Page:A Study of Mexico.djvu/229

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POSITION OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
219

tion, as it is my duty to see that the laws are respected; and, while I feel no interest whatever in your religious forms or opinions, we are all interested in encouraging the organization of a body of clergy strong enough to keep the old Church in check."

Whether the Catholic Church will accommodate itself to the new order of things, and be content to live peaceably side by side with civil liberty and full religious toleration, or whether, smarting under a sense of injustice at its spoliation, and restless under the heavy hand of an antagonistic government, it waits its opportunity to array itself against the powers that be, is yet to be determined. Ex-Consul Strother, who has already been often quoted as an authority, thus graphically exhibits the respective attitudes of the former and still great ecclesiastical power and its acknowledged antagonist, the Government: "They may be illustrated," he says, "by a glance at the Grand Plaza of the city, across an angle of which the palace of the liberal Government and the old cathedral stand looking askance at each other. On the one hand, at the guard-mounting, the serried lines of bayonets and the rolling drums appear as a daily reiterated menace and warning. On the other, we might naturally expect to hear from the cathedral towers a responsive peal of indignant pro-