II. THE SPANISH CONCEPTION OF A REFORMATION.[649]…

II. THE SPANISH CONCEPTION OF A REFORMATION.[649]

§ 1. The Religious Condition of Spain.

The country, however, where all these various conceptions of what was meant by a reformation of the Church were combined in one definite scheme of reform which was carried through successfully, was Spain. It is to that country one must turn to see what mediævalists, who were at the same time reformers, wished to effect, and what they meant by a reformation of the Church. It included a measure of secular control, a revival and enforcement of all canonical laws framed to purify the morals of the clergy, a measured accommodation with Humanism, a steady adherence to the main doctrines of the Scholastic Theology, the preservation in their entirety of the hierarchy, the rites and the usages of the mediæval Church, and a ruthless suppression of heresy. Spain furnishes the example of what has been called the Catholic Reformation.

In Spain, as nowhere else in mediæval Europe, the firm maintenance of the Christian religion and patriotism had been felt to be one and the same thing. The seven hundred years' war, which the Christians of Spain had waged with the Moors, had given strength and tenacity to their religious sentiments, and their experience as Christians in daily battle with an enemy of alien race and alien faith, left to themselves in their Peninsula, cut off from the rest of Europe, had made them cling all the more closely to that visible solidarity of all Christian people which found expression in the mediæval conception of the mediæval Catholic Church. Spain had given birth to the great missionary monastic order of the Dominicans,--the leaders of an intellectual crusade against the penetrating influence of a Moslem pantheism (Averroism), --and to the great repressive agency of the Inquisition in its sternest and most savage form. It was Spain that was to furnish the Counter-Reformation, with its most devoted leader, Ignatius Loyola, and with its strongest body of combatants, the Society of Jesus which he founded.

It need scarcely be wondered at that it was in Spain that we find the earliest systematic attempts made to save the Church from the blindness and perversity of its rulers by the interposition of the secular authority to combat the deteriorating influence of the Roman Curia upon the local Church, and to restore discipline among the clergy. The Cortes of the various small kingdoms of the Spanish Peninsula repeatedly interfered to limit the overgrowth of clerical privileges, to insist on the submission of the clergy to the common law of the land, and to prevent the too great preponderance of clerical influence in secular administration. The ordinances of their Kings were used, time after time, to counteract the influence of harmful papal Bulls, and to prevent the interference of Italian ecclesiastics in the affairs of the Spanish Church. In the end of the fifteenth century the Spanish Bishops had been reduced to a state of dependence on the Crown; all exercise of ecclesiastical authority was carefully watched; the extent of ecclesiastical jurisdiction was specifically limited, and clerical courts were made to feel their dependence on the secular tribunals. The Crown wrung from the Papacy the right to see that piety and a zeal for religion were to be indispensable qualifications for clerical promotion. All this regulative zeal was preserved from being simply the attempts of politicians to control a rival power by certain fundamental elements in the national religious character, which expressed themselves in rulers as well as in the mass of their subjects. In Spain, more than in any other land, asceticism and mystical raptures were recognised to be the truest expression of genuine religious sentiment. Kings and commonalty alike shared in the firm belief that a real imitation of Christ meant to follow in the footsteps of the Man of Sorrows, who wandered about not knowing where to lay His head, and who was enabled to endure what was given Him to do and to suffer by continuous and rapt communion with the Unseen.

The ecclesiastical Reformer of Spain had all these elements to work upon, and they made his task comparatively easy.

§ 2. Reformation under Ximenes.

The consolidation of the Peninsula under Ferdinand and Isabella suggested a thorough reorganisation of the Spanish Church. The Crown extorted from the Papacy extraordinary powers to deal with the secular clergy and with the monasteries. The great Queen was determined to purge the Church of her realm of all that she deemed to be evil. She called to her councils three famous Churchmen in whom she had thorough confidence--the great Spanish Cardinal, Mendoza, her confessor, Hernando de Talavera, and Francesco Ximenes. It was Ximenes who sketched the plan and who carried through the reformation.

Francesco Ximenes de Cisneros, as he is called, had been a Franciscan monk devoted to the ideals of his order. He belonged to a poor family, and had somehow or other attracted the attention of Cardinal Mendoza, at whose instigation the Queen had made him her father-confessor (1492). She insisted on his accepting the dignity of Archbishop of Toledo (1495), and had selected him to carry out her plans for the organisation and purification of the Spanish Church. After his elevation to the arch-episcopal chair he gave the example of what he believed to be the true clerical life by following in the most literal way the maxims of St. Francis about self-denial, devotion, and ascetic life. He made these the ideal for the Spanish clergy; they followed where he led.

The Concordat of 1482 gave the Spanish Crown the right of "visitation" (held to involve the power to dismiss from office) and of nomination to benefices. Ximenes used these powers to the full. He "visited" the monasteries personally, and received full reports about the condition of the convents. He re-established in all of them monastic discipline of the strictest kind. The secular clergy were put to like proof. The secular power was invoked to sweep all opponents to reform from his path. His Queen protected him when the vacillations of the papal policy threatened to hinder his work. In the end, the Church in Spain secured a devoted clergy whose personal life was free from the reproaches justly levelled at the higher clergy of other lands.

Ximenes, having purified the morals of the Spanish clergy, next set himself to overcome their ignorance and lack of culture. In every Chapter within Castile and Aragon, two prebends were set apart for scholars, one of them for a student in Canon Law, and the other for an expert theologian. A special "visitation" of the clergy removed from their places all utterly ignorant persons. New schools of theology were instituted. In addition to the mediæval Universities of Salamanca and Valladolid, Ximenes founded one in Alcala, another in Seville, a third at Toledo. Alcala and Valladolid were the principal theological schools, and there, in addition to the older studies of Dogmatic Theology and Ethics, courses of lectures wore given in Biblical Exegesis. The theology taught was that of Thomas Aquinas, to the exclusion of the later developments of Scholastic under John Duns Scotus and William of Occam. The Augustinian elements in Thomas were specially dwelt upon; and soon there arose a school of theologians who were called the New Thomists, who became very powerful, and were later the leading opponents of the Jesuit teachers. There was also an attempt to make use of the New Learning in the interest of the old theology. Ximenes collected at Alcala the band of scholars who under his superintendence prepared the celebrated Complutensian Polyglot.

