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 deep stirring of religious feeling at any time; it was especially attendant on the religious agitations of that period; but most of all it was in Spain, where, of all the Catholic nations, corruption had gone deepest and spiritual revival was most earnest and sincere, that the manifestations of fanaticism were most shocking. Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic were distinguished alike by their piety and their part in the promotion of civilization, and by the horrors of bloody cruelty perpetrated by their authority and that of the church, at the instigation of the sincere and devout reformer Ximenes. In the memorable year 1492 was inaugurated the fiercest work of the Spanish Inquisition, concerning which, speaking of her own part in it, the pious Isabella was able afterward to say, "For the love of Christ and of his virgin mother I have caused great misery, and have depopulated towns and districts, provinces and kingdoms."
The earlier pages of American church history will not be intelligently read unless it is well understood that the Christianity first to be transplanted to the soil of the New World was the Christianity of Spain--the Spain of Isabella and Ximenes, of Loyola and Francis Xavier and St. Theresa, the Spain also of Torquemada and St. Peter Arbues and the zealous and orthodox Duke of Alva.
[2:1] See the account of the Greenland church and its missions in Professor O'Gorman's "History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States" (vol. ix. of the American Church History Series), pp. 3-12.
SPANISH CONQUEST--THE PROPAGATION, DECAY, AND DOWNFALL OF SPANISH CHRISTIANITY.
It is a striking fact that the earliest monuments of colonial and ecclesiastical antiquity within the present domain of the United States, after the early Spanish remains in Florida, are to be found in those remotely interior and inaccessible highlands of New Mexico, which have only now begun to be reached in the westward progress of migration. Before the beginnings of permanent English colonization at Plymouth and at Jamestown, before the French beginnings on the St. Lawrence, before the close of the sixteenth century, there had been laid by Spanish soldiers, adventurers, and missionaries, in those far recesses of the continent, the foundations of Christian towns and churches, the stately walls and towers of which still invite the admiration of the traveler.