THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD.
The spoilers are come upon all high places through the
wilderness.—_Jeremiah_ xii. 12.
Forth rush the fiends as with the torrent’s sweep,
And deeds are done that make the angels weep.—_Rogers._
We have thus in our first chapter glanced at the scene of crime and
abomination which Europe through long ages presented, still daring
to clothe itself in the fair majesty of the Christian name. It is
a melancholy field of speculation—but our business is not there
just now; we must hasten from it, to that other field of sorrow and
shame at which we also glanced. For fifteen centuries, during which
Christianity had been promulgated, Europe had become little aware of
its genuine nature, though boastful of its profession; but during the
latter portion of that period its nations had progressed rapidly in
population, in strength, and in the arts of social life. They had,
amid all their bickerings and butcherings, found sufficient leisure
to become commercial, speculative, and ambitious of still greater
wealth and power. Would to God, in their improvements, they could
have numbered that of religious knowledge! Their absurd crusades,
nevertheless, by which they had attempted to wrest the Holy City from
the infidels to put it into the possession of mere nominal Christians,
whose very act of seizing on the Holy Land proclaimed their ignorance
of the very first principles of the divine religion in whose cause
they assumed to go forth—these crusades, immediately scandalous
and disastrous as they were, introduced them to the East; gave them
knowledge of more refined and immensely wealthy nations; and at once
raised their notions of domestic luxury and embellishment; gave them
means of extended knowledge; and inspired them with a boundless thirst
for the riches of which they had got glimpses of astonishment. The
Venetians and Genoese alternately grew great by commerce with that
East of which Marco Polo brought home such marvellous accounts; and
at length, Henry of Portugal appeared, one of the noblest and most
remarkable princes in earth’s annals! He devoted all the energies of
his mind and the resources of his fortune to discovery! Fixing his
abode by the ocean, he sent across it not merely the eyes of desire,
but the far-glances of dawning science. Step by step, year by year,
spite of all natural difficulties, disasters and discouragements, he
threw back the cloud that had for ages veiled the vast sea; his ships
brought home news of isle after isle—spots on the wide waste of
waters, fairer and more sunny than the fabled Hesperides; and crept
along the vast line of the African coast to the very Cape of Hope.
He died; but his spirit was shed abroad in an inextinguishable zeal,
guided and made invincible by the Magnet, “the spirit of the stone,”
the adoption of which he had suggested.[1]—At once arose Gama and
Columbus, and as it were at once—for there were but five years and a
few months between one splendid event and the other,—the East and the
West Indies by the sea-path, and America, till then undreamed of, were
discovered!
What an era of amazement was that! Worlds of vast extent and wonderful
character, starting as it were into sudden creation before the eyes of
growing, inquisitive, and ambitious Europe! Day after day, some news,
astounding in its very infinitude of goodness, was breaking upon their
excited minds; news which overturned old theories of philosophy and
geography, and opened prospects for the future equally confounding
by their strange magnificence! No single Paradise discovered; but
countless Edens, scattered through the glittering seas of summer
climes, and populous realms, stretching far and wide beneath new
heavens, from pole to pole—
Another nature, and a new mankind.—_Rogers._
Since the day of Creation, but two events of superior influence on
the destinies of the human race had occurred—the Announcement of
God’s Law on Sinai, and the Advent of his Son! Providence had drawn
aside the veil of a mighty part of his world, and submitted the lives
and happiness of millions of his creatures to the arbitrium of that
European race, which now boasted of superior civilization—and far
more, of being the regenerated followers of his Christ. Never was so
awful a test of sincerity presented to the professors of a heavenly
creed!—never was such opportunity allowed to mortal men to work in the
eternal scheme of Providence! It is past! Such amplitude of the glory
of goodness can never again be put at one moment into the reach of the
human will. God’s providence is working out its undoubted design in
this magnificent revelation of
That maiden world, twin-sister to the old;—_Montgomery._
But they who should have worked with it in the benignity and
benevolence of that Saviour whose name they bore, have left to all
futurity the awful spectacle of their infamy!
Had the Europeans really at this eventful crisis been instructed in
genuine Christianity, and imbued with its spirit, what a signal career
of improvement and happiness must have commenced throughout the vast
American continent! What a source of pure, guiltless, and enduring
wealth must have been opened up to Europe itself! Only let any one
imagine the natives of America meeting the Europeans as they did,
with the simple faith of children, and the reverence inspired by an
idea of something divine in their visitors; let any one imagine them
thus meeting them, and finding them, instead of what they actually
were, spirits base and desperate as hell could have possibly thrown
up from her most malignant regions—finding them men of peace instead
of men of blood, men of integrity instead of men of deceit, men of
love and generosity instead of men of cruelty and avarice—wise,
enlightened, and just! Let any one imagine that, and he has before
him such a series of grand and delightful consequences as can only
be exhibited when Christianity shall _really_ become the actuating
spirit of nations; and they shall as the direct consequence, “beat
their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.”