The labours of Erasmus were sympathised with by the leaders of this Spanish movement. The Princes of the Church delighted to call themselves his friends. They prevented the Spanish monks from attacking him even when he struck hardest at the follies of the monastic life. He was esteemed at Court. The most prominent statesmen who surrounded Charles, the young Prince of the Netherlands, the King of Spain, called themselves Erasmians. Erasmus, if we are to believe what he wrote to them,--which is scarcely possible,--declared that the work in Spain under Ximenes followed the best type of a reformation in the Church.

But there was another and terrible side to this Spanish purification of the Church and of the clergy. The Inquisition had been reorganised, and every opinion and practice strange to the mediæval Church was relentlessly crushed out of existence. This stern repression was a very real part of the Spanish idea of a reformation.

The Spanish policy for the renovation of the Church was not a reformation in the sense of providing room for anything new in the religious experience. Its sole aim was to requicken religious life within the limits which had been laid down during the Middle Ages. The hierarchy was to remain, the mediæval conceptions of priesthood and sacraments; the Pope was to continue to be the acknowledged and revered Head of the Church; "the sacred ceremonies, decrees, ordinances, and sacred usages"[650] were to be left untouched; the dogmatic theology of the mediæval Church was to remain in all essentials the same as before. The only novelty, the only sign of appreciation of new ideas which were in the air, was that the papal interference in the affairs of national Churches was greatly limited, and that at a time when the Papacy had become so thoroughly secularised as to forget its real duties as a spiritual authority. The sole recognition of the new era, with its new modes of thought, was the proposal that the secular authorities of the countries of Europe should undertake duties which the Papacy was plainly neglecting. Perhaps it might be added that the slight homage paid to the New Learning, the appreciation of the need of an exact text of the original Scriptures, its guarded approval of the laity's acquaintance with Holy Writ, introduced something of the new spirit; but these things did not really imply anything at variance with what a devoted adherent of the mediæval Church might readily acquiesce in.

§ 3. The Spaniards and Luther.

Devout Spaniards were able to appreciate much in Luther's earlier work. They could sympathise with his attack on Indulgences, provided they did not inquire too closely into the principles implied in the Theses--principles which Luther himself scarcely recognised till the Leipzig Disputation. Their hearts responded to the intense religious earnestness and high moral tone of his earlier writings. They could welcome his appearance, even when they could not wholly agree with all that he said, in the hope that his utterances would create an impetus towards the kind of reformation they desired to see. The reformation of the Spanish Church under Cardinal Ximenes enables us to understand both the almost universal welcome which greeted Luther's earlier appearances and the opposition which he afterwards encountered from many of his earlier supporters. Some light is also cast on that opposition when we remember that the Emperor Charles himself fully accepted the principles underlying the Spanish Reformation, and that they had been instilled into his youthful mind by his revered tutor whom he managed to seat in the chair of St. Peter--Adrian VI., whose short-lived pontificate was an attempt to force the Spanish Reformation on the whole of the Western Obedience.

If it be possible to accept the statements made by Glapion, the Emperor's confessor, to Dr. Brück, the Saxon Chancellor in the days before Luther's appearance at Worms, as a truthful account of the disposition and intentions of Charles V., it may be said that an attempt was made to see whether Luther himself might be made to act as a means of forcing the Spanish Reformation on the whole German Church. Glapion professed to speak for the Emperor as well as for himself. Luther's earlier writings, he said, had given him great pleasure; he believed him to be a "plant of renown," able to produce splendid fruit for the Church. But the book on the Babylonian Captivity had shocked him; he did not believe it to be Luther's; it was not in his usual style; if Luther had written it, it must have been because he was momentarily indignant at the papal Bull, and as it was anonymous, it could easily be repudiated; or if not repudiated, it might be explained, and its sentences shown to be capable of a catholic interpretation. If this were done, and if Luther withdrew his violent writings against the Pope, there was no reason why an amicable arrangement should not be come to. The papal Bull could easily be got over, it could be withdrawn on the ground that Luther had never had a fair trial. It was a mistake to suppose that the Emperor was not keenly alive to the need for a Reformation of the Church; there were limits to his devotion to the Pope; the Emperor believed that he would deserve the wrath of God if he did not try to amend the deplorable condition of the Church of Christ. Such was Glapion's statement. It is a question how far he was sincere, and if so, whether he really did express what was in the mind of the Emperor. Frederick of Saxony did not believe either in his sincerity or in his representation of the Emperor's real opinions; and Luther himself refused all private conference with Glapion. Yet it is almost certain that Glapion did express what many an earnest Spanish ecclesiastic thoroughly believed. We have an interesting confirmation of this in the conversation which Konrad Pellikan had with Francisco de los Angeles, the Provincial of the Spanish Franciscans at Basel. The Franciscan expressed himself in almost the very same terms as Glapion.[651]

Three forces met at the Diet of Worms in 1521--the German movement for Reform inspired by Luther, the Spanish Reformation represented by Charles v., and the stolid inertia of the Roman Curia speaking by the Nuncio Aleander. The first and the second could unite only if Luther retraced his steps and stood where he did before the Leipzig Disputation. If he refused, the inevitable result was that the Emperor and the Curia would combine to crush him before preparing to measure their strength against each other. The two different conceptions of reform may be distinguished from each other by saying that the Spanish conception sought to awaken the benumbed and formalist mediæval Church to a new religious life, leaving unchanged its characteristics of a sacerdotal ministry, an external visible unity under a hierarchy culminating in the Papacy, and a body of doctrine guaranteed by the decisions of Oecumenical Councils. The other wished to free the human spirit from the fetters of merely ecclesiastical authority, and to requicken the life of the Church through the spiritual priesthood of all believers. The former sought the aid of the secular power to purge national Churches and restore ecclesiastical discipline, but always under a decorous air of submission to the Bishop of Rome, and with a very real belief in the supremacy and infallibility of a General Council. The latter was prepared to deny the authority of the Bishop of Rome altogether, and to see the Church of the Middle Ages broken up into territorial or National Churches, each of which, it was contended, was a portion of the one Visible Catholic Church. But as separate tendencies may be represented by a single contrast, it may be said that Charles would have forgiven Luther much had the Reformer been able to acknowledge the infallibility of a General Council. The dramatic wave of the hand by which Charles ended the altercation between Official Eck and Luther, when the latter insisted that General Councils had erred, and that he could prove it, ended the dream that the movement in Germany could be used to aid in the universal introduction of the Spanish Reformation. If the ideas of reforming Spanish ecclesiastics and statesmen were to requicken the whole mediæval Church, some other way of forcing their acceptance had to be found.

