xlix; and Joseph Joaquin Granados y Galvez, _Tardes Americanas_, p.
90 (Mexico, 1778).] These traditions have been doubted, for no other reason than because it was assumed that such thoughts were above the level of the red race.

But the proper names and titles, unquestionably ancient and genuine, which I have analyzed in the preceding pages refute this supposition.
We may safely affirm that other and stronger instances of the kind could be quoted, had the early missionaries preserved more extensively the sacred chants and prayers of the natives.

In the Maya tongue of Yucatan a certain number of them have escaped destruction, and although they are open to some suspicion of having been colored for proselytizing purposes, there is direct evidence from natives who were adults at the time of the Conquest that some of their priests had predicted the time should come when the worship of one only God should prevail.

This was nothing more than another instance of the monotheistic idea finding its expression, and its apparition is not more extraordinary in Yucatan or Peru than in ancient Egypt or Greece.
The actual religious and moral progress of the natives was designedly ignored and belittled by the early missionaries and conquerors.

Bishop Las Casas directly charges those of his day with magnifying the vices of the Indians and the cruelties of their worship; and even such a liberal thinker as Roger Williams tells us that he would not be present at their ceremonies, "Lest I should have been partaker of Satan's Inventions and Worships."[1] This same prejudice completely blinded the first visitors to the New World, and it was only the extravagant notion that Christianity had at some former time been preached here that saved us most of the little that we have on record.
[Footnote 1: Roger Williams, _A Key Into the Language of America_, p.
152.] Yet now and then the truth breaks through even this dense veil of prejudice.