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Show CHAPTER XVII. SOLDIERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. It may have occurred to a few of my readers who have accompanied me in my wanderings in Northern Mexico and Lower California that I have exhibited a rather strong partiality in favor of the Jesuit missionaries and by my silence have been unfair to those self- sacrificing and zealous members of the Order of St. Francis whose undaunted courage on the mission fields of the south west have wrung applause even from the materialist and the infidel. I am filled with admiration for the zeal, the self- denial, the heroism of the martyrs and missionary fathers of the Franciscan order. From their monasteries came men whose names are beads of gold worthy to be filed on the Eosary of Fame ; men of saintly lives and of a transcendent greatness that raises them high above the level even, of good men and whose sacrifices for Christ and humanity challenge the admiration of the brave and stagger faith itself. If I have omitted to do honor to the members of the great order it was because I have already been antici pated by many pens abler than mine. Bancroft, C. F. Lummis, Stoddard, Helen Hunt Jackson, Bryan Clinch and even poor Bret Harte, in fact, an army of writers in books, magazines and newspapers have sounded the praises of the Franciscan padres, forgetting those saintly men, the Jesuits, who pre ceded the Franciscans on the thorny road and broke the trail that afterward carried them to the martyr's grave |