e
extinguished, as in so many later instances, by savage massacre. With
impressive coincidence, the latest vestige of this primeval American
Christianity fades out in the very year of the discovery of America by
Columbus.[2:1]

By a prodigy of divine providence, the secret of the ages had been kept
from premature disclosure during the centuries in which, without knowing
it, the Old World was actually in communication with the New. That was
high strategy in the warfare for the advancement of the kingdom of God
in the earth. What possibilities, even yet only beginning to be
accomplished, were thus saved to both hemispheres! If the discovery of
America had been achieved four centuries or even a single century
earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the western world would
have been that of the church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence.
The period closing with the fifteenth century was that of the dense
darkness that goes before the dawn. It was a period in which the
lingering life of the church was chiefly manifested in feverish
complaints of the widespread corruption and outcries for "reformation of
the church in head and members." The degeneracy of the clergy was
nowhere more manifest than in the monastic orders, that had been
originally established for the express purpose of reviving and purifying
the church. That ancient word was fulfilled, "Like people, like priest."
But it was especially in the person of the foremost official
representative of the religion of Jesus Christ that that religion was
most dishonored. The fifteenth century was the era of the infamous
popes. By another coincidence which arrests the attention of the reader
of history, that same year of the discovery by Columbus witnessed the
accession of the most infamous of the series, the Borgia, Alexander VI.,
to his short and shameful pontificate.

Let it not be thought, as some of us might be prone to think, that the
timeliness of the discovery of the western hemisphere, in its relation
to church history, is summed up in this, that it coincided with the
Protestant Reformation, so that the New World might be planted with a
Protestant Christianity. For a hundred years the colonization and
evangelization of America were, in the narrowest sense of that large
word, Catholic, not Protestant. But the Catholicism brought hither was
that of the sixteenth century, not of the fifteenth. It is a most
one-sided reading of the history of that illustr