In 1843, Madame Calderon de la Barca painted a discerning picture of life when she compared village life in New England and in Mexico. The wife of the Spanish ambassador to Mexico, she had fond memories of home when she took her readers on a tour of an archetypal “small and flourishing” New England town. There, the four new churches – each representing a different sect – symbolized a “religion suited to all customers.” Elsewhere, neat stores and dwelling houses – all new, wooden, clean, and ornamented with slight Grecian pillars – proclaimed “prosperity, equality, consistency” and an eye toward the future. Implicitly, she suggested that a happy marketplace existed both in commerce and religion. In contrast, the Mexican village was dominated by two images. One included the “Indian huts, with their half-naked inmates,” and the other included the church, “grey and ancient, but strong as if designed for eternity,” with saints and virgins and gold, silver, and precious stones, “whose value would buy up all the spare lots in the New England village.” Everything there was reminiscent of a distant past, whereas all in the present was “decaying and growing fainter” as humans seemed to trust “to some unknown future which they may never see.” The garish, backward-looking church complemented an economy of lethargy, and a society divided between haves and have-nots.