Mexico and Its Religion: With Incidents of Travel in That Country During Parts of the Years 1851-52-53-54, and Historical Notices of Events Connected With Places VisitedWilson, Robert Anderson
Religion
Mexico and Its Religion: With Incidents of Travel in That Country During Parts of the Years 1851-52-53-54, and Historical Notices of Events Connected With Places Visited
Wilson, Robert Anderson
Mexico -- Description and travel; Mexico -- Religion
"Among these great benefactors to the churches of that city, I should
wrong my history if I should forget one that lived in my time, called
Alonzo Cuellar, who was reported to have a closet in his house laid
with bars of gold instead of brick; though indeed it was not so, but
only reported for his abundant riches and store of bars of gold, which
he had in one chest, standing in a closet distant from another, where
he had a chest full of wedges of silver. This man alone built a nunnery
for Franciscan nuns, which stood him in above 30,000 ducats, and left
unto it, for the maintenance of the nuns, 2000 ducats yearly, with
obligation of some masses to be said in the church every year for his
soul after his decease. And yet this man's life was so scandalous, that
commonly, in the night, with two servants, he would go round the city
visiting such scandalous persons, whose attire before hath been
described, carrying his beads in his hands, and at every house letting
fall a bead, and tying a false knot, that when he came home in the
morning, toward break of the day, he might number by his beads the
uncivil stations he had walked and visited that night.
"Great alms and liberality toward religious houses in that city
commonly are coupled with great and scandalous wickedness. They wallow
in the bed of riches and wealth, and make their alms the coverlet to
cover their loose and lascivious lives. From hence are the churches so
fairly built and adorned. There are not above fifty churches and
chapels, cloisters and nunneries, and parish churches in the city; but
those that are there are the fairest that ever my eyes beheld, the
roofs and beams being, in many of them, all daubed with gold, and many
altars with sundry marble pillars, and others with Brazil-wood stays
standing one above another, with tabernacles for several saints, richly
wrought with golden colors, so that twenty thousand ducats is a common
price of many of them. These cause admiration in the common sort of
people, and admiration brings on daily adoration in them to those
glorious spectacles and images of saints; so Satan shows Christ all the
glory of the kingdoms to entice him to admiration, and then he said,
'_All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship
me_' (Matthew, iv. 8, 9). The devil will give all the world to be
adored.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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