A History of American Christianity | Page 6

against you in all ways and manners that we can, and subject you to the yoke and obedience of the church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children and make slaves of them, and sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord; and we protest that the deaths and losses that shall accrue from this are your own fault."[8:1]
While the church was thus implicated in crimes against humanity which history shudders to record, it is a grateful duty to remember that it was from the church also and in the name of Christ that bold protests and strenuous efforts were put forth in behalf of the oppressed and wronged. Such names as Las Casas and Montesinos shine with a beautiful luster in the darkness of that age; and the Dominican order, identified on the other side of the sea with the fiercest cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, is honorable in American church history for its fearless championship of liberty and justice.
The first entrance of Spanish Christianity upon the soil of the United States was wholly characteristic. In quest of the Fountain of Youth, Ponce de Leon sailed for the coast of Florida equipped with forces both for the carnal and for the spiritual 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 Franciscan 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