tle imaginations,
singing and rejoicing left their country, and followed vain
and idle hope. But when they saw that they were deceived,
and neither met their parents nor any that they desired,
but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and
command, and to endure cruel and extreme labour, they
either slew themselves, or, choosing to famish, gave up
their fair spirits, being persuaded by no reason or violence
to take food. So these miserable Yucaians came to their
end."

It was once more as it was in the days of the
apostles. The New World was first offered to the
holders of the old traditions. They were the husbandmen
first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and
desolation were the only fruits which they reared upon
it. In their hands it was becoming a kingdom not of
God, but of the devil, and a sentence of blight went
out against them and against their works. How fatally
it has worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America
bear witness. We need not follow further the history
of their dealings with the Indians. For their colonies,
a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at
Catholic colonization. Like shoots from an old decaying
tree which no skill and no care can rear, they were
planted, and for a while they might seem to grow; but
their life was never more than a lingering death, a
failure, which to a thinking person would outweigh in
the arguments against Catholicism whole libraries of
faultless calenas, and a consensus patrum unbroken
through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
Peter.

There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes
to explain it. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the
faith of the large mass of earnest thinking capable
persons; and to those who can best do the work, all
work in this world sooner or later is committed.
America was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted
at home, they sought a place where they might
worship God in their own way, without danger of
stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as
afterwards the English Puritans, early found their way
there. The fate of a party of Coligny's people, who
had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree,
the wrath and fury with which the passions on both
sides were boiling. A certain John Ribauk, with about
400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several
years, cultivating