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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 101 fined or scholarly minds, and doomed themselves volun tarily to the horrors of hourly association with revolting vice, with repellent surroundings, to daily fellowship with filthy and unhospitable hordes. The " Digger In dian " was a man, so was the priest. The Digger Indian had descended to the level, and in some instances below the level of the brute ; the priest rose to the heights of a hero and to the plane of the saint. What conspiracy of accidents, what congeries of events, what causes com bined to make a brute of one and a civilized and an hon orable man of the other? Well, unrestrained passions, ungoverned will, unregulated desires, contempt for all law human and divine in the beginning and then entire ignorance of it, and finally well- nigh desperate condi tions of existence and almost utter destitution and, there-fore, impossible conditions of civilization, made the Dig ger Indian. And the Jesuit priest, the hero and the saint? Ethnologically, it is not so long ago since the ancestors of the priest were barbarians, and on the downward road to savagery. When Pope Innocent L, early in the fifth century, sent his missionaries to civilize and preach the doctrines of our Divine Lord to the Spaniards and those of the Iberian peninsula, they were, as we learn from the letter of the Pope to Decentius, given over to foul ness and the worship of demons. The church lifted them out of their degradation, civilized and Christianized tEem and made of them what Voltaire termed ' i an heroic nation. " The same church with her consecrated mis sionaries was leading out from the shadow of death the Digger Indians and would have made a civilized and Christian community of them if she had been left for fifty years in undisturbed possession of the field. |