The Spanish adventurers had brought into conquered America all the vices and the ferocious passions of their Inquisition. It might be said that South America had been transformed into a large inquisitorial tribunal, and that every soldier was an inquisitor and an executioner at the same time. The adventurers, to palliate their crimes, when they murdered the poor, inoffensive Indians, gave out that they did so to honour Christ, whom these obdurate pagans refused to worship. It is not our intention to detail all the crimes of those most Christian assassins, and we shall be contented with saying, that while they butchered tens of thousands of inoffensive people, in endeavouring to convert them to their religion, they succeeded with but very few; and those who, to avoid tortures and death, submitted to be _baptized_, hated still more than their pagan brethren the very name of Christians. Ranke gives a very prosperous picture of the state of religion in America, and says, “In the beginning of the sixteenth century we find the proud fabric of the Catholic Church completely erected in South America. It possessed five archbishoprics, twenty-seven bishoprics, four hundred monasteries, and _doctrines_ innumerable.”[289] Now, with all deference to so great a historian, we venture to say, that we admit the veracity of the statement as to the number of monks and monasteries, archbishoprics and bishoprics; but we believe that these establishments were in proportion to the extent of the country, not to the number of Christian inhabitants. Indeed, in every tract of land of which the Europeans had taken possession, there was erected a church, if not for the accommodation of these same Europeans, at least to furnish priests and monks with a pretext to claim a share in the spoils and wealth of the country; but we doubt much that many Indians frequented these churches. The swarms of monks who had flocked to America, finding in the climate a still greater stimulus to their usual propensity to indolence and luxury, indulged in all their vices, and thought only of making converts as far as was necessary to procure some subjects who might enrich their patrons, the soldiers, as well as their monasteries.[290] Such, however, was not the conduct of the Jesuits. There, as in Europe, they wished to be distinguished from other brotherhoods, and affected a more saintly and pious course of life. Concealing their ultimate purposes under the cloak of religion and piety, they spoke of nothing else but of converting infidels, and opposed, in the name of Christ, the sanguinary measures adopted by the conquerors, and approved by other religious communities. Perhaps we are not far from the truth when we assert that the Jesuits adopted a more humane and Christian policy, as well for their private purpose, as to set themselves in opposition to other religious communities. Because, it is a remarkable fact in the history