they were, and shed all the light they saw lying on the world beyond the grave. They were, in their own acceptation of the term, a religious people, and freely sacrificed their best and dearest in what they believed to be the way most acceptable to their gods: may we not hope that OUR God was pleased with the offerings of their gratitude, and listened to the cry of their penitence? To us Odin and Thor are mere names; to them they represented the governing and defending powers of the universe. They had no interpreters of the world and human life but their own experience and fancy; we have a sure key to both in God's Word.

"Earth outgrows the mythic fancies

Sung beside her in her youth;
And those debonair romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phoebus' chariot-course is run:
Look up, poets, to the sun!
Pan, Pan is dead.

Christ hath sent us down the angels,
And the whole earth and the skies

Are illumed by altar-candles

Lit for blessed mysteries;

And a Priest's hand through creation
Waveth calm and consecration:

And Pan is dead."

ANCIENT RELIGIONS OF CENTRAL

THE

AMERICA.

HE pioneers of the famous "ocean chivalry" of Spain inflamed the curiosity and the cupidity of their countrymen by reports of fertile regions beyond the newly discovered Cuba. These reports were more than confirmed by the adventurous band headed in 1518 by Grijalva. Landing in Yucatan, they beheld houses with sloping roofs built of stone and lime. The fields were cultivated. The natives were carefully dressed. What most amazed them, and evoked such enthusiasm that on beholding them they named the shores New Spain, was the occurrence, at various places, of large stone crosses. They came on fragments of masonry exhibiting the artist's skill; nay, says an old chronicler, "a city was seen which for hugenesse they called Cayrus, where were found turretted houses, stately temples, well-paved ways and roads, where markets and fairs for merchandize are held." But the monuments of extinct social life, in which the archæologists of recent times have found an exhaustless study, were unobserved. Buried in dense forests, the eye of the invader never reached them. Cortes, six years after the time of Grijalva's expedition, accomplished a

dreadful march to Honduras. Along the line of march the people burned their villages and abandoned the country. For traces of human habitations he and his warriors intensely longed; and yet, although passing within a short distance of the most famous of the ancient cities of America, no reference whatever is made to it. Palenque was even then, we may conclude, "a heap of mouldering ruins buried in a wilderness of vegetation."

Such mouldering ruins are found in spots far removed from the din and bustle of men, between the Isthmus of Darien and the northern limit of Anahuac. Undoubtedly the most remarkable are in the southern division of our territory—in Honduras, and Yucatan, and Chiapas.

Honduras has its Copan, the oldest of American cities,uninhabited when Cortes and his soldiers marched through the land. Monuments extending for more than two miles indicate how large and magnificent the city once was. The part which preserves most its integrity is that which has been named the Temple. In it altars and idols are of single blocks of stone, often elaborately carved, with tablets of hieroglyphics, and figures, and death-heads, and designs some of which, in the judgment of Stephens are equal to the finest Egyptian sculpture. Besides these, there are still to be seen fragments of mounds on which, at a period indefinitely remote, imposing wooden temples had been reared. Yucatan has its Uxmal and its ChichenItza. The one, the capital of the old theocratic kingdom of the Totul-Xius in the ninth century. The explorer, attempting a description of its remains, observes,-" So vast a work rises up before me, that I am at a loss where to begin." Notable are piles of gigantic buildings, pyramidal structures whose stones are each “part of an allegory or fable," subterranean reservoirs, façades, corridors, terraces, walls covered with ornaments "strange and in

comprehensible in design, sometimes grotesque, but often singularly simple, tasteful, and beautiful." The other city, Chichen-Itza, is praised as "the gem for the riches of its sculptures;" and one of its crumbling edifices is declared to be "the most strange and incomprehensible pile of architecture ever beheld-elaborate, elegant, stupendous." Chiapas is famous for the Palenque already referred to,—if not the most ancient, at least the most extensive, of all the ruined places. Here, signs of an astonishing artistic genius, are the remains of pyramids whose summits were formerly crowned by palace and fane. Here are tablets perfect in beauty, “surviving the wreck of elements, their figures and characters as distinct as when the people went to pay their adorations before them." Here -but the time fails to tell of the temples of the sun, and the moon, and the three tables, the bas-reliefs, the doorways, the chambers, the monuments of a city once teeming with life, but for long centuries silent and deserted.

These are the most outstanding of the witnesses of antiquity. The imagination is fascinated by the loneliness of their situation; the great idol-stones and sculptures standing erect on solitary plain or in the midst of dense and tangled jungle; and around and around, portions of stupendous masonry, their tracery and hieroglyphs telling the story of nations whose names cannot be recalled: the scenes of this vanished glory now shunned by the Indian; the bat, and the owl, and the monkey left sole tenants of places once brilliant with all that distinguishes power, and impressive with all that is gorgeous in the ritual of paganism.

The architecture of these partly buried cities contrasts most markedly with that of Mexico. They are unquestionably the more ancient, "to be measured, not by hundreds, but by thousands of years." The designs traced on

the buildings are different from those in the north. The hieroglyphs, too, are different. The key to decipher them has been lost. But they speak of peoples milder in manner and gentler in spirit than those of Anahuac. There is an entire absence of the figures of warriors or the circumstances of battle. And with this agrees the character of the remains. They exhibit no signs of fortifications. In the variety of sculpture, there is none which can distinctly be identified as a weapon of war. Idols are there, but they are neither so numerous nor are they so grim as in the country of the Aztecs. At Uxmal there are no idols. Where idols are found, altars, circular and square, stand before or near them, and stones which resemble the dread sacrificial stone. But the stones may belong to a time more recent than the most characteristic of the ruins. In these ruins we recognise the evidence of tribes which loved the arts, and possessed a considerable share of the refinements, of peaceful life. Their worship, on the whole, was not sanguinary. There was no god of war. There was no god of hell.

All this corresponds to the tradition that the nations in the Southern States belonged to the great family of Indians called the Maya, whose historical head is the half-mythical Votan-probably the leader of some great migration, the founder of a priestly empire which, towards the beginning of the historic ages, spread far and wide. When it was broken up, we know not. Whither the Mayas dispersed, or what combinations the dispersion formed, we know not. But remnants of the empire settled, apparently, in Yucatan, carrying with them their worship and their arts. Probably in the course of time. these remnants were mixed by other elements - the Toltecs from Mexico, and those Quiches, whencesoever they came, who found a home in Guatemala. And the result