Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/100

80 party went northward. The further lure was the discovery of the Spice Islands. A station for supplies was established at Panama. Gil Gonzalez claimed the whole country of Nicaragua, whose coast he visited. The Spaniards claim special success and benefit for the natives from their mission and civilizing work among them in California, when entered by Cabrillo, in 1542. Their mission work, however, did not begin till near the close of the seventeenth century. This mission work was begun by the Jesuits, and was pursued by them till the general expulsion of the order from the Spanish dominions. The Franciscans succeeded them, and then the Dominicans. Alexander Forbes, in his “History of California,” gives from the work of Father Venegas, and from his own observations, very interesting accounts of the condition and results of the Spanish missions. The field was a stern and hard one, but it had been heroically worked. There were sixteen stations there in 1767, when the Jesuits were expelled. The funds for the missions were invested in farms in Mexico.

We may here anticipate a statement, to be more fully advanced on later pages, that the Roman Catholic missions among the Indians, from the very first down to our own times, have been far more successful in accomplishing the aims and results which they have had in view, than have been those of any or of all the denominations of Protestants. But those aims and expected results have been most widely unlike, if not in full contrast, as had in view and labored for by Catholics and Protestants. In nothing concerning the theology or the government and discipline of those severed parties of the Christian fold, is the difference between them so broad or so deep as in the fundamental variance of their respective views as to the essential requisite for the conversion and Christianization of an American savage. Devout and heroic priests of the Roman Church, sharing the sweet and humane spirit of Las Casas, soon came hither from Spain on their consecrated missions, and according to their