§ 4. Pope Adrian VI. and the Spanish Reformation.

The opportunity seemed to come when, owing to the rivalries of powerful Cardinals and the steady pressure of Charles V. on the Conclave, Adrian of Utrecht was elected Pope. The new Pontiff had a long reputation for learning and piety. His courage had been manifested in his fearless denunciation of prevailing clerical abuses, and in the way he had dealt with difficult questions in mediæval theology. He had no sympathy with the new curialist ideas of papal inerrancy and infallibility, nor with the repeated assertions of Italian canonists that the Pope was superior to all ecclesiastical law. He rather believed that such ideas were responsible for the degradation of the Church, and that no amendment was possible until the whole system of papal reservations, exemptions, and other ways in which the Papacy had evaded the plain declarations of Canon Law, was swept away. The public confidence in his piety, integrity, and learning was so great that the Netherlands had entrusted him with the religious education of their young Prince, and none of his instructors so stamped themselves on the mind of Charles.

Adrian was a Dutch Ximenes. He had the same passionate desire for the Reformation of the Church, and the same ideas of how such Reformation could be brought about. He prized the ascetic life; he longed to see the monastic orders and the secular clergy disciplined in the strictest way; he had a profound admiration for Thomas Aquinas, and especially for that side of the great Schoolman's teaching which represented the ideas of St. Augustine. He so exactly reproduced in his own aspirations the desires of the Spanish Reformers, that Cardinal Carvajal, who with the grave enthusiasm of his nation was engaged in the quixotic task of commending the Spanish Reformation to the authorities in Rome, desired to take him there as an indispensable assistant. He was also in full sympathy with the darker side of the Spanish Reformation. During his sojourn in Spain he had become one of the heads of the Inquisition, and was firmly opposed to any relaxation of the rigours of the Holy Office. With Adrian in the chair of St. Peter, the Emperor and the leaders of the Spanish Church might hope to see their type of a reformation adopted to cure the ills under which the Church was suffering.

The new Pope did not lack sympathisers in Italy when he began his task of cleansing the Augean stables without turning the torrent of revolution through them. Cardinal Carvajal welcomed him in a speech which expressed his own ideas if it displeased his colleagues in whose name he was supposed to speak. A memorial drafted by Egidio, General of the Augustinian Eremites, was presented to him, which practically embodied the reforms the new Pope wished to see accomplished.[652] His programme was as extensive as it was thorough. A large part of it may be compared with the reforms sketched in Luther's Address to the Nobility of the German Nation. He disapproved of the way in which prebends were taken from foundations within national Churches to swell the incomes of Roman Cardinals. He disliked the whole system of papal reservations, indults,[653] exemptions, expectances, which under the fostering care of Pope John XXII. had converted the Curia into a great machine for raking in money from every corner of western Europe.[654] He disapproved of the system of encouraging complainants to pass over the episcopal courts of their own lands and bring their cases at once before the papal court. But every one of these reforms would cut off a source of revenue. It meant that hundreds of hungry Italian Humanists would lose their pensions, and that as many pens would lampoon the Holy Father who was intent on taking bread from his children. It meant that hundreds of ecclesiastical lawyers who had invested their savings in purchasing places in the Curia, would find themselves reduced to penury. It meant that the incomes of the Princes of the Church would shrink in an incalculable manner. Adrian set himself to show such men how to meet the changes in prospect. He brought his old Flemish peasant housekeeper with him to Rome, contented himself with the simple dishes she cooked for him, and lived the life of an anchorite in a corner of his vast palace on the Vatican hill; but in this case example did not seem better than precept. It had seemed so easy to the simple-minded Dutch scholar to reform the Church; everything was provided for in the Canon Law, whose regulations had only to be put in force. His Spanish experience had confirmed him in the possibility of the task. But at Rome he found a system of Rules of Chancery which could not be set aside all at once; there was no convenient Inquisition so organised that it could clear all objectors out of his path; no secular power always ready to support a reforming Churchman.

Where was he to begin? The whole practice of Indulgences appeared to be what was most in need of reform. Its abuses had kindled the storm in Germany. To purge them away would show how much in earnest he was. He knew the subject well. He had written upon it, and therefore had studied it from all sides. Rightly understood, Indulgences were precious things. They showed how a merciful God had empowered His Church to declare that He pardoned sins freely; and, besides, they proclaimed, as no other usage of the Church did, the brotherhood of all believers, within which the stronger could help the weaker, and the holier the more sinful, and all could fulfil the law of Christ by bearing each other's burdens. Only it was to be remembered that every pardon required a heart unfeignedly penitent, and the sordid taint of money must be got rid of. But--there was always a "but" for poor Adrian--it was shown to him that the papal court could not possibly pay its way without the money which came in so easily from the sale of Indulgences. He was baffled at the very start; checks, for the most part quite unexpected, thwarted every effort. He was like a man in a nightmare, set in a thicket of thorns, where no hewing could set him free, clothes torn, limbs bleeding, till at last he sank exhausted, welcoming the death which freed him from his impossible task. Adrian was the distinguished martyr of the Spanish Reformation. History has dwelt upon his failures; they were only too manifest. It has derided his simplicity in sending Chieregati to Germany with the confession that the Curia was the source of most of the evils which beset the mediæval Church, and at the same time demanding the death of Luther, who had been the first to show the fact in such a way that all men could see it. It has said little of the success that came in due time. Chieregati was unable to overcome the deeply rooted Evangelical Reformation in Germany. But his mission and the honest statement that the Curia was the seat of evil in the Church, date the beginnings of a reaction, of a genuine Romanist party with a vague idea of reforms on mediæval lines. It must be taken as the starting-point of the Counter-Reformation in Germany. Adrian's example, too, did much to encourage the few spiritually minded Churchmen in Italy, and its effects can be seen in the revival of a zeal to purify the Church which arose during the pontificate of Paul III.

