Image worship has another curious aspect. It is a very tolerable thermometer by which to measure the downward progress of nations. Pagan Rome, in times of comparative purity, had her laws against idolatry; but as her higher classes advanced in refinement and sensuality, and the plebeians became debased and brutalized, the whole religious ideas of the nation degenerated into idolatry, associated with a despotic miracle-working priesthood, and soon followed by a political despotism. It is curious to witness how exactly it takes on the same form in different countries in traveling this downward road. The Buddhist of China, who has reached a thousand-fold lower level than the Catholic, has his unmarried priesthood, his monks, and nuns, and self-imposed penances, and tortures, and holy water, and a ritual in an unknown tongue (Sanscrit), so strikingly resembling the Catholic as to suggest the idea of a common origin, if such an idea were not impossible. Yet in the moral standard they seem to have reached the point of total depravity. Hence we might sum up the cause that have produced the Mexican of the present day by enumerating the absence of the scriptural idea of family relation; the despotism exercised by the priesthood with the aid of an Inquisition, and the unnumbered toll-gates they have placed on the road to heaven; the effeminacy of the higher classes and debasement of the peasantry; the absorption of half the revenues of the country in superstitious and idolatrous purposes, and the uncleanly habits superinduced by mental and physical degradation for generations, so that the word _leper_ is used to designate a poor man in the city where that loathsome disease has its victims. [63] _Grando Sinoptico de la Republica Mejicana en 1850. Por Miguel M. Lerdo y Tejado_; approved by the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics. [64] This number 3223 includes all of the 1139 monks, except the lay brothers. The two classes of priests, those who are not monks and those who are monks, are distinguished in Catholic countries as seculars and regulars (_clerigos_ and _religios_). Humboldt says the Mexican clergy are composed of 10,000 individuals (_Essai Politique_, vol. i. p. 172), and, including the nuns, and lay brothers and sisters, he puts the sum total of the religious at 14,000. But in a note he gives the numbers in five of the principal departments out of twelve, which foot up at only 5405 for the clergy of both orders.