ritual warfare. Besides his colonists and
his men-at-arms, he brought his secular priests as chaplains and his
monks as missionaries; and his instructions from the crown required him
to summon the natives, as in the famous "Requerimiento," to submit
themselves to the Catholic faith and to the king of Spain, under threat
of the sword and slavery. The invaders found a different temper in the
natives from what was encountered in Mexico and Peru, where the
populations were miserably subjugated, or in the islands, where they
were first enslaved and presently completely exterminated. The insolent
invasion was met, as it deserved, by effective volleys of arrows, and
its chivalrous leader was driven back to Cuba, to die there of his
wounds.

It is needless to recount the successive failures of Spanish
civilization and Christianity to get foothold on the domain now
included in the United States. Not until more than forty years after the
attempt of Ponce de Leon did the expedition of the ferocious Menendez
effect a permanent establishment on the coast of Florida. In September,
1565, the foundations of the oldest city in the United States, St.
Augustine, were laid with solemn religious rites by the toil of the
first negro slaves; and the event was signalized by one of the most
horrible massacres in recorded history, the cold-blooded and perfidious
extermination, almost to the last man, woman, and child, of a colony of
French Protestants that had been planted a few months before at the
mouth of the St. John's River.

The colony thus inaugurated seemed to give every promise of permanent
success as a center of religious influence. The spiritual work was
naturally and wisely divided into the pastoral care of the Spanish
garrisons and settlements, which was taken in charge by "secular"
priests, and the mission work among the Indians, committed to friars of
those "regular" orders whose solid organization and independence of the
episcopal hierarchy, and whose keen emulation in enterprises of
self-denial, toil, and peril, have been so large an element of strength,
and sometimes of weakness, in the Roman system. In turn, the mission
field of the Floridas was occupied by the Dominicans, the Jesuits, and
the Franciscans. Before the end of seventy years from the founding of
St. Augustine the number of Christian Indians was reckoned at
twenty-five or thirty thousand, distributed among forty-four missions,
under the direction of thirty-five F