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 illustrious age which fails to recognize that the great Reformation was a reformation _of_ the church as well as a reformation _from_ the church.