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Chapter III

ITALIAN LIBERAL ROMAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR CONCEPTION OF A REFORMATION.[655]

§ 1. The Religious Condition of Italy.

Italy is the land which next to Spain is the most important for the Counter-Reformation. While we can trace in Spain and in Germany a certain solidarity of religious movement, the spiritual conditions of Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century were as manifold as its political conditions. It is impossible to speak of the Italians as a whole. Italy had been the land of the Renaissance, but that great intellectual movement had never rooted itself deeply in the people as it had done in Germany, France, or England.

The Italian peasantry were a class apart from the burghers as they were nowhere else. Their religion was usually a thinly veiled paganism, a belief in the omnipresence of spirits, good and bad, to be thanked, propitiated, coaxed or compelled by use of charms, amulets, spells, and ceremonies. The gods of their pagan ancestors had been replaced by local saints, and received the same kind of worship. To fight for their faith had never been a tradition with them as with the Spaniards; they were not troubled by any continuous sense of sin as were the people of the northern nations; but they had an intense fear of the supernatural, and their faith in the priest, who could stand between them and the terrors of the unseen, was boundless. Goodness touched them as it does all men. But the immorality of their religious guides did not embarrass them; a bad priest had as powerful spells as a good one. The only kind of Christianity which seemed able to impress them and hold them was that of Francis of Assisi. He was the highest embodiment of the Christian spirit for the Italian peasantry; the impression he had made upon the people of the Peninsula was enduring; the wandering revivalist preacher who lived as Francis had done always made the deepest impression. John of Capistrano owed much of his power to the fact that he remained always the Abruzzi peasant. During the whole of the period of the Renaissance the peasantry and the clergy who served the village chapels were regarded by those above them with a scorn that degenerated into hatred. We may search in vain through the whole of the literature of the time for the thought that any attempt ought to be made to lead them to a deeper faith and a purer life. The whole of the peasant population of Italy were believed to be beneath the level of desire for something better than what the religious life of the times gave.[656]

The towns presented an entirely different picture. There was a solidarity binding together all the civic population. The ordinary division of ranks, made by greater or less possession of wealth or by social standing, existed, but it did not prevent a common mode of thinking. We can trace the same thoughts among artisans, small shopkeepers, rich merchants, and the patricians of the towns. No country presented so many varieties of local character as Italy; but the inhabitants of Venice or Florence, Milan, Naples, however else they might differ, were all on the same spiritual level. They thought much about religion; they took the moral degradation of the Church and of the clergy to heart; they longed to see some improvement, if it was only within their own city. They were clearsighted enough to trace the mischief to the influence of the Roman Curia, and their belief in the hopelessness of reforming the evil Court gives a settled despondency to their thought which appears in most of the Chronicles. The external side of religion was inextricably interwoven with their city life. The civic rulers had always something to do with the churches, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical foundations within their walls. They had no great interest in doctrine; what they wanted was a real improvement in the moral living of clergy and of people. When an Italian town was blessed with a good and pious Bishop, it is touching to see how the whole population rallied round him.

When we turn to the outstanding men of the Italian peninsula, whose opinions have been preserved in their writings or correspondence, we find, to begin with, a great variety of religious opinions whose common note is unconstrained hostility to the Church as it was then constituted. The institution was a necessary evil, very important as a factor in the game of politics, useless for the religious life. This sentiment existed almost universally, both among those who merely maintained a decorous relation towards the existing ecclesiastical institutions, and among those who really believed in Christianity, and acknowledged its power over their mind and life. The papal Curia oppressed them; they were hopeless of its reformation, and yet there was little hope of a revival of religion, with its social worship and its "sacraments" unless it was reformed. The feeling of hopelessness is everywhere apparent; the deepest spiritual longings and experiences were to be treasured as sacred secrets of the heart, and not to be spoken about. Yet the work of Savonarola had not been entirely consumed in the fire that burnt the martyr, and the earlier message of Luther had found an echo in many Italian hearts.

§ 2. The Italian Roman Catholic Reformers.

There is no evidence of any widespread acceptance of the whole of Luther's teaching, little appreciation of the thought that the Church may be conceived as a fellowship of God with man depending on the inscrutable purpose of God and independent of all visible outward organisation, none of the idea that the Visible Church Catholic exists one and indivisible in the many forms in which men combine to listen to the Word and to manifest their faith. The Catholic Church was always to these pious Italians the great historical and external institution with its hierarchy, and its visible head in the Bishop of Rome. A reform of the Church meant for them the reformation of that institution. So long as this was denied them they could always worship within the sanctuary of their own souls, and they could enjoy the converse of likeminded friends. So there came into existence coteries of pious Italians who met to encourage each other, and to plan the restoration of religion within the Church. Humanism had left its mark on all of them, and their reunions were called academies, after the Platonic academies of the earlier Renaissance. The first had come into being before the death of Leo. X.--a society of pious laymen and prelates, who met in the little church of Santi Silvestro et Dorotea in the Trastevere in Rome. The associates were more than fifty in number, and they were all distinguished by their love of the New Learning, the strict purity of their lives, and their devotion to the theology of St. Augustine. The members were scattered after the sack of Rome (1527), but this Oratory of Divine Love gave rise to many kindred associations within which the original members found a congenial society.

The most important found a home in Venice. Its most prominent members were Gasparo Contarini, a distinguished Senator, who afterwards was induced to become a Cardinal. With him were Cardinal Caraffa, already meditating upon taking another path, and Gregorio Cortese, then Abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore. The friends met in the beautiful garden of the convent. All shades of opinion were represented in this circle, where Humanists and Churchmen met to exchange views about a reformation of the Church. To share in such intercourse, Reginald Pole willingly spent his days far from his native England. Cardinal Fregoso, Archbishop of Salerno, gathered a similar company around him at Genoa; and Ghiberti, Bishop of Verona, collected likeminded friends to talk about the possibilities of reformation. Modena and Padua had their Christian academies also. Nor must the influence of well-born, cultured and pious ladies be forgotten.

