of the Catholics is substantially materialism, more or less gross, according to its distance from or its proximity to Protestantism. There is no blasphemy, according to their system, in naming their shops after the Holy Ghost, a horse-stable after "the Precious Blood," though I could never hear them mentioned or see them without having my Protestant notions shocked, while I equally shocked their feelings by refusing to kneel to the Host, and slipping out of the way to avoid it. Nor could I exhibit the least reverence to their religious emblems without committing what in me would be an act of idolatry, the two systems being so diametrically opposite that one can not go a step toward the other without breaking over a fundamental doctrine of his own belief. God is an invisible Spirit, says the Protestant. God is a Spirit, answers the Catholic, but he daily assumes the form of a wafer, and traverses our streets, and in that form we most commonly worship him. Such is the religious antagonism that will ever be found in the world while man remains what he now is, ever divided between mentalism and materialism. Forms and names often differ, but these are the two ideas into which all the religious systems of the world resolve themselves, although abortive attempts are often made to combine them.
78 (Return)
Vol. ii. p. 452.
79 (Return) When I was first at the city of Mexico, Governor Letcher introduced to me a son of the late emperor, who had a claim for land in California which he had not located before the annexation. I advised him, without a fee, that our courts did not recognize foreign "floats," and that, by his own laches, he had lost his claim, which he now spread along the Sacramento River for 400 miles. Finding out, after