A History of American Christianity | Page 8

to become by thousands the dependents and servants of the missions. Conversion went on apace. At the end of sixty-five years from the founding of the missions their twenty-one stations numbered a Christian native population of more than thirty thousand, and were possessed of magnificent wealth, agricultural and commercial. In that very year (1834) the long-intended purpose of the government to release the Indians from their almost slavery under the missions, and to distribute the vast property in severalty, was put in force. In eight years the more than thirty thousand Catholic Indians had dwindled to less than five thousand; the enormous estates of the missions were dissipated; the converts lapsed into savagery and paganism.
Meanwhile the Spanish population had gone on slowly increasing. In the year 1840, seventy years from the Spanish occupancy, it had risen to nearly six thousand; but it was a population the spiritual character of which gave little occasion of boasting to the Spanish church. Tardy and feeble efforts had been instituted to provide it with an organized parish ministry, when the supreme and exclusive control of that country ceased from the hands that so long had held it. "The vineyard was taken away, and given to other husbandmen." In the year 1848 California was annexed to the United States.
This condensed story of Spanish Christianity within the present boundaries of the United States is absurdly brief compared with the vast extent of space, the three centuries of time, and what seemed at one time the grandeur of results involved in it. But in truth it has strangely little connection with the extant Christianity of our country. It is almost as completely severed from historical relation with the church of the present day as the missions of the Greenlanders in the centuries before Columbus. If we distinguish justly between the Christian work and its unchristian and almost satanic admixtures, we can join without reserve both in the eulogy and in the lament with which the Catholic historian sums up his review: "It was a glorious work, and the recital of it impresses us by the vastness and success of the toil. Yet, as we look around to-day, we can find nothing of it that remains. Names of saints in melodious Spanish stand out from maps in all that section where the Spanish monk trod, toiled, and died. A few thousand Christian Indians, descendants of those they converted and civilized, still survive in New Mexico and Arizona, and that is all."[15:1]
FOOTNOTES:
[7:1] Helps, "Spanish Conquest in America," vol. i., p. 234, American edition.
[8:1] Helps, "Spanish Conquest in America," vol. i., p. 235; also p. 355, where the grotesquely horrible document is given in full.
In the practical prosecution of this scheme of evangelization, it was found necessary to the due training of the Indians in the holy faith that they should be enslaved, whether or no. It was on this religious consideration, clearly laid down in a report of the king's chaplains, that the atrocious system of encomiendas was founded.
[15:1] "The Roman Catholic Church in the United States," by Professor Thomas O'Gorman (vol. ix., American Church History Series), p. 112.
CHAPTER III.
THE PROJECT OF FRENCH EMPIRE AND EVANGELIZATION--ITS WIDE AND RAPID SUCCESS--ITS SUDDEN EXTINCTION.
For a full century, from the discovery of the New World until the first effective effort at occupation by any other European people, the Spanish church and nation had held exclusive occupancy of the North American continent. The Spanish enterprises of conquest and colonization had been carried forward with enormous and unscrupulous energy, and alongside of them and involved with them had been borne the Spanish chaplaincies and missions, sustained from the same treasury, in some honorable instances bravely protesting against the atrocities they were compelled to witness, in other instances implicated in them and sharing the bloody profits of them. But, unquestionable as was the martial prowess of the Spanish soldier and adventurer, and the fearless devotion of the Spanish missionary, there appears nothing like systematic planning in all these immense operations. The tide of conquest flowed in capricious courses, according as it was invited by hopes of gold or of a passage to China, or of some phantom of a Fountain of Youth or a city of Quivira or a Gilded Man; and it seemed in general to the missionary that he could not do else than follow in the course of conquest.
It is wholly characteristic of the French people that its entering at last upon enterprises of colonization and missions should be with large forecasting of the future and with the methods of a grand strategy.
We can easily believe that the famous "Bull of Partition" of Pope Alexander VI. was not one of the hindrances that so long delayed the beginnings of a New France in the West. Incessant dynastic wars with near neighbors, the