Article October 22, 1910 Issue

GOD THE ALL-GOOD

EDWARD C. BUTLER.

THE nobler Mexican traditions entwine about Tezcatlicapa, the "Soul of the World," and "Benevolent God." This deity is believed to have been the creator of the world, and its worship runs back to the dawn of Mexican history. Long before human sacrifices were instituted among the rose-red teocalli or temples of the ancient Aztecs, the worship of Tezcatlicapa, purely primitive and simple, stood as rebuke to polytheism.

Those peoples, so far removed from this age of achievement, cherished traditions concerning the creation of man, the flood, and other human epochs, that are singularly similar to the Biblical accounts. They had a form of the eucharist, also baptism, confession, penance, fasting, prayer, and they emphasized the sacredness of matrimony and sobriety. Drunkenness and offenses against chastity were punishable with death. Among the idols of hewn basalt, mainly of black color, to be found in the National Museum, none is more noticeable than that of Tezcatlicapa. They were rescued from the burning teocalli of Mexico City in 1530 by the Aztec warriors. They fled with their idols, and when hard pressed by the Spaniards, threw them into the lakes. Recently one of these images of Tezcatlicapa was unearthed at the northwest corner of the Alameda, within a stone's throw of the site of the Spanish Inquisition of New Spain.

It is singularly significant that this God of Benevolent Good is one of the most revered deities of the ancient Mexicans. This historical fact gives additional weight to this statement in Science and Health (p. 286): "In the Saxon and twenty other tongues good is the term for God." Had the peaceful regime of Tezcatlicapa prevailed, the Aztec race would not have lost its pristine purity. Monotheism faded under the withering touch of the rank polytheism of later years. Similarly, the worship of the one God, good, vanished until the time of Jesus Christ. Even after his stupendous epoch, the race seemed to sink into the polytheism of minds many, gods many, in the realm of medicine as well as religion. It remained for Mrs. Eddy to resurrect, as from a riven sepulcher, the monotheistic worship of the one God,—Him of whom Jesus said, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

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