The
burning of the infidel was a sacrifice acceptable to Heaven, and
the conversion of those who survived amply atoned for the foulest
offences. It is a melancholy and mortifying consideration, that
the most uncompromising spirit of intolerance - the spirit of the
Inquisitor at home, and of the Crusader abroad - should have
emanated from a religion which preached peace upon earth and
good-will towards man!
What a contrast did these children of Southern Europe present to
the Anglo-Saxon races who scattered themselves along the great
northern division of the western hemisphere! For the principle
of action with these latter was not avarice, nor the more
specious pretext of proselytism; but independence, - independence
religious and political. To secure this, they were content to
earn a bare subsistence by a life of frugality and toil. They
asked nothing from the soil, but the reasonable returns of their
own labor. No golden visions threw a deceitful halo around their
path, and beckoned them onwards through seas of blood to the
subversion of an unoffending dynasty. They were content with the
slow but steady progress of their social polity. They patiently
endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of
liberty with their tears and with the sweat of their brow, till
it took deep root in the land and sent up its branches high
towards the heavens; while the communities of the neighbouring
continent, shooting up into the sudden splendors of a tropical
vegetation, exhibited, even in their prime, the sure symptoms of
decay.
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