ious age which fails to
recognize that the great Reformation was a reformation _of_ the church
as well as a reformation _from_ the church. It was in Spain itself, in
which the corruption of the church had been foulest, but from which all
symptoms of "heretical pravity" were purged away with the fiercest zeal
as fast as they appeared,--in Spain under the reign of Ferdinand and
Isabella the Catholic,--that the demand for a Catholic reformation made
itself earliest and most effectually felt. The highest ecclesiastical
dignitary of the realm, Ximenes, confessor to the queen, Archbishop of
Toledo, and cardinal, was himself the leader of reform. No changes in
the rest of Christendom were destined for many years to have so great
an influence on the course of evangelization in North America as those
which affected the church of Spain; and of these by far the most
important in their bearing on the early course of Christianity in
America were, first, the purifying and quickening of the miserably
decayed and corrupted mendicant orders,--ever the most effective arm in
the missionary service of the Latin Church,--and, a little later, the
founding of the Society of Jesus, with its immense potency for good and
for evil. At the same time the court of Rome, sobered in some measure,
by the perilous crisis that confronted it, from its long orgy of simony,
nepotism, and sensuality, began to find time and thought for spiritual
duties. The establishment of the "congregations" or administrative
boards, and especially of the _Congregatio de Propaganda Fide_, or board
of missions, dates chiefly from the sixteenth century. The revived
interest in theological study incident to the general spiritual
quickening gave the church, as the result of the labors of the Council
of Trent, a well-defined body of doctrine, which nevertheless was not so
narrowly defined as to preclude differences and debates among the
diverse sects of the clergy, by whose competitions and antagonisms the
progress of missions both in Christian and in heathen lands was destined
to be so seriously affected.

An incident of the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth
century--inevitable incident, doubtless, in that age, but none the less
deplorable--was the engendering or intensifying of that cruel and
ferocious form of fanaticism which is defined as the combination of
religious emotion with the malignant passions. The tendency to
fanaticism is one of the perils attendant on the dee