It is not to be doubted that the men who were the promoters of the Independence, and most active in the establishment of the Republic, were very little under priestly influence; for one of the first acts of the National Constituent Assembly was to prohibit the sale of Papal indulgences, and to limit the exactions of the Church. This policy arrayed the priestly influence against the new order of things, and it was henceforth exercised in favor of the aristocratical, monarchical, or Servile faction, against the Liberals and the Republic,—thus becoming one of the causes of many of the disasters to which the country has since been subjected. Yet the zeal of the Priests did not fail to react upon themselves. They entered into the arena of politics, and were treated as partisans in the civil contests. They espoused the cause of an obnoxious faction, and came to share its odium as well as its misfortunes. The Liberals, emancipated from the machinery of the Church, soon began to look with incredulity on its doctrines, and with contempt on its forms; and although the people of Central America are still nominally Catholics, yet amongst those capable of reflection, or possessed of education, there are more who are destitute of any fixed creed, rationalists, or what are sometimes called free thinkers, than Catholics, or adherents of any form of religion. Many of the priests share in the general skepticism. The first decided encounter between the Church and the Republic, was in 1825, when the people of San Salvador, the stronghold of Liberalism, dissatisfied with the political tendencies of the Bishop of Guatemala, under whose ecclesiastical jurisdiction they were, elected a Bishop of their own, in defiance of the Archbishop and the Pope. This example was soon after followed by Nicaragua. The ignorant priesthood, the friars of Quesaltenango, siding with the Archbishop and the Serviles, infuriated by this and other bold innovations, contrived to excite the Indians in Los Altos, who in their fury cruelly slaughtered the vice-president of the Republic; and for a time the Liberals were overwhelmed by the coalition. They, however, afterwards rallied under Gen. Morazan. During his enlightened and vigorous sway, in 1829, it was discovered that the Archbishop was intriguing against the government; and it was then the Church received a blow from which it can never recover. Morazan was not a man to be trifled with; he boldly seized the Archbishop, and sent him out of the country under a guard of soldiers, forbidding his return under penalty of death. The monks and friars belonging to the various convents and monasteries of Guatemala, who were deeply concerned with the Archbishop, were expelled in an equally summary manner. But the measures thus commenced did not stop here. The Legislature of Guatemala decreed the suppression of all the male convents, prohibited females from becoming nuns for the future, and appropriated the revenues of the suppressed monasteries.