I hurried home from this profanation of the Lord's day, and sat down and contemplated the old Aztec god, who had been deified for his wisdom, and could not but regret the change that had been imposed upon these imbecile Indians. The next Sabbath after this was the national anniversary of the miraculous apparition; but, having seen enough of this sort of thing, I concluded that my Sabbaths would be better spent in staying at home and reading a Spanish Testament, which had been brought into the country in violation of the law. When I was first at the city of Mexico, Governor Letcher related to me the stratagem by which he contrived to smuggle an American Bible agent out of the country when the police were after him, on an accusation of selling prohibited books! for in such a country as this, the Word of God is a prohibited book. Juan Diego, upon whose veracity rests the story of the miraculous appearance of the Virgin, was an Indian _peon_; and though, like the rest of his race, he probably was an habitual liar, yet when he bears testimony to a miracle he is presumed to speak the truth. He lived in a mud hut somewhere about the barren hill now consecrated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The attempt to make out that it was Saint Thomas, or the Wandering Jew who here had an interview with the Virgin Mary, and that the old rag on which the picture is painted is really a part of the cloak of Saint Thomas, is, by a very verbose proclamation of the Archbishop of Mexico, dated 25th March, 1795, pronounced a damnable heresy. I have in my possession a copy of this precious document, bearing the signature of Don Alonzo Nunez de Haro y Peralto. As I learn from the said proclamation that "the adoration of this holy image" [picture] exists not only in Mexico, but in South America and Spain, and that it has propagated itself in Italy, Flanders, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Poland, Ireland, and Transylvania, I shall be excused for giving the substance of this miraculous apparition, since it is now an article of belief of all good Catholics, having been proved before the Congregation of Rites at Rome to have been a miraculous appearance of the Mother of God upon earth, in the year and at the place aforesaid. And the proclamation farther informs us that his holiness, Benedict XIV., was so fully persuaded of the truth of the tradition, that he made "cordial devotion to our Lady of Guadalupe, and conceded the proper mass and ritual of devotion. He also made mention of it in the lesson of the second _nocturnal_..., declaring from the high throne of the Vatican that Mary, most holy, _non fecit taliter omni nationi_." STORY OF JUAN DIEGO.