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.

[Illustration: Signature: George Wharton