[Sidenote: Its religion, priesthood, and ceremonies.] The religious state is a reflexion of that of Europe and Asia. The worship was an imposing ceremonial. The common people had a mythology of many gods, but the higher classes were strictly Unitarian, acknowledging one almighty, invisible Creator. Of the popular deities, the god of war was the chief. He was born of a virgin, and conceived by mysterious conception of a ball of bright-coloured feathers floating on the air. The priests administered a rite of baptism to infants for the purpose of washing away their sins, and taught that there are rewards and punishments in a life to come--a paradise for the good, a hell of darkness for the wicked. The hierarchy descended by due degrees from the chief priests, who were almost equal to the sovereign in authority, down to the humble ecclesiastical servitors. Marriage was permitted to the clergy. They had monastic institutions, the inmates praying thrice a day and once at night. They practised ablutions, vigils, penance by flagellation or pricking with aloe thorns. They compelled the people to auricular confession, required of them penance, gave absolution. Their ecclesiastical system had reached a strength which was never attained in Europe, since absolution by the priest for civil offences was an acquittal in the eye of the law. It was the received doctrine that men do not sin of their own free will, but because they are impelled thereto by planetary influences. With sedulous zeal, the clergy engrossed the duty of public education, thereby keeping society in their grasp. [Sidenote: Its literary condition.] Their writing was on cotton cloth or skins, or on papyrus made of the aloe. At the conquest immense collections of this kind of literature were in existence, but the first Archbishop of Mexico burnt, as was affirmed, a mountain of such manuscripts in the market-place, stigmatizing them as magic scrolls. About the same time, and under similar circumstances, Cardinal Ximenes burnt a vast number of Arabic manuscripts in Granada.