XXX. CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT COUNTRIES.*

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ARTICLE VI. BRAZIL AND THE BRAZILIANS.

Interest of the subject-Qualifications for an impartial traveler-Misrepresenting Catholic doctrines and practices-Missionary tourists-Mr. Kidder's misstatements-The Brazilians adoring imagesAbsurd blunders-Fire-works on the "Sabbath "-Service of the holy week-Decoration of Brazilian churches-Religious emblems and names-Our Lady of the Snow-Homicides in Brazil and among us-Distributing tracts-A bright youth-The Bible in Brazil-Extracts from it read in the public schools-"The Bible never proscribed in Brazil "-Inquisitorial censorship-A trick of the Bible society-The Brazilians liberal and tolerant-The Catholic clergy-Slavery in BrazilTouching practices of piety among the slaves-The religious Brotherhoods-The charity hospital at Rio-Is there any native party in Brazil?-Failure of Mr. Kidder's mission-His return homeAdvantages of clerical celibacy.

FEW countries are more interesting than Brazil; concerning few are the sources of information which are accessible to the American reader more shallow and unsatisfactory. Mr. Kidder has attempted, and with some success, to supply a great deficiency of which we, in common with many others, have long been deeply sensible. The very name Brazil calls up agreeable and poetic associations. It tells of a country of beautiful rivers and magnificent harbors, of splendid cities and cheerful people, of lovely flowers and smiling valleys, of rare plants and gigantic vegetation, of warm sunshine and warmer hearts. We confess that, from our boyhood up, we have always thought of the El Dorado whenever we heard the name of Brazil uttered; and, even now, there is no place in the new world we would be more delighted to see than Rio de Janeiro.

To be able to judge of a country correctly, a man should be almost more than human. If he should not have dropped down from the clouds, he should at least divest himself of all narrow prejudice, and become a citizen of the world, in the most enlarged sense of the term, ere he can rightly appreciate the character of a strange people. Unless his heart be as wide as the world, he will be but too apt to judge the new people among whom he may travel by the contracted views which he formed when under his father's roof, or while breathing the air of his native hills or valleys. To love our own country above all others, and to think its people greater and better and happier than any other, is a natural feeling, which may be either a virtue, or at most a very excusable weakness; but to push this sentiment so far as to conceive a contempt for all other nations, whose people do no exactly agree with us in constitu

* Sketches of Residence and Travel in Brazil, embracing Historical and Geographical notices of the empire and its several provinces. By Daniel P. Kidder. In two volumes, with illustrations. Philadelphia: Sorin & Ball. London: Wiley & Putnam. 1845.

tional temperament or social life, in legislation or religion, is certainly something more than a mere infirmity. It is an evidence of silly pride and narrow-minded prejudice. The traveler in foreign lands should surely leave all such ideas at home; at least, if he take it into his head to write a book, he should not inflict his own contracted and erroneous views on his readers, who look more for agreeable narrative and solid information, than for the peculiar notions or first impressions of the writer.

And yet how difficult it is to get rid of this narrow prejudice; and to become really a citizen of the world! How difficult to institute an impartial comparison between our own people and those of other nations, whom we consider less favored! How apt are we to look only at the dark side of the picture in a strange land, and to compare it with the bright side of that in our own dear country! Though extensive travel tends to expand our ideas and to liberalize our views, yet there are some men whose views are never expanded; and who, for all the good traveling does them or others, might as well stay at home.

We are not inclined to set down Mr. Kidder in this class of unteachable travelers, except where the religion of Brazil was opposed to his own settled prejudices. We have read his Sketches with great interest and pleasure, and we really believe that, with the exception just indicated, he sought to be impartial and accurate in his statements. We are indebted to him for much valuable information on the present political and financial condition of the Brazilian empire; as well as for an interesting synopsis of its past history, and a pretty fair estimate of its population, resources, literary and charitable establishments, great men, and future prospects. We are the more grateful for all this, as we had never before seen any work on Brazil, in which the attempt to portray the institutions of the country had been so full and successful.

