I, Lord, have come to take with my hands,
_blindness to mine eyes_, rottenness and shriveling to my members,
poverty and affliction to my body; for my meanness and rudeness this
it is that I merit to receive. Live and rule for ever in all
quietness and tranquillity, O thou that art our lord, our shelter,
our protector, most compassionate, most pitiful, invisible,
impalpable."
It is true that much of all this would apply to any great period of
famine, but it appears that these events occurred when there was
great cold in the country, when the people gathered around fires and
could not get warm, a remarkable state of things in a country
possessing as tropical a climate as Mexico. Moreover, these people
were wanderers, "going by mountain and wilderness," seeking food, a
whole nation of poverty-stricken, homeless, wandering paupers. And
when we recur to the part where the priest tells the Lord to seek his
friends and servants in the mountains, "below the dung-hills," and
raise them to riches, it is difficult to understand it otherwise than
as an allusion to those who had been buried under the falling slime,
clay, and stones.
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