The system broke down only when the crown itself, in the eighteenth century, deserted the orthodox Catholic camp and initiated reforms. This was all very well for enlightened despots in Europe, but it was fatal in the Americas, where the Church, not the army, was the instrument of control. The first warning came in 1769, when the Jesuits were suppressed, arrested and deported. Mobs of angry Indians tried to break into the barracks where the Jesuits were held, in an effort to release them; and a large military escort was required to march 500 Jesuits to the coast at Veracruz. The crown was repeatedly advised that moves against the clergy would weaken its grip on the colonies. There was need, the king was told for 'constant vigilance to preserve suitable conduct and healthy principles of obedience and love for Your Majesty among the clergy’ (1768); 'the conduct of the people depends in large part on that of the clergy’ (1789). The most effective way of quelling unrest, he was informed, was ‘to station a friar with a holy crucifix in the nearest plaza’. In 1799 the cathedral chapter of Pueblo wrote to the king of the ‘fanatical devotion’ of the Indians to the clergy, whose hands 'they always knelt to kiss’, and whose advice they ‘blindly followed’. The same year an Indian crowd attacked a Pueblo gaol where a priest was imprisoned. The Indians, the king was warned, resented royal reforming efforts to remove ecclesiastical privileges’. It was the failure of the Spanish crown and government to heed these warnings which led to the colonial revolution, under the cry ‘America is the only refuge left for the religion of Jesus Christ.’ The LatinAmerican clergy did not want an uneasy mixture of Bourbonism and Voltaire, and when they were given it they revolted, and carried the masses with them. It was the famous decree of 1812 abolishing clerical immunity which detonated the independence movement. The clergy provided many of the political and military leaders of the insurrection. Priests persuaded their entire parishes to ‘pronounce’ for the revolution. It was the clergy who drew up the first scheme for separation from Spain, in 1794, and provided most of the press propaganda. They were active politically throughout Spanish America, but in Mexico they also provided the military leadership. The rebellion of September 1810 was started by a village curate in the small town of Dolores in Michoacan. Among active rebels who had been captured or convicted, the government identified 244 secular priests and 157 monks and friars. One official wrote (1812): '. . . the ecclesiastics were the principal authors of this rebellion. . . one can count by the hundreds the generals, brigadiers, colonels and other officers, all clerics, in the bands of the traitors, and there is scarcely a military action of any importance in which priests are not leading the enemy.’ As the Bishop of Pueblo told the king, Mexico was a nation which hid ‘a profound malice and irreconcilable hatred towards its conqueror underneath the most humble and abject exterior; Spain had controlled its colonies with only a token force for 300 years because the clergy had constantly preached obedience to the king. For a time, the bishops, the cathedral clergy and the Inquisition officials (most of them born in Spain) remained loyal, though their efforts to rally the lower clergy to the crown were ineffective. The last straw came in 1820, when the triumph of the liberals in Spain, followed by anti-clerical legislation, brought all the prelates, with two exceptions, out on the side of independence. Fr Mariano Lopez Bravo told Ferdinand VII in 1822 that Spain lost Mexico because the clergy had persuaded the people that their choice lye between loyalty to the crown and defending their religion from destruction, their priests from persecution and their churches from despoliation’. He said that when he had attempted to preach against independence ‘they branded me as a heretic’. Thus' Spain forfeited the New World by reforming its colonial pillar, the Church. The attempt failed: the Church emerged stronger; it retained its political and financial privileges. But it now reigned in isolation, without the support of the crown, and so in turn has tended to fall victim to the violent anti-clericalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until, quite recently, it has resumed its revolutionary role in defense of a new orthodoxy. The case of Latin America is without parallel. Yet it directs attention to what might be called the dynamic weakness of all the missions sponsored by mature Christianity. From the sixteenth century, Christian attempts to evangelize the world were continuous in one theatre or another, and at times 98