The temple on the island of Cozumel in Yucatan was visited every year by such multitudes from all parts of the peninsula, that roads, paved with cut stones, had been constructed from the neighboring shore to the principal cities of the interior.[302-1] Each village of the Muyscas is said to have had a beaten path to Lake Guatavita, so numerous were the devotees who journeyed to the shrine there located.[302-2] In Peru the temples of Pachacamà, Rimac, and other famous gods, were repaired to by countless numbers from all parts of the realm, and from other provinces within a radius of three hundred leagues around. Houses of entertainment were established on all the principal roads, and near the temples, for their accommodation; and when they made known the object of their journey, they were allowed a safe passage even through an enemy's territory.[302-3] * * * * * The more carefully we study history, the more important in our eyes will become the religious sense. It is almost the only faculty peculiar to man. It concerns him nearer than aught else. It is the key to his origin and destiny. As such it merits in all its developments the most earnest attention, an attention we shall find well repaid in the clearer conceptions we thus obtain of the forces which control the actions and fates of individuals and nations. FOOTNOTES: [288-1] Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, i. p. 459. [288-2] Navarrete, _Viages_, iii. p. 415. [288-3] _Relation de Cueba_, p. 140. Ed. Ternaux-Compans. [290-1] La Vega, _Hist. des Incas_, liv. v. cap. 12. [291-1] Morse, _Rep. on the Ind. Tribes_, App. p. 345. [291-2] Ximenes, _Origen de los Indios de Guatemala_, p. 192; Acosta, _Hist. of the New World_, lib. v. chap. 18. [291-3] Joseph de Maistre, _Eclaircissement sur les Sacrifices_; Trench, _Hulsean Lectures_, p. 180. The famed Abbé Lammenaais and Professor Sepp, of Munich, with these two writers, may be taken as the chief exponents of a school of mythologists, all of whom start from the theories first laid down by Count de Maistre in his _Soirées de St. Petersbourg_. To them the strongest proof of Christianity lies in the traditions and observances of heathendom. For these show the wants of the religious sense, and Christianity, they maintain, purifies and satisfies them all. The rites, symbols, and legends of every natural religion, they say, are true and not false; all that is required is to assign them their proper places and their real meaning. Therefore the strange resemblances in heathen myths to what is revealed in the Scriptures, as well as the ethical anticipations which have been found in ancient philosophies, all, so far from proving that Christianity is a natural product of the human mind, in fact, are confirmations of it, unconscious prophecies, and presentiments of the truth. [292-1] Alfred Maury, _La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen Age_, p. 8: Paris, 1860.