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Show 108 BY PATH AND TRAIL. in his ways. " If ye labor only to please men, ye are fallen from your high estate, " wrote Francis Xavier to the members of the order in Portugal. Preaching the precepts of self- denial to men and women given over to sensual indulgence, to carnal pleasures, and with whom freedom to think and act as they pleased was an immemorial right, these men of God came as enemies making war on the dearest traditions of the family and the established customs and habits of the teibe. From the cradle to the grave, this religion of the strangers forced on their savage natures a new law of conduct, new habits, new conceptions of action and of life. It entered above all into that sphere within which the individual will of the savage man had been till now supreme, the sphere of his own hearth; it curtailed his power over his wife and child ; it forbade infanticide, the possession of more than one woman and commanded the abiding with that woman and with her alone. It chal lenged almost every social act; it denied to the bravp cruelty to an enemy and the right to torture his foe; it made war on his very thoughts if they were foul. It held up gluttony and drunkenness, to which they were wedded and which alone made life worth living, as abominable vices; it interfered with the unlawful gratification of sexual desire and condemned killing for revenge or gain under threat of eternal fire. It claimed to control every circumstance of life and imposed abstinences and fasts on men, at all times, ravenous for food and drink. When reading of the martyrdom of many of these heroic priests our wonder is, not that forty- seven of them were done to death when delivering the message of the Crucified Christ, but that any one of them escaped the horrors of the torch or the scalping knife. |
