It is difficult, amid the intoxication of the imagination on contemplating such a spectacle,—for there is nothing like it in the history of the whole world—it is difficult, dazzled by military triumph, and seduced by the old sophisms of glory and adventure, to bring the mind steadily to contemplate the real nature and consequences of these events. The names of Cortez and Pizarro, indeed, through all the splendour of that renown with which the acclamations of their interested cotemporaries, and the false morality of their historians have surrounded them, still retain the gloom and terror of their cruelties. But this is derived rather from particular acts of outrageous atrocity, than from a just estimate of the total villany and unrighteous nature of their entire undertakings. Their entrance, assault, and subduction of the kingdoms of Mexico and Peru, were from first to last, _in limine et in termino_, the acts of daring robbers, on flame with the thirst of gold, and of a spurious and fanatical renown,—setting at defiance every sentiment of justice, mercy and right, and bound by no scruples of honour or conscience, in the pursuit of their object. It is not to be denied that in the prosecution of their schemes, they displayed the most chivalrous courage, and Cortez the most consummate address,—but these are the attributes of the arch-fiend himself—boundless ambition, gigantic talent, the most matchless and successful address without one feeling of pity, or one sentiment of goodness! These surely are not the qualities for which Christians ought to applaud such men as Cortez and Pizarro! They are these false and absurd notions, derived from the spirit of gentile antiquity, that have so long mocked the progress of Christianity, and held civilization in abeyance. It is to these old sophisms that we owe all the political evils under which we groan, and under which we have made all nations that have felt our power groan too. To every truly enlightened and Christian philosopher can there be a more melancholy subject of contemplation, than these romantic empires thus barbarously destroyed by an irruption of worse than Goths and Vandals? But that melancholy must be tenfold augmented, when we reflect what _would_ have been the fate of these realms if Europe had been not nominally, but _really_ Christianized at the moment of their discovery. If it had learned that the “peace on earth and good-will towards men,” with which the children of heaven heralded the gospel into the world, was not a mere flourish of rhetoric,—not a mere phrase of eastern poetry, “beautiful exceedingly;” but actually the promulgation of the grandest and most pregnant axiom in social philosophy, that had ever been, or should be made known to mankind, or that it was possible for heaven itself from the infinitude of its blessedness to send down to it. That in it lay concentrated the perfection of civil policy, the beauty of social life, the harmony of nations, and the prosperity