“From Cholula,” adds Robertson, “Cortez marched directly towards Mexico, which was only twenty leagues distant:”—and that is all the remark that he makes on this brutal butchery of an innocent people, by a man on his march to plant the cross! A Christian historian sees only in this most savage and infernal action, a piece of necessary policy—so obtuse become the perceptions of men through the ordinary principles of historic judgment. But the Christian mind asks what business Cortez had there at all? The people were meditating his destruction? True;—and it was natural and national that they should get rid of so audacious and lawless an enemy, who entered their country with the intentions of a robber, set at defiance the commands of their king, and stirred up rebellion at every step he took. The Mexicans would have been less than men if they had not resolved to cut him off. What right had he there? What right to disturb the tranquillity of their country, and shed the blood of its people? These are questions that cannot be answered on any Christian principles, or on any principles but those of the bandit and the murderer. _Six thousand people butchered in cold blood—two days employed in hewing down trembling wretches, too fearful to even raise a single weapon against the murderers!_ Heavens! are these the deeds that we admire as heroic and as breathing of romance? Yet, says Clavigero, “He ordered the great temple to be cleaned from the gore of his murdered victims; and raised there the standard of the cross; _after giving the Cholulans, as he did all the other people among whom he stopped_,” SOME IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION!!! What _idea_ had the Abbé Don Francesco Saverio Clavigero of Christianity himself?
But Cortez had plunged headlong into the enterprise—he had set his life and that of his followers at stake on the conquest of Mexico, and there was no action, however desperate, that he was not prepared to commit. And sure enough his hands became well filled with treachery and blood. It is not my business to dwell particularly upon these atrocities, but merely to recall the memory of them; yet it may be as well to give, in the words of Robertson, the manner in which the Spaniards were received into the capital, because it contrasts strongly with the manner in which the Christians behaved in this same city, and to this same monarch.