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.