Renée, Duchess of Ferrara and daughter of Louis XII. of France, had accepted the Reformation in its entirety, and had surrendered herself to the guidance of Calvin. She corresponded with the great Frenchman and with Bullinger. She sheltered persecuted Italian Protestants, or had them safely conveyed to Switzerland.[657] But she saw good wherever it was to be found. Her letters, instinct with Christian graciousness, remind the reader of those of her kinswoman Marguerite of Navarre. She was full of sympathy with the circle of men and women who longed for a regeneration of Italy; and it is interesting to notice how the far more highly gifted Vittoria Colonna leant on the woman whose spiritual insight was deeper, and whose heart was purified by the trials which her decision in religious matters made her pass through.

Caterina Cybó, a niece of Pope Clement, Princess of Camerino, Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, Julia Gonzaga at Naples, and Vittoria Colonna at Viterbo and at Rome, formed a circle of highly intellectual and deeply pious women, who by their letters and intercourse inspired men who were working for the regeneration of the Church in Italy.

The network of their correspondence covered Italy from Venice to Naples and from Genoa to Camerino, and the letters exchanged between Marguerite of Navarre and Vittoria Colonna extended the influence of the association beyond the peninsula. The correspondents, men and women, regarded themselves as a band of companions pledged to each other to work together for the Reformation of the Church and of society. It is not easy to describe their aims, for they contented themselves for the most part with vague aspirations; and they all had their favourite likes and dislikes. It is impossible to doubt their earnestness, but it was of the high-bred placid kind. It had nothing of the Spanish exaltation of Teresa, of the German vehemence of Luther, of the French passion scarcely veiled by the logical precision of Calvin. They all admired St. Francis, but in a way out of sympathy with the common people, for they looked on asceticism with a mild wonder, and had no eagerness for that type of the imitation of Christ. Vittoria Colonna indeed found the convent at Viterbo a pleasant retreat for a few weeks at a time. A sigh sometimes escaped her that perhaps the nuns were all Marys who had chosen the better part, but that was only when she was weary with the perversities of the incomprehensible world. Their correspondence suggests an academy of the earlier Italian Renaissance, where the theory of Ideas had given way to doctrines of Justification, and the Epistles of St. Paul had taken the place of the Dialogues of Plato. There is a touch of dilettantism in their habits of thought, and a savour of the eighteenth century Salon in their intercourse. They longed to mediate between contending parties in the religious strife which was convulsing Europe beyond the Alps and might invade Italy; but they were unfit for the task. A true via media can only be found by men who see both sides of the controversy in the clear vision of thought, not by men who perceive neither distinctly. Sadoleto, to take one example, declared that he could see much to admire in the German Reformation, but what he approved were only the external portions which came from Humanism, not those elements which made the movement a religious revival. He disliked Luther, but had a great esteem for Bucer and Melanchthon. Indeed, the Italian Cardinal may be called the Melanchthon of Romanism. Melanchthon, rooted in Protestantism, felt compelled by his intellectual sympathy and humility to believe that there was some good in Romanism and to try to find it; Sadoleto, rooted in Romanism, was impelled to some sympathy with the Protestant theology. He had, however, a fatal lack of precision of thought. One doctrine tended to slide insensibly into another, into its opposite even, under the touch of his analysis. The man who could defend and commend auricular confession because it was an example of Christian humility, and saint-worship because it was a testimony to the immortality of the soul, ran the risk of being regarded as a trifler by Protestants and a traitor by Romanists. Such was his fate.

Contemporary with these offshoots from the Oratory of Divine Love was a revival among some of the monastic orders in Italy which had distinct connection with some of the members of the associations above mentioned.

The most important for its influence on the religious life of the people was the Order of the Capucins. It took its rise from Matteo de Grassis, a man of no intellectual powers, but endowed with more than the usual obstinacy of the Italian peasant. He was an Umbrian, like Francis himself. He belonged to a district where traditions of the great mediæval revivalist had been handed down from parents to children for generations, and one of these insisted that St. Francis had worn a hood with its peak pointed and not rounded, as the fashion among the monks then was. He declared that St. Francis had appeared to him in a vision, and had said that the brethren of the order ought to obey his rules "to the letter, to the letter, to the letter." He for one resolved to obey. He threw away rounded hood and wore one with pointed peak. The peasants refused to recognise the novelty, and drove him off with stones; his brethren argued with him, and belaboured him with their fists; but Matteo stuck to his pointed hood. The shape was nothing, but the Founder's commands were everything; Matteo would die before he would wear the rounded thing which had never been hallowed by St. Francis. The Princess Caterina Cybó took compassion on the hunted man, and gave him an asylum within her little principality of Camerino, where he wore his pointed capuze in peace. He soon sank back into the obscurity from which he had for a moment emerged. But new life was stirring among the Franciscans. Many were dissatisfied with the laxity of the order, and were longing for a monastic Reformation. All down the Middle Ages the watchword of every monastic revival had been, "Back to the Founder's rules." The pointed hood was a trifle, but it was the symbol of a return to the rigid discipline of Francis. Men heard that Camerino was an asylum for Franciscans discontented with the laxity of the superiors of the order, and gradually they flocked to the little principality. Vittoria Colonna had long mourned over the decadence of the genuine monastic life; she encouraged her friend the Princess Caterina to beseech her uncle the Pope to permit the pointed hood, and gradually there came into being a new fresh offshoot of the Franciscans, called the Capucins, who revived the traditions of St. Francis, and went preaching among the villages after the fashion of his earlier followers. Francis had told his disciples to beware of books when making their sermons; he had advised them to talk to the women as they washed, Italian fashion, by the side of streams, to masons while they were hewing, to artisans at their work, to find out what their religious difficulties were, what prevented them becoming really Christians in their lives, and then to discourse on the things they had heard. This old Franciscan preaching was restored by the Capucins, and they did more than any others to bring the people of Italy back to the discredited Church. They were accused of heresy. What "reformation" of the Franciscans was not? They were called Lutherans; and a good deal of Luther's Evangelical teaching was unconsciously presented in their sermons; but they could always quote St. Francis for what they said; and who could gainsay what Francis had taught?

