The idol, the inner walls of the temple, the floor, the altar, were always wet with the most precious fluid on earth. In the bowl human hearts smouldered. Black-robed wizards, their faces painted black with white rings about eyes and mouth, their hair matted with blood, their faces raw from constant self-torture, forever flitted to and fro, keeping watch by night and day, ready always for the victims whom that dreadful superstition was always ready to bring. The supply of victims was drawn from prisoners taken in war, and from slaves paid as tribute by conquered tribes; and it took a vast supply. Sometimes as many as five hundred were sacrificed on one altar on one great day. They were stretched naked upon the sacrificial stone, and butchered in a manner too horrible to be described here. Their palpitating hearts were offered to the idol, and then thrown into the great stone bowl; while the bodies were kicked down the long stone stairway to the bottom of the great mound, where they were seized upon by the eager crowd. The Mexicans were not cannibals regularly and as a matter of taste; but they devoured these bodies as part of their grim religion. It is too revolting to go more into detail concerning these rites. Enough has been said to give some idea of the moral barrier encountered by the Spanish missionaries when they came to such blood-thirsty savages with a gospel which teaches love and the universal brotherhood of man. Such a creed was as unintelligible to the Indian as white blackness would be to us; and the struggle to make him understand was one of the most enormous and apparently hopeless ever undertaken by human teachers. Before the missionaries could make these savages even listen to--much less understand--Christianity, they had the dangerous task of proving this paganism worthless. The Indian believed absolutely in the power of his gory stone-god. If he should neglect his idol, he felt sure the idol would punish and destroy him; and of course he would not believe anything that could be told him to the contrary. The missionary had not only to say, "Your idol is worthless; he cannot hurt anybody; he is only a stone, and if you kick him he cannot punish you," but he had to prove it. No Indian was going to be so foolhardy as to try the experiment, and the new teacher had to do it in person. Of course he could not even do that at first; for if he had begun his missionary work by offering any indignity to one of those ugly gods of porphyry, its "priests" would have slain him on the spot. But when the Indians saw at last that the missionary was not struck down by some supernatural power for speaking against their gods, there was one step gained. By degrees he could touch the idol, and they saw that he was still unharmed. At last he overturned and broke the cruel images; and the breathless and terrified worshippers began to distrust and despise the cowardly divinities they had played