ranciscan missionaries, while the
city of St. Augustine was fully equipped with religious institutions and
organizations. Grave complaints are on record, which indicate that the
great number of the Indian converts was out of all proportion to their
meager advancement in Christian grace and knowledge; but with these
indications of shortcoming in the missionaries there are honorable
proofs of diligent devotion to duty in the creating of a literature of
instruction in the barbarous languages of the peninsula.

For one hundred and fifteen years Spain and the Spanish missionaries had
exclusive possession in Florida, and it was during this period that
these imposing results were achieved. In 1680 a settlement of Scotch
Presbyterians at Port Royal in South Carolina seemed like a menace to
the Spanish domination. It was wholly characteristic of the Spanish
colony to seize the sword at once and destroy its nearest Christian
neighbor. It took the sword, and perished by the sword. The war of races
and sects thus inaugurated went on, with intervals of quiet, until the
Treaty of Paris, in 1763, transferred Florida to the British crown. No
longer sustained by the terror of the Spanish arms and by subsidies from
the Spanish treasury, the whole fabric of Spanish civilization and
Christianization, at the end of a history of almost two centuries,
tumbled at once to complete ruin and extinction.

The story of the planting of Christian institutions in New Mexico runs
parallel with the early history of Florida. Omitting from this brief
summary the first discovery of these regions by fugitives from one of
the disastrous early attempts to effect a settlement on the Florida
coast, omitting (what we would fain narrate) the stories of heroic
adventure and apostolic zeal and martyrdom which antedate the permanent
occupation of the country, we note the arrival, in 1598, of a strong,
numerous, and splendidly equipped colony, and the founding of a
Christian city in the heart of the American continent. As usual in such
Spanish enterprises, the missionary work was undertaken by a body of
Franciscan friars. After the first months of hardship and
discouragement, the work of the Christian colony, and especially the
work of evangelization among the Indians, went forward at a marvelous
rate. Reinforcements both of priests and of soldiers were received from
Mexico; by the end of ten years baptisms were reported to the number of
eight thousand; the entire p