Great River. Paul Horgan
habits, men who forbear patiently the abuse that may come upon them.” All must “exercise the greatest possible charity with these creatures of the Lord, made in His image and likeness with a rational soul to enable them to know Him.” It was a view of the Indian that was by no means universally held. But she was firm. “God,” she wrote, “created these Indians as apt and competent beings to serve and worship Him.…”
When Fray Alonso asked her whether in the river kingdom of New Mexico all were “proceeding in the right way” in the work of conversions, she replied that “everything was pleasing to our Lord, as it was all directed to the aim of the conversions, which is the greatest charity.” But she also said that she had taken it upon herself to pray for “the peace and harmony between the governors and the friars… so that friars, governors, Spaniards and Indians together and in harmony may worship and praise the Lord.…”
With those words, and in her baffling knowledge of the river kingdom of the seventeenth century, Mother María de Jesús de Agreda went to the heart of a problem that was charged with passion and violence.
26.
The Two Majesties
For in the seventeenth century the river colony was like a man in whom raged opposing desires, good and bad. These forces contended so long and so hard that they nearly tore apart forever the social body in which they were inescapably joined. The body and the soul were at war—life temporal and life spiritual. In her cry for harmony Mother María had fearfully seen who were the contenders. They were the governors at Santa Fe, with their corrupt little garrisons and their comic vanity and their bald cleverness at scraping private gain from the impoverished province; opposed by the friars in their fortress-missions, with a grim strength of spirit, and arrogance on behalf of Almighty God, and certain convictions as to human nature which keeping faith they could not recant. With but a few brief peaceful interludes the struggle raged for seven decades, and was resolved only in a disaster which falling equally upon both contenders was the bitter product of their strife.
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