Yet we much regret to say, that Mr. Kidder's work is often greatly disfigured by religious prejudice, and not unfrequently marred by positive misrepresentation. We could not, of course, have expected that, being a Protestant, he would have written as a Catholic; but we certainly had a right to expect that one so well informed and so liberal in other things, would not have betrayed so much ignorance and bigotry in regard to the Catholic religion. And it will be our duty, as reviewers, to notice some of the more striking among these exhibitions of an illiberal spirit. In discharging this office we intend "not to set down aught in malice," but, at the same time, to speak plainly, whenever the subject may seem to require it. We are heartily tired of being compelled every day to expose misrepresentations of our religion, made by men who should have known better, and who can plead no excuse whatever for their ignorance or malice. The doctrines and practices of Catholicity are not hidden in a corner; they are not of yesterday; they have been boldly and unequivocally set forth to the whole world for eighteen long centuries, during fifteen of which those sectarians who now think proper to cover them with obloquy had not yet sprung into existence!

Mr. Kidder went to Brazil with his religious notions already formed, and with a predetermination not to be pleased with any thing not conformable to them. He went with a settled conviction that the Brazilians were sitting "in the region of the shadow of death," and that it would be a great mercy to endeavor to shed some light on their darkness. He went as a hired agent of the Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society, for the purpose of distributing Bibles and tracts among the benighted papists of Brazil; and, of course, it was his obvious interest to represent them as ignorant, as priest-ridden, as dark on the subject of the Bible as possible. We are quite confident we are doing him no injustice; we have traveled ourselves in Catholic countries; we have had for several years full opportunities of comparing what we knew to be the truth, with the false or miserably perverted statements of those very men of God who belong to Mr. Kidder's school; and we have come to the deliberate conclusion, that little or no reliance is to be placed on the statements of any among them all, whenever the Catholic religion is concerned. The notable Memoranda of Foreign Travel" by the Rev. R. J. Breckinridge, the "Letters of Rev. Mr. Cheever," and the "Sketches of Brazil,” - to say nothing of a hundred other books of the same kind with which our country is literally flooded, are, all of them, little better than base libels on the religious character of the various people, among whom those Reverend missionaries temporarily sojourned.

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But, after all, these devout emissaries do some good, not only to themselves, but incidentally at least to others. They encourage the publishers, and they spread out among the people some wholesome knowledge, cumbered though it be with much misrepresentation and prejudice. The truth sometimes peeps out from their pages almost, in spite of them; and they not unfrequently, in the most simple and good-natured manner imaginable, let out the secret of their own utter failure in the holy enterprise upon which they had embarked,—with a good round sum for an outfit, and high annual wages to console them in their labors. We shall see that Mr. Kidder does this; but before we come to this feature in his book, we must spread out before our readers some of the glaring evidences of his ignorance and prejudice, in regard to the religion of the Brazilians.

He deliberately repeats the silly and exploded falsehood, that the Brazilian Catholics are in the habit of adoring images! Thus he says, speaking of what he saw in the convent of St. Antonio at Rio: "The adoration of images was, of course, a prominent topic of remark." "Of course" it was! Had not his grandmother told him, while he was yet in the nursery, that all Catholics adore images? And was not the mere presence of images in Catholic churches sufficient evidence to his mind to confirm this grave accusation? "Of course" it was! How could Catholics be supposed to have common sense enough, to distinguish between a bit of canvass or a piece of marble and the living God of heaven and Shade of Raphael! how you would stand aghast at the prodigious

1 Vol. i, 186.

Had he but invoked you,

he

acumen and taste of this modern tourist! might have received some information as to the emblematic meaning of those streams of blood issuing from the five sacred wounds of the Saviour, and descending "to a figure beneath, in the posture of devotion," which he saw represented in a painting in the same convent, and the explanation of which, he says, none of the good monks could give him! Probably they thought him an unfit subject for instruction, or they smiled at his ignorance, and were too polite to undeceive him; else they might have told him that those streams indicated the saving influence of the blood of Christ on the fervent Christian. Had he possessed but a very reasonable share of penetration, he might have found out this of himself without the trouble of asking.

