Where The Blood Of Races Commingles

( Originally Published 1905 )

From these two came we all;

And from their blood our blood is brewed

And thus we all are brothers.

—Young's " Night Thoughts."

BEFORE bidding good-bye forever to Nicaragua and its beautiful capital, Leon, which was my home during my wanderings in the republic, I ought to say something of the people, of the mixing of the blood of strange races, of the blending and fusing of the mysterious African and prehistoric American races with the Celto-Spanish and Iberian stock, which has occurred and is occurring in this extraordinary land. Nowhere could I view to better advantage the outward results of the fusion of race with race, or see more satisfactory effects of the Hamitic and Semitic graftings on the Japhetic tree than at high mass at the cathedral on Sunday. I had already attended an early mass at the Church of the Mercedes, and as a student interested in my fellow-men, I was free to be present in the cathedral during the great Sacrificial Act, the mass.

In the cathedrals of Latin America, as in Europe, there are no pews. From the rising of the sun until the beginning of the high mass, at some one of the many side altars mass is being offered up, and the worshippers are always streaming in or out of the building. The Protestant tourist and the travelled Catholic not understanding this custom, often make the mistake of assuming that the congregation which is present in the church when they enter on Sunday make up all who attend divine service and return home with a very low opinion of the devotion of the people. The fact is, from early morning in some part of the sacred edifice the Holy Sacrifice is taking place, the people are coming in and going out, and because they are coming in and going out, pews and chairs would be a nuisance. When I entered the cathedral mass had already begun. The splendid choir, carried forward and upward by the support of a great organ whose tones were mellowed with age, were singing the " Kyrie," the officiating priest was seated on the epistle side of the altar, to his right and left the deacon and sub-deacon of the mass. Occupying his throne and supported by his episcopal entourage, the archbishop of Nicaragua offered to the eye an imposing and venerable personality. His crosier, ring and pectoral cross were the insignia of his high and holy office, and stood for his unquestioned spiritual authority over those within his canonical jurisdiction. Beginning with Antonio de Valdivieso, who in 1544 was murdered by Hernandez de Contreras, the venerable figure before me represents, in unbroken continuity, a line of forty-four prelates that stood for the conversion and civilization of the Nicaraguan Indians and the permanency of Christianity in Central America.

Fully sixteen hundred people, representing all grades of society, were present at the Adorable Sacrifice, and yet so vast was the building that the congregation seemed small. I saw around me assembled in the unity of the faith Spaniards of the all-conquering Aryan stock; descendants of the mysterious African or Ethiopian race which probably antedates the deluge; the sons and daughters of the aboriginal American whose origin is lost in the darkness of a very remote past. Here also, and constituting the numerical strength of the congregation, were sambas, offspring of Indian and negro parentage, mulattoes, mestizos, quadroons, tercerons, and octoroons—multitudinous shades of black and white, of yellow and brown, " devout men out of every nation under Heaven."

According to the law that " like begetteth like," and " no one gives what he has not got," each parent must have given to every one of those around me something of himself or herself. To the conservatism of the sons of Shem and the emotionalism of the daughters of Ham was added the aggressiveness and recuperative powers of the sons of Japheth, so conspicuously wanting to the descendants of Shem and Ham. Structurally, all these around me are the same, yet anatomically, morally and physiologically they differ. Yet in spite of all differences, they are of one species, of one common origin, which, biologically, means they sprang from one primitive pair. St. Paul two thousand years ago, addressing the Athenians on "the unknown God," long before anthropology became a science, taught the principle of the unity of the human race when he said, "God hath made of one all mankind, to dwell upon the face of the earth, determining the limits of their habitation."

The mysterious past was dissolving before me into the present, the prehistoric into the historic, and an entirely new type of the old races was in process of formation which the world never before saw, and may never see again. Here to-day, and around me, were the descendants of those who but a few hundred years back, on the west coast, or in the gloomy forests of equatorial Africa, or on the blood-soaked altars of Nicaragua, sacrificed their children and their prisoners of war to demons, drank the blood and feasted on the flesh of their human victims. We have only to go back four hundred years, less than six lives, when we reach the prehistoric line and cross it into the savagery of Africa or the barbarism of ancient America. And now I gazed upon these human variants with face and form, colour and brain altered, with new life, hopes and aspirations; everything of the old gone, except the specific sum of character by which a man is a man all the world over.

I looked down the avenue and vista of human history, down through the ages of time, to the dispersing of my race and its segregation into national units, and I recalled my vision and fixed it on these devout worshippers around me, that typed once again the reunion of the scattered fragments. It was a notable portend of a converging towards a final reunion of the human family, of a return to a lost civilization, to a unity of adoration, when God's designs shall have received their entire accomplishment over the children of men. They had dropped their old brutality, their old savagery as moth-eaten garments fall away from the shoulders, and come here into the House of their Master as friends, each one arrayed in his " wedding garment." From the valley of the shadow of death, they came out at last, from monstrous cruelties, cannibalism, human sacrifices, from serpent adoration, from Vaudaux worship with its obscene rites, its sacrifice of children, its human blood drinking, its human flesh banquets, its violation of the rights of infancy, its degradation and prostitution of the sanctity of womanhood—from an awful night of darkness they came, and now stood in the bright light flooding them from the " orient Son of Justice."

Here and today, I thought, age is reverenced, infancy loved, manhood respected, womanhood honoured, and human life held sacred. Christianity, following the matchless teaching of its Christ, took the children of the man-eaters and those of the sacrificers of human life, and tamed the beastliness and ferocity of their savage natures. It invested the home with purity, redeemed the captive reserved for sacrifice, lifted the curse of slavery, put a stop to infanticide, preached the unity and sanctity of all mankind, and brought marriage once again within the sacred domain of God, its founder. On these children it imposed a new law of conduct, new habits, new conceptions of life and society.

The sanctuary bell intimating the beginning of the canon of the mass, the entering upon the sacred mysteries, the "mysteries diving" of the early church, awoke me to myself. I heard the music of the great organ mingling with the voices of the descendants of the worshippers of the sun; I saw the Ethiopians, the Aztecs, the Spaniards, their commingled blood alive in the veins and arteries of those around them, sway forward and sink to their knees, and over allover the prostrate multitude, over the spiritual chief and sacrificing priest—filling and flooding the mighty temple with its proclamation, I heard the voice of the angel singing, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, the heavens and earth are full of Thy glory. We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we adore Thee." I, too, fell upon my knees. From the snow-capped hills of the north, crossing mountain, sea and plain, I came, the son of a Norman Celt, and knelt, alone of my race, among these sons and daughters of Shem and Ham, at home in my Father's and their Father's House, claiming by our common humanity and our common faith my right to a seat at the banquet and my kinship to those who, with me, belonged to the "Household of the Faith."