Imagine the Spaniards and the Portuguese to have been merely what
they pretended to be,—men who had been taught in the divine law of
the New Testament, that “God made of one blood all the nations of the
earth;” men who, while they burned to “plant the Cross,” actually
meant by it to plant in every new land the command, “thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself;” and the doctrine, that the religion of the
Christian is, to “do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before
God.” Imagine that these men came amongst the simple people of the New
World, clothed in all the dignity of Christian wisdom, the purity of
Christian sentiment, and the sacred beauty of Christian benevolence;
and what a contrast to the crimes and the horrors with which they
devastated and depopulated that hapless continent! The historian would
not then have had to say—“The bloodshed and attendant miseries which
the unparalleled rapine and cruelty of the Spaniards spread over the
New World, indeed disgrace human nature. The great and flourishing
empires of Mexico and Peru, _steeped in the blood of_ FORTY MILLIONS
of their sons, present a melancholy prospect, which must excite the
indignation of every good heart.”[2] If, instead of that lust of gold
which had hardened them into actual demons, they had worn the benign
graces of true Christians, the natives would have found in them a
higher image of divinity than any which they had before conceived,
and the whole immense continent would have been laid open to them as
a field of unexampled and limitless glory and felicity. They might
have introduced their arts and sciences—have taught the wonders and
the charms of household enjoyments and refinements—have shewn the
beauty and benefit of cultivated fields and gardens; their faith would
have created them confidence in the hearts of the natives, and the
advantages resulting from their friendly tuition would have won their
love. What a triumphant progress for civilization and Christianity!
There was no wealth nor advantage of that great continent which might
not have become legitimately and worthily theirs. They would have
walked amongst the swarming millions of the south as the greatest of
benefactors; and under their enlightened guidance, every species of
useful produce, and every article of commercial wealth would have
sprung up. Spain need not have been blasted, as it were, by the
retributive hand of Divine punishment, into the melancholy object which
she is this day. That sudden stream of gold which made her a second
Tantalus, reaching to her very lips yet never quenching her thirst, and
leaving her at length the poorest and most distracted realm in Europe,
might have been hers from a thousand unpolluted sources, and bearing
along with it God’s blessing instead of his curse: and mighty nations,
rivalling Europe in social arts and political power, might have been
now, instead of many centuries hence, objects of our admiration, and
grateful repayers of our benefits.
But I seem to hear many voices exclaiming, “Yes! these things _might_
have been, had men been what they are not, nor ever were!” Precisely
so!—that is the point I wish expressly to illustrate before I proceed
to my narrative. These things might have been, and would have been,
had men been merely what they professed. They called themselves
Christians, and I merely state what Christians would and must, as
a matter of course, have done. The Spaniards professed to be, and
probably really believed that they were, Christians. They professed
zealously that one of their most ardent desires was to bring the
newly-discovered hemisphere under the cross of Christ. Columbus
returned thanks to God for having made him a sort of modern apostle to
the vast tribes of the West. Ferdinand and Isabella, when he returned
and related to them the wonderful story of his discovery, fell on
their knees before their throne, and thanked God too! They expressed
an earnest anxiety to establish the empire of the Cross throughout
their new and splendid dominions. The very Spanish adventurers, with
their hands heavy with the plundered gold, and clotted with the
blood of the unhappy Americans, were zealous for the spread of their
faith. They were not more barbarous than they were self-deluded; and
I shall presently shew whence had sprung, and how had grown to such a
blinding thickness, that delusion upon them. But the truth which I am
now attempting to elucidate and establish, is of far higher and wider
concernment than as exemplified in the early adventurers of Spain and
Portugal. This grand delusion has rested on Europe for a thousand
years; and from the days of the Spaniards to the present moment, has
gone on propagating crimes and miseries without end. For the last
three hundred years, Europe has been boasting of its Christianity, and
perpetrating throughout the vast extent of territories in every quarter
of the globe subjected to its power, every violence and abomination
at which Christianity revolts. There is no nation of Europe that is
free from the guilt of colonial blood and oppression. God knows what
an awful share rests upon this country! It remains therefore for us
simply to consider whether we will abandon our national crimes or our
Christian name. Whether Europe shall continue so to act towards what
it pleases to term “savage” nations, as that it must seem to be the
very ground and stronghold of some infernal superstition, or so as
to promote, what a large portion of the British public at least, now
sincerely desires,—the Christianization, and with it the civilization,
of the heathen.
I shall now pass in rapid review, the treatment which the natives
of the greater portion of the regions discovered since the days of
Columbus and Gama, have received at the hands of the nations styling
themselves Christian, that every one may see what has been, and still
is, the actual system of these nations; and I shall first follow
Columbus and his immediate successors to the Western world, because it
was first, though only by so brief a period, reached by the ships of
the adventurers.