A very moderate acquaintance with the Catholic Catechism and Church Calendar would have prevented him from exposing his ignorance on many other points, in which a Catholic child of ten years could have set him right. Thus he says, in the first volume, that Mass was celebrated during the hours of the evening; and he had not grown a whit wiser when he reached the middle of the second, for he there made the startling discovery that a Catholic "novena is a service of nine Masses performed on as many successive days," and very late in the evening too, as the sequel of the passage shows! The veriest old woman in Brazil could have told him, that Mass is universally celebrated in the morning, and generally at a very early hour, as the officiating clergyman must be fasting; and we venture to say that, if his Sketches should ever be republished in Brazil, all the Brazilian women and children would indulge in a hearty and good natured laugh at his expense, for having supposed the Mass and evening devotions of the Lenten season identical; and the laugh would have grown louder and merrier when they would have found out, that our traveler actually identified the Mass with the popular festivals celebrated by the people in some localities with fire-rockets, illuminations, and other demonstrations, amid the thickening darkness of the evening! Mr. Kidder would really do well to study our religion, at least a little, before he undertakes again to travesty its worship and to caricature its observances: he should do this, even if it were only for his own sake, and to avoid making himself ridiculous.

By the way, his nerves were dreadfully shocked by the sound of those same fire-rockets let off in a popular festival, probably of the patron saint, at Parahiba; and,- oh! horrible desecration! on the evening of the Sabbath day! We will present an extract, for the double purpose of making our readers acquainted with the author's exquisitely delicate feelings on the subject, and of laying before them his description of certain popular sports which the church authorities have thought proper to tolerate, in connection with religious festivals in certain parts of Spanish and Portuguese America, to which we believe they are peculiar.

"I was induced to walk out in the evening to witness what was thought

1 Vol. i, 187.

2 Vol. i, 123.

3 Vol. ii, 184, 5.

could not fail to be deeply interesting. The Matriz church, at which the fête was held, was situated near by. It stood at one end of an oblong area. Its front was illuminated by candles hung in broken lanterns around the door, and burning before an image in a nitch attached to the cupola. Large fires were blazing in different parts of the area. Around them were groups of blacks, eager to fire off volleys of rockets at appropriate parts of the service that was going on within the church. After the novena was finished, all the people sallied out into the campo to witness the fireworks. These commenced about nine o'clock, and continued, I was told, till after midnight. . . . . One of the most painful impressions of the scene arose from seeing whole families, including mothers and their daughters, out in the damp air to gaze upon spectacles not only partaking of the most low and vulgar species of the ludicrous, but having a decidedly immoral tendency and all this under the name of religion! I was glad to retire as early as those who accompanied me would consent to go, resolving never again voluntarily to witnesss such profanations of the Sabbath."

The godly man! We almost fancy that we see him retiring in disgust from the vulgar crowd of publicans and sinners, assembled to amuse themselves with fire-works on a popular feast-day, after the religious services were over in the church; and hastening to his chamber, there to raise his pure eyes and hands to heaven, "to thank God that he is not like the rest of men," and "to resolve never again voluntarily (!) to witness such desecrations of the Sabbath: that is, we suppose, unless some ungodly Brazilian papist should take it into his head to drag the Reverend man to the scene of the festival, and to have his eyes propped wide open, so that he could not avoid looking on such popish abominations; then indeed it would be an involuntary act, and there would be no remedy except in submitting or dying a martyr, which alternative seldom falls to the lot of our enlightened modern missionaries! And so it was a profanation of the Sabbath to fire off rockets on that holy day-though there is no Scripture against it that we know of—and it was no profanation to turn Pharisee on that day, to sneer at the neighbor, and worse still, to slander his religious character! How some people will "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel!" Now we do not like any profanation of the Sunday or Lord's day,— very pharisaically called the Sabbath, though the Jewish Sabbath has long since been done away with ; we love to see it kept holy as much as our brethren; but we cannot, for the life of us, see why our faces should be particularly lengthened on that day, or why we should grow sadder. Is it not a day of rest from toil, and also a day of rejoicing for the resurrection of our Lord? We confess we are not at all partial to fire-works on the Sunday, and they are certainly no part of our worship, nor is their use at all general in Catholic countries; but we are free to avow the conviction, based upon a careful examination of both sides of the question, that where all popular amusements are suppressed, and the pall of death is spread over the people on Sunday, there is really less piety and more vice, than where some innocent popular sports are

1 Vol. ii, 185-6.