There is a rather striking resemblance in the matter of ministers between Bret Harte and Rhoda Broughton. Both have the same instinctive antipathy to a parson that boys have to a policeman; both have the same general notion that ministers are mainly canting hypocrites; both, being struck apparently by the idea of doing full justice to the cloth, have set themselves to describe one really good and even heroic minister, and in each case the type evolved is the same, and not convincing. Gideon Deane has the slender physique, the humility, the courage, the self-sacrificing spirit, the melancholy temperament of the Reverend James Stanley, and, it may be added, the same unreality, the same inability to stamp his image upon the mind of the reader.
Bret Harte’s treatment of the Spanish priest in California is very different. He pokes a little fun at his Reverence, now and then. He shows us Father Felipe entering the estudio of Don José Sepulvida “with that air of furtive and minute inspection common to his order”; and in the interview with Colonel Parker, Don José’s lawyer, there is a beautiful description of what might be called an ecclesiastical wink. “The Padre and Colonel Parker gazed long and gravely into each other’s eyes. It may have been an innocent touch of the sunlight through the window, but a faint gleam seemed to steal into the pupil of the affable lawyer at the same moment that, probably from the like cause, there was a slight nervous contraction of the left eyelid of the pious father.”
Father Sobriente, again, “was a polished, cultivated man; yet in the characteristic, material criticism of youth, I am afraid that Clarence chiefly identified him as a priest with large hands whose soft palms seemed to be cushioned with kindness, and whose equally large feet, encased in extraordinary shapeless shoes of undyed leather, seemed to tread down noiselessly—rather than to ostentatiously crush—the obstacles that beset the path of the young student.... In the midnight silence of the dormitory, he was often conscious of the soft, browsing tread and snuffy, muffled breathing of his elephantine-footed mentor.”
But the simplicity, the unaffected piety, and the sweet disposition of the Spanish priest are clearly shown in Bret Harte’s stories. The ecclesiastic with whom he has made us best acquainted is Padre Esteban of the Mission of Todos Santos, that remote and dreamy port in which the Crusade of the Excelsior ended. And yet even there the good priest had learned how to deal with the human heart, as appeared when he became the confidant of the unfortunate Hurlstone.
“‘A woman,’ said the priest softly. ‘So! We will sit down, my son.’ He lifted his hand with a soothing gesture—the movement of a physician who has just arrived at an easy diagnosis of certain uneasy symptoms. There was also a slight suggestion of an habitual toleration, as if even the seclusion of Todos Santos had not been entirely free from the invasion of the primal passion.”
The Reader need not be reminded how often Bret Harte speaks of Junipéro Serra, the Franciscan Friar who founded the Spanish Missions in California. Father Junipéro was a typical Spaniard of the religious sort, austere, ascetic,—a Commissioner of the Inquisition. He ate little, avoiding all meat and wine. He scourged himself in the pulpit with a chain, after the manner of St. Francis, and he was accustomed, while reciting the confession, to hold aloft the Crucifix in his left hand, and to strike his naked breast with a heavy stone held in his right hand. To this self-punishment, indeed, was attributed the disease of the lungs which ultimately caused his death.
THE BELLS, SAN GABRIEL MISSION
Copyright, Detroit Photographic Co.
Each Mission had its garrison, for the intention was to overcome the natives by arms, if they should offer resistance to Holy Church. But the California Indians were a mild, inoffensive people, lacking the character and courage of the Indians who inhabited the Plains, and they quickly succumbed to that combination of spiritual authority and military force which the Padres wielded. At the end of the eighteenth century there were eighteen Missions in California, with forty Padres, and a neophyte Indian population of about thirteen thousand. But all this melted away when the Missions were secularized. In 1822 Mexico became independent of Spain, and thenceforth California was an outlying, neglected Mexican province. From that time the office-holding class of Mexicans were intriguing to get possession of the Mission lands, flocks and herds; and in 1833 they succeeded. The Missions were broken up, the Friars were deprived of all support; and many of the Christian Indians were reduced to a cruel slavery in which their labor was recompensed chiefly by intoxicating liquors. Little better was the fate of the others. Released from the strict discipline in which they had been held by the priests, they scattered in all directions, and quickly sank into a state of barbarism worse than their original state.
But the Missions were not absolutely deserted. In some cases a small monastic brotherhood still inhabited the buildings once thronged by soldiers and neophytes; and these men were of great service. They ministered to the spiritual needs of Spanish and Mexicans; they instructed the sons and daughters of the ranch-owners; they kept alive religion, and to some extent learning in the community; and, finally,—if one may say so without irreverence,—they contributed that Mediæval element which, otherwise, would have been the one thing lacking to complete the picturesque contrasts of Pioneer life. The Missions had been the last expression of the instinct of conquest upon the part of a decaying nation; and the Angelus that nightly rang from some fast-crumbling tower sounded the knell of Spanish rule in America.