaplain slaughtered, that he might not be deprived of his support in the other world. But in all this there is nothing to distinguish the Mexican religion from the beliefs that stretched over the whole of America, and there is no indication that any moral conception had as yet vivified and hallowed the prospect beyond the grave. The mass of ordinary mortals remained in the sombre, dreary, monotonous realm of Mictlan; for in Mexico, as in Polynesia, a really happy immortality was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy. ”

“ The priests marched at the head of the soldiers, and bore Aztec idols on their backs. On the eve of a battle they kindled fresh fire by the friction of wood; and it was they who gave the signal of attack. These wars had pillage and conquest as their object, but also and very specially the capture of victims to sacrifice to the Aztec gods. For the Aztecs pushed the superstitious practice of human sacrifice to absolute frenzy. It was to these horrible sacrifices that they attributed their successes in war and the prosperity of their empire. ”

“ It is the spiritually-minded who must learn the art of discerning the spirit wherever it reveals itself; and when the horrors rise up before us of which religion has more than once in the course of history been the cause or the pretext, and we are almost tempted to ask whether this attribute of human nature has really worked more good than ill in the destinies of our race, we may remember that the same question might be asked of all the proudest attributes of our humanity. Take polity or the art [81] of governing human societies. To what monstrous aberrations has it not given birth! ”

“ Now this very cleverness, this conscious and often extremely deliberate and astutely calculated policy, compels us to ask how far the Incas themselves were sincere in their pretension to be descended from the Sun, and their faith in the very special favour in which the great luminary held them. There is so much rationalism in their habitual tactics, that one cannot help suspecting a touch of it in their beliefs. ”

“ I believe, Gentlemen, that in studying the religious origins of the different peoples of the earth, we shall come to the conclusion that the fusion of the religious and moral life—which has long been an accomplished fact for us, especially since the Gospel, so that we cannot admit the possibility of uniting immorality and piety for a single instant—is not primitive, but is due to the development of the human spirit, and to healthier, more complete and more religious ideas concerning the moral law. ”

“ Civilization can only be handed on if the invaded race possesses a special disposition and aptitude for civilized life; and this aptitude may have existed to such a degree as to be capable of independent development in the New-World as we know it did in the Old; and if there were centres of such nascent civilization in Central America, in Mexico and in Peru, it is absolutely superfluous to search elsewhere than in America itself for the origins of American civilization. ”

“ If the world was to come to an end, if the sun was never to rise again, the Pleiades would not pass the zenith; but the moment they passed it, it was known that a new era of fifty-two years had been guaranteed to men. ”

“ The most remarkable results of the rule of the Incas are seen in the material well-being which they secured to their people. All the historians speak of the really extraordinary perfection to which Peruvian agriculture had been carried, though the use of iron was quite unknown. The solar religion fits perfectly with the habits of an agricultural people, and the Incas thought it became them, as children of the Sun, to encourage the cultivation of the soil. ”

“ Our age is not, as is sometimes said, an age of positive science and of industrial discoveries alone, but also, and in a very high degree, an age of criticism and of history. It is to history, indeed, more than to anything else, [4] that it looks for the lights which are to guide it in resolving the grave difficulties presented by the problems of the hour, in politics, in organization, and in social and religious life. ”

“ It was this deity, in one of his forms, who was worshipped in the sacred island of Cozumel, situated close to Yucatan, to which pilgrimages were made from great distances. It was there that the Spaniards, to their great surprise, first observed a cross surmounting the temple of this god of the wind. This was the starting-point of the legend according to which the Apostle Thomas had of old evangelized America. It is a pure illusion. The pagan cross of Central America and Mexico is nothing whatever but the symbol of the four cardinal points of the compass from which blow the four chief winds. ”

“ The intrinsic interest of all the strange, original, dramatic and even grotesque features that they present to the historian, is in itself sufficiently great; for they possessed beliefs, institutions, and a developed mythology, which would bear comparison with anything known to antiquity in the Old World. But we have another very special and weighty reason for interesting ourselves in these religions of a demi-civilization, brusquely arrested in its development by the European invasion. ”