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.