[Sidenote: THE MEXICAN RELIGION AND ITS HISTORIANS.]
The Mexican religion, as transmitted to us, is a confused and clashing chaos of fragments. If ever the great nation of Anáhuac had its Hesiod or its Homer, no ray of his light has reached the stumbling feet of research in that direction; no echo of his harmony has been ever heard by any ear less dull than that of a Zumárraga. It is given to few men to rise above their age, and it is folly to expect grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles; yet it is hard to suppress wholly some feelings of regret, in poring upon those ponderous tomes of sixteenth and seventeenth century history that touch upon Mexican religion; one pities far less the inevitable superstition and childish ignorance of the barbarian than the senility of his Christian historian and critic--there was some element of hope and evidence of attainment in what the half-civilized barbarian knew; but from what heights of Athenian, Roman, and Alexandrian philosophy and eloquence, had civilization fallen into the dull and arrogant nescience of the chronicles of the clergy of Spain.
We have already noticed[VI-7] the existence of at least two schools of religious philosophy in Mexico, two average levels of thought, the one that of the vulgar and credulous, the other that of the more enlightened and reflective. It has resulted from this that different writers differ somewhat in their opinions with regard to the precise nature and essence of that religion, some saying one thing and some another. I cannot show this more shortly and--what is much more important in a subject like this--more exactly, than by quoting a number of these opinions:
"Turning from the simple faiths of savage tribes of America, to the complex religion of the half-civilized Mexican nation, we find what we might naturally expect, a cumbrous polytheism complicated by mixture of several national pantheons, and beside and beyond this, certain appearances of a doctrine of divine supremacy. But these doctrines seem to have been spoken of more definitely than the evidence warrants. A remarkable native development of Mexican theism must be admitted, in so far as we may receive the native historian Ixtlilxochitl's account of the worship paid by Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Tezcuco, to the invisible supreme Tloque-Nahuaque, he who has all in him, the cause of causes, in whose star-roofed pyramid stood an idol, and who there received no bloody sacrifice, but only flowers and incense. Yet it would have been more satisfactory, were the stories told by this Aztec panegyrist of his royal ancestors confirmed by other records. Traces of divine supremacy in Mexican religion are especially associated with Tezcatlipoca, 'Shining Mirror,' a deity who seems in his original nature the Sun-god, and thence by expansion to have become the soul of the world, creator of heaven and earth, lord of all things, Supreme Deity. Such conceptions may, in more or less measure, have arisen in native thought, but it should be pointed out that the remarkable Aztec religious formulas collected by Sahagun, in which the deity Tezcatlipoca is so prominent a figure, show traces of Christian admixture in their material, as well as of Christian influence in their style. In distinct and absolute personality, the divine Sun in Aztec theology was Tonatiuh[VI-8] whose huge pyramid-mound stands on the plain of Teotihuacan, a witness of his worship for future ages. Beyond this the religion of Mexico, in its complex system, or congeries of great gods, such as results from the mixture and alliance of the deities of several nations, shows the solar element rooted deeply and widely in other personages of its divine mythology, and attributes especially to the sun the title of Teotl, God."[VI-9]