As to Christopher Columbus, who does not know, I will not say his obedience and filial devotion to the Church of Rome, but the profound piety of his soul and the tenderness of his religious sentiments? According to the chronicler who has preserved for us in Latin the admirable prayer made by that great man at that solemn hour of his life when, triumphant at last over so many distrusts and so many wrongs, over so many delays and so many obstacles, conqueror, so to speak, of the elements and of men, but always submissive to God, he cast himself upon his knees on the land of the New World, as if to take possession of it in the name of faith. "O God!" he said, "eternal and omnipotent, thou hast by thy holy Word created heaven and earth and sea. Blessed and glorified be thy name; praised be thy majesty which has deigned by thy humble servant to cause that thy holy name should be known and proclaimed in this other part of the world."
Now, by whom, think you, had the bold discoverer the intention of proclaiming and making known the name of Jesus Christ in the New World? Was it by the Methodist and Quaker missionaries? or by those apostolic men who, docile to the word of the Roman pontiff, and like him "fishers of men," went forth to announce the Gospel to every creature and to "cast the net of the word" amidst all nations? It is mere idle fancy, then, to connect with Luther and Calvin that wonderful movement, made up of theoretical science and of boldness, of learned calculations and of enthusiastic intuitions, which set out to open to the adventurous genius of the race of Japheth the vast field of enterprise presented by the continents of America and the Archipelagoes of Oceanica. Chronology, moreover, suffices to give the lie very explicitly to this iniquitous claim. Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, and died in 1506: the same year in which Martin Luther entered as a novice the Augustinian convent of Erfurt, and when no one looked to see him become one day an adversary of the Papacy.
The Papacy! Far rather with _its_ remembrance should be associated that grand epoch of modern Europe, that new crusadal enterprise, not to recover the tomb of Christ, but to plant the cross, to propagate the Gospel, and to accomplish the prophecies respecting the universality of the church. It was, in fact, a pope, and that pope an Alexander VI.--the same that proved how much the grandeur of that institution is independent of the worth of individuals--it was Borgia, so severely judged by history, who promulgated the famous bull of 1493, designed to draw the line of demarcation between the discoveries of the Portuguese and those of the Spaniards. From that bull, and from the names of the peoples who bore away the palm from all the rest of Europe in the career of great discoveries, it follows that the Protestant Reformation had nothing to show or pretend to in that splendid episode of the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. All those intrepid navigators were Catholics; and the only power which intervened to regulate and pacify the feverish movement that bore them onward was the Church of Rome--the Papacy!