This monastic revival affected the commonalty; another spoke to the educated classes. As early as 1504 an attempt had been made to reorganise the great Benedictine order, and a number of Benedictine abbeys had united to form a Congregation, which soon after its institution took the name of the Benedictine Mother-Cloister, Monte Cassino. Gregorio Cortese, one of the members of the Oratory of Divine Love, entered into the movement, and as Abbot of the Benedictine convent on the Island of Lerina on the Riviera, and afterwards in the convent of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, led his monks to show that their convents were the centres of learning dedicated to the service of the Church. He interested himself more especially in historical studies with a view of maintaining the historic traditions of the Church, which were beginning to be shaken by historical criticism, then in its infancy.

The improvement of the secular clergy was more important for the Church in Italy than any reforms of the monastic orders. An attempt to do this was begun by two members of the Oratory of Divine Love, Giovanni Pietro Caraffa and Gaetano da Thiene. Their idea was that in every diocese there ought to be a small band of men doing the work of secular clergy but bound by monastic vows. Their idea was taken from Augustine's practice of living monastically with some of his clergy; and fulfilled itself in the order of the Theatines. The name was derived from Theate (Chieti), the small See of which Caraffa was Bishop. These picked clergy were to be to the Bishop what his staff is to a general. The Theatines were not to be numerous, still less to include the whole secular clergy of a diocese; but they were to incite by precept, and above all by example, to a truly clerical life. The idea spread, and similar associations arose all over Italy.[658]

Such were the preparations in Italy for the Counter-Reformation. There was no prospect of any attempt to set the Church in order while Pope Clement VII. lived. He exhausted all his energies in preventing the summoning of a General Council--a measure on which Charles V. was growing more and more set as the only means of ending the religious dispute in Germany.

The accession of Paul III. (1534) seemed to inaugurate a new era full of hopes for the advocates of reform at the centre of the Roman Church. The new Pope made Gasparo Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, and Pole Cardinals. A Bull, which remained unpublished, was read in the Consistory (January 1536), sketching the possibility of reforming the Curia. The Pope appointed a commission of nine members to report upon the needful reforms, and the commission was everywhere regarded as a sort of preliminary Council, a body of men who were appointed to investigate and tabulate a programme of necessary reforms to be laid before a General Council. The Commissioners were Contarini, Caraffa, Ghiberti, Sadoleto, Pole, Fregoso, all of whom had been members of the Oratory of Divine Love, Aleander who had been Nuncio at the Diet of Worms, and Tomaso Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace. They met and drafted a report which was presented to the Pope in 1537, and is known as the Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum prælatorum de emendanda ecclesia. A more scathing indictment of the condition of the Roman Church could scarcely be imagined, nor one which spoke more urgently of the need of radical reformation. Its very thoroughness was disconcerting. It revealed so many scandals connected with the Papacy that it was resolved not to make it known. But it had been printed as a private document; a copy somehow or other reached Germany; it was at once republished there, with comments showing how a papal commission itself had justified all the German demands for a reformation of the Church. At Rome the appearance of reforming activity was maintained. Contarini, Caraffa, Aleander, and Badia were appointed to investigate the workings of those departments of the Curia which had most to do with the abuses detailed in the report of the Commission of Nine--the Chancery, the Datary, and the Penitentiary, where reservations, dispensations, exemptions, etc., were given and registered. They presented their report in the autumn of 1537. It was entitled Consilium quattuor delectorum a Paulo III. super reformatione sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ. But Contarini evidently felt that the Pope needed pressing. When the Commission of Nine had been appointed, the Pope had summoned a General Council to meet at Mantua in May 1537, in a Bull published on May 29th, 1536, and had also published a Bull of Reformation in September of that year. The Council never met--the war between Charles V. and Francis I. preventing. The Council was then summoned to meet at Vicenza, but was again postponed. The Emperor had no wish for a General Council in Italy, and the Pope was determined not to call one to meet in Germany. In these circumstances Contarini published his Epistola de potestate Pontificis in usu clavium, and his De potestate Pontificis in Compositionibus.[659]

Historians differ about the sincerity of Pope Paul III. in the matter of reform, and there is room for two opinions. His Italian policy was anti-Hapsburg, and the German Romanist Princes, at all events, had little belief in his sincerity, and were seriously meditating on following the example of Henry VIII. Cardinal Morone, the Nuncio in Germany, made no concealment of the difficulties attending the position of the Romanist Church there, and urged continually substantial reforms in Italy, and the necessity of a General Council. Perhaps these energetic messages stirred the Pope to renewed activity in Rome, and also to the necessity of formulating a definite policy with regard to the Lutherans beyond the Alps. In April (1540) commissions were appointed to reform certain offices in the Curia--the Rota, the Chancery, and the Penitentiary. Consultations were held about how to deal with the state of affairs in Germany. For the moment the ideas of the more liberal-minded Italian Reformers were in the ascendant. Charles had determined to find out whether it was not possible to reunite the broken Church in Germany. Conferences were to be held with the leading Lutheran theologians. The Pope determined to reject the advice of Faber, the Bishop of Vienna, and to refrain from pronouncing judgment on a series of Lutheran propositions sent to him for condemnation. Cardinal Contarini, whose presence had been urgently required by the Emperor, was permitted to cross the Alps to see, in conference with distinguished Lutherans, whether some common terms of agreement might be arrived at which would serve as a programme to be set before the General Council, which all were agreed must be summoned sometime soon.

§3. Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa.

This mission of Contarini's to Germany dates the separation between two different ways of proposing to deal with the Reformation movement. The two methods were embodied in two men, Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa. They had both belonged to the Oratory of Divine Love; they were both zealous to see the Church reformed in the sense of reviving its moral and spiritual life; they both longed to see the rent which had made itself apparent repaired, and the Church again reunited. They differed entirely about the means to be adopted to bring about the desirable end. The differences originated in the separate characters and training of the two leaders.

Gasparo Contarini belonged to an ancient patrician family of Venice, and spent the greater portion of his life in the service of the Republic. He was looked on as the ablest and most upright of its statesmen. He had drunk deeply of the well of the New Learning, and yet can hardly be called a Humanist. He had been a student at Padua, and had there studied and learned to appreciate Scholastic Theology. He had been trained as a Venetian statesman, and clung to the political ideas of the mediæval jurisprudence. The whole round of mediæval thought encircled and possessed him. Christendom was one great commonwealth, and embodied three great imperialist ideas--a world King, the Emperor; a world priest, the Pope; a realm of sanctified science, the Scholastic Philosophy under Theology, the Queen of the Sciences. He held these three conceptions in a broad-minded and liberal way. There was room under the Emperor for a community of Christian States, under the Pope for a brotherhood of national Churches, under Scholastic for the New Learning and what it brought to enrich the mind of mankind.

