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 thus inaugurated went on, with intervals of quiet, until the Treaty of Paris, in 1763, transferred Florida to the British crown.

No longer sustained by the terror of the Spanish arms and by subsidies from the Spanish treasury, the whole fabric of Spanish civilization and Christianization, at the end of a history of almost two centuries, tumbled at once to complete ruin and extinction.
The story of the planting of Christian institutions in New Mexico runs parallel with the early history of Florida.

Omitting from this brief summary the first discovery of these regions by fugitives from one of the disastrous early attempts to effect a settlement on the Florida coast, omitting (what we would fain narrate) the stories of heroic adventure and apostolic zeal and martyrdom which antedate the permanent occupation of the country, we note the arrival, in 1598, of a strong, numerous, and splendidly equipped colony, and the founding of a Christian city in the heart of the American continent.