The story of the Old Missions of California is perennially new.
The interest in the ancient and dilapidated buildings and their
history increases with each year. To-day a thousand visit them
where ten saw them twenty years ago, and twenty years hence,
hundreds of thousands will stand in their sacred precincts, and
unconsciously absorb beautiful and unselfish lessons of life as
they hear some part of their history recited. It is well that this
is so. A materially inclined nation needs to save every unselfish
element in its history to prevent its going to utter destruction.
It is essential to our spiritual development that we learn that
“Not on the vulgar mass
Called ‘work,’ must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O’er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a
trice.”
It is of incalculably greater benefit to the race that the
Mission Fathers lived and had their fling of divine audacity for
the good of the helpless aborigines than that any score one might
name of the “successful captains of industry” lived to make their
unwieldy and topheavy piles of gold. With all their faults and
failures, all their ideas of theology and education,—which we, in
our assumed superiority, call crude and old-fashioned,—all their
rude notions of sociology, all their errors and mistakes, the work
of the Franciscan Fathers was glorified by unselfish aim, high
motive and constant and persistent endeavor to bring their heathen
wards into a knowledge of saving grace. It was a brave and heroic
endeavor. It is easy enough to find fault, to criticize, to carp,
but it is not so easy to do. These men did! They had
a glorious purpose which they faithfully pursued. They aimed high
and achieved nobly. The following pages recite both their aims and
their achievements, and neither can be understood without a
thrilling of the pulses, a quickening of the heart’s beats, and a
stimulating of the soul’s ambitions.
This volume pretends to nothing new in the way of historical
research or scholarship. It is merely an honest and simple attempt
to meet a real and popular demand for an unpretentious work that
shall give the ordinary tourist and reader enough of the history of
the Missions to make a visit to them of added interest, and to link
their history with that of the other Missions founded elsewhere in
the country during the same or prior epochs of Mission
activity.
If it leads others to a greater reverence for these outward and
visible signs of the many and beautiful graces that their lives
developed in the hearts of the Franciscan Fathers—their founders
and builders—and gives the information needed, its purpose will be
more than fulfilled.
In most of its pages it is a mere condensation of the author’s
In and Out of the Old Missions of California, to which book
the reader who desires further and more detailed information is
respectfully referred.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, April, 1913.
