It may be said, perhaps, that the Spaniards, in discovering America, put to shame the Catholic religion by their sharp cupidity and the disgraceful severity of their conduct toward the natives. We have not the slightest intention of transforming the soldiers of Cortez and of Pizarro into peaceful missionaries. If the ferocity of those men disgraced the Gospel, so much the worse for them. But as to the church, if it be insisted on that she shall be mixed up with the question, she has nothing to lose; for it was she herself, and she alone, who intervened to moderate the cupidity of the conquerors, and to defend against it the cause of the conquered. To her alone belongs the name, ever to be venerated, of Bartholomew Las Casas, the eloquent pleader in behalf of Catholicity and of its beneficent action upon society. As to the great Italian artists of the sixteenth century, and particularly as to Michael Angelo and Raphael, it is still more arbitrary, if possible, to have enrolled them in the army of the innovators. What could be more entirely Catholic than the inspirations and great works of these men of genius? Not to speak in detail of the inimitable Madonnas of Raphael, nor of the gigantic frescoes of Michael Angelo in the Sistine chapel, nor the many other marvellous works with which they have for ever enriched Italy and Europe; but of the church of St. Peter, upon which both had the glory of working, is it not, as it were, the very personification, at once ideal and plastic, of the entire Catholic Church? It is the grand church of the popes; it is there that repose, by the side of the illustrious chiefs St. Peter and St. Paul, the remains of so many sovereign pontiffs. It is under its dome that is celebrated, on the grand solemnities of the year and by the very hands of the vicar of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice of the Mass. It is from its balcony that is given, on those same solemnities, that pontifical benediction, preceded by that absolution and those indulgences, against which for three hundred years Protestantism never loses an occasion of casting its anathemas or its sarcasms; save perhaps when one of its children, assisting on Easter-Day at that wonderful solemnity, and hearing the sonorous and affecting voice of Pius IX., at the moment of imparting benediction to the world, mingling itself with the roll of drums, the discharge of cannon, and the chimes of the thousand bells of Rome, falls upon his knees in spite of himself, subdued by I know not what mysterious power, and rises up again with the confession that the inspirations of Catholicism are far differently fitted to charm the soul and seize hold upon the heart than the chilling ceremonial of a Calvinistic Lord's Supper under the arches of St. Paul's in London. { 64} In a word, everything of that grand basilica of the Eternal City, from its corner-stone to the cross which surmounts its dome, all has been inspired by Catholic thought; and it may be affirmed with assurance that all the grand artists who worked upon it could say as Raphael replied to Leo X.: "I love so much the Church of St. Peter!" [Footnote 15]