Erasmus had ridiculed Scholastic; Contarini's friend Cortese called it a farrago of words; Luther had maintained that it sounded hollow because at its centre was the vague eternal Something of Pagan Philosophy and not the Father who had revealed His heart in Jesus Christ; but Contarini saw the grandeur of the imposing edifice, believed in its solidity, and would do nothing to destroy it. But this did not prevent him sympathising strongly with Luther's doctrine of Justification by Faith, nor from believing that room might be found for it and other Protestant conceptions within the circle of medieval theological thought. He had little sympathy with the enthusiasm which some of his friends--Cardinal Pole for example--expressed for Plato. Aristotle was for him the great master-builder of human systematic thinking; but the Aristotle he recognised as the Master was not the sage revealed in the Greek text or commentaries (although he studied both), but the Aristotle who had cast his spell over Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. He was firmly persuaded that the Bishop of Rome was the Head of the Church, and as such had his place in the political system of Christendom from which he could not be removed without serious danger to the whole existing framework of society; but he looked on the Pope as a constitutional monarch bound to observe in his own person the ecclesiastical laws imposed by his authority on the Christian world. Luther, he believed, had recognised this in his earlier writings, and in this recognition lay the possibilities of a readjustment which would bring Christendom together again. On the other hand, Calvin's Institutio filled him with mingled admiration and dread. He recognised it to be the ablest book which the Protestant movement had produced; but the thought of a Christian democracy with which it was permeated, the stress it laid on the procession of the divine purpose down through the ages, and the manner in which it taught the prevenience of divine grace, were conceptions whose acceptance, he thought, would be dangerous to the political governance of mankind.

He dwelt with complacency on the thought that he had never longed for ecclesiastical place or power. The Pope had persuaded him to permit himself to be made Cardinal because the Holy See had need of his service. He was conscious with a sort of proud humility that he was generally esteemed the foremost Italian of his generation, that enthusiastic friends spoke of his learning and virtue as "more divine than human." He thought much more of his position as a Venetian Senator and the trusted counsellor of the Republic, whose constitution he believed to be the embodiment of the best political principles of the time, than he did of his place in the Roman Court. "I for my part, to tell the truth, do not think that the Red Hat is my highest honour," he was accustomed to say. Such was the leader of the liberal-minded Roman Catholics of Italy, who was asked by the Pope and urgently entreated by the Emperor to visit Germany and end the schism by his persuasions.

Giovanni Picture's Caraffa, the intimate, the rival and the supplanter of Contarini, belonged to one of the oldest noble families of Naples. His house was intimately allied to the Church, and for more than one hundred years its members had been Archbishops of Naples, and several had been made Cardinals. The boy was destined for the Church. As a child he had longed to enter a cloister, and had once set out to join the Dominicans. His family, however, had other views for him. He was sent when eighteen years of age to the papal court, and was soon almost burdened with marks of distinction and with offices. He had been highly educated while at Naples, and had steeped himself in the New Learning. At the Humanist Courts of Alexander VI. and Julius II. he studied Greek and Hebrew, and became an accomplished theologian besides. In 1504, much against his will, he had been consecrated Bishop of the small diocese of Chieti (Theate), lying in the wild Abruzzi district, almost due east of Rome, on the slopes from the highest spurs of the Apennines to the Adriatic. He found his people demoralised by constant feuds, and the priests worse than their parishioners. Caraffa, determined to reduce his unruly diocese to order, began with persuasion; and finding this of small avail, flogged people and clergy into something like decency by repeated spiritual censures and rigidly enforced excommunications. His methods revealed the man. His talents were of too high an order and his family influence too great to permit him to linger in his uncivilised diocese. He was sent as Nuncio to England and thence to Spain. His visit to the latter country made an indelible impression on his strong nature. His earnest petitions for the independence of his native Naples were contemptuously refused by the young King Charles, and the fierce Neapolitan pursued the Emperor with an undying hatred. But what was more important, his stay in Spain imbued him with the ideas of the Spanish Reformation. He was too much an Italian and too strong a believer in the papal supremacy to adopt the thought of secular interference in the affairs of the Church, but with that exception the Spanish method of renovating the Church took possession of him heart and soul. The germs of fanaticism, hitherto sleeping within him, were awakened to life, and never afterwards slumbered. He sympathised with the projects of Adrian VI., and was a power during his brief pontificate. During the reign of Clement VII. he took little part in public affairs, but all the attempts to put new life into the monastic orders were assisted by him. He viewed with some suspicion the attempt to conciliate the Germans; and the results of Contarini's dealing with the Protestants at Regensburg filled him with alarm.

Contarini's attempt to reunite the Church by reconciliation was twenty years too late. It is doubtful whether anyone in Germany save the Emperor had much faith in the uniting influences of a conference. Morone, who had for years represented the Vatican at the Court of Ferdinand of Austria, and who was perpetually urging the Pope to summon a General Council, was afraid ever since Hagenau that conferences benefited the Protestants more than the Romanists. Contarini himself had said that what was needed to overcome the German movement was neither conferences nor discussions about doctrine, but a Reformation in morals. The Curia regarded his mission as a dangerous experiment. They tied his hands as firmly as they could by his letter of instructions: He was to inform the Emperor that no Legate, not even the Pope himself until he had consulted the other nations, could modify the doctrines of the Church for the sake of the Germans; he was to do his utmost to prevent the assembly of a National Council for Germany. He heard from Paris that the French Romanists believed that he was about to betray the Church to the heretics. No one encouraged him except his own circle of immediate friends. The men with whom he was to work, Cardinal de Granvelle and Dr. Eck, were suspicious of him and of his antecedents. Nevertheless his natural and confirmed optimism urged him to the task.

The situation, looked at broadly and from the point of view taken by a contemporary who had made himself acquainted with the theology and constitution of the mediæval Church, was not so hopeless as it must seem to us with the history of what followed to enlighten us. The great mass of mediæval doctrines lay uncodified. They were not codified until the Council of Trent. The extreme claims made by the supporters of a papal absolutism--claims which may be briefly expressed by the sentence: The Church Universal is condensed in the Roman Church, and the Roman Church is represented by the Pope--which had been used to crush the Lutheran movement in its earliest stages, were of recent origin. Curialism could be represented to be almost as much opposed to the mediæval theory of the Church as anything that Luther had brought forward. There was a real via media, if it could only be discovered and defined. The commonplace opinions of men who were sincerely attached to the mediæval conception of the Church, with its claims to catholicity, with its doctrines, usages, ceremonies and hierarchy, could scarcely be better represented than in the declaration said to have been made by Charles V. to his sister Maria, his governor in the Netherlands:

"It happened that on the Vigil of St. John the Baptist the Emperor held a banquet in the garden. Now, when Queen Maria asked him what he thought of doing with the people and with the Confession (the Augsburg) that had been presented, he made reply: 'Dear Sister, when I was made chief of the Holy Roman Empire, the great complaint reached me that the people who profess this doctrine were more wicked than the devil. But the Bishop of Seville gave me the advice that I should not think of acting tyrannically, but should ascertain whether the doctrine is at variance with the articles of the Christian faith (the Apostles' Creed). This advice pleased me, and so I find that the people are not so devilish as had been represented; nor is the subject of dispute the Twelve Articles, but a matter lying outside them, which I have therefore handed over to the scholars. If their doctrine had been in conflict with the Twelve Articles I should have been disposed to apply the edge of the sword.'"[660]

The Twelve Articles, as the Apostles' Creed was called, always occupied a peculiar position in the Western Church. They were believed to contain the whole of the theologia revelata. The great Schoolmen of the most opposite parties (Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus alike) were accustomed to deduce from the Apostles' Creed fourteen propositions, seven on God and seven on the Incarnation, and to declare that they contained the sum of revealed theology; everything else was natural theology on which men might differ without being considered to have abandoned the essentials of the Christian faith. Charles V. had been taught at first, probably by Aleander's insistent reiterations, that Luther had denied some portion of this revealed theology; he had come to learn that he had been wrongly informed; therefore conference and adjustment were possible.

Men like Charles V. and Contarini could honestly believe that so far as doctrine was concerned a compromise might be effected.

§ 4. The Conference at Regensburg.

The Diet was opened at Regensburg in February 1541. The Emperor explained his position and intentions. He declared that the most important duty before them was to try to heal the division in religion which was separating Germany into two opposing parties. The one duty of the hour was to endeavour to come to a unanimous decision on religious matters, and to bring about this he proposed to name some peace-loving men who could confer together upon the points in debate. Count Frederick of the Palatinate, brother of the Elector, and Cardinal de Granvelle were nominated presidents: three pronounced Protestants, two pronounced Romanists, and one whose opinions were doubtful, were the assessors; Eck, Gropper, and Pflug were to support the Romanist side, Melanchthon, Bucer, and Pistorius were the speakers for the Protestants. Perhaps the only name that could be objected to was that of Eck; it was impossible to think of him as a man of peace. The Legate Contarini guided everything.

During preliminary conferences an understanding was come to on some practical questions which served to preserve an appearance of unanimity. It was thought that marriage might be permitted to the clergy and the cup to the laity within Germany; that the Pope might be honoured as the Primate of the Church, provided it was clearly understood that his position did not give him the power of perpetual interference in the affairs of the national Churches; that the hierarchy might be maintained if the episcopal jurisdiction were exercised conjointly by a vicar appointed by the Bishop and a learned layman appointed by the secular authority.

It was the business of the conference to discuss the deeper theological differences which were supposed to separate the two parties. So in the opening meetings the delegates began to consider those questions which gathered round the thought of Justification.

It was agreed that there was no distinction between the ordinances of grace and those of nature in the original condition of man. This declaration involved the denial of the distinction between the dona supernaturalia and the dona naturalia made so much of in Scholastic Theology, and the basis of a great deal of its Pelagian tendencies. It was expressly conceded by the Romanist theologians that man had lost his original freedom of will by the Fall--a concession directly at variance with the future declaration of the Council of Trent.[661] The statement agreed upon about the origin of sin was given almost in the words of the Augsburg Confession, and agrees with them. The doctrine of the tenacity of original sin scarcely differs from a statement of Luther's which had been condemned in the Bull Exurge Domine of Pope Leo X.[662] In the discussions and conclusions about this first head of doctrine the conclusions of Protestant theology had been amply vindicated.

There was more difficulty on the matter of Justification. Two definitions suggested by the Romanist theologians and by Melanchthon were successively rejected, and one brought forward, it is said by Contarini himself, was accepted after some discussion. It was couched in language which the Lutheran theologians had not been accustomed to use. It embodied phrases which Pole, Contarini, and other liberal Italian Roman Catholics had made their own. The Protestants of Germany, however, saw nothing in it to contradict their cherished ideas upon Justification, and they gladly accepted the definition. The statement, repeated more than once, that grace is the free gift of God and is not merited by our works, expressed their deepest thought, and completely excluded the meritorious character of ecclesiastical good works. They seemed rather pleased than otherwise that their thoughts could be expressed in language suggested by Romanist theologians.[663] It appears that Eck, while consenting to the definition, wished to avoid signing it, but was compelled by Granvelle to fix his name to the document.[664]

The fact that the Romanist and Protestant members of the conference could agree upon an article on Justification caused great rejoicings among Contarini's friends in Italy. Cardinal Pole was convinced that every obstacle in the way of reunion had been removed, and the most extravagant expectations were cherished.[665] The Protestant members of the conference were entirely satisfied with the results so far as they had gone.

The conference then turned to questions affecting the organisation and worship of the Church.

Somewhat to their surprise, the Protestants found that their opponents were willing to accept their general theory of what was meant by the Church and what were its distinguishing characteristics. The Christian Society was defined without any reference to the Pope as its permanent Head on earth. This provoked strong dissents from Rome when the definition was known there. Differences emerged when the power of the Church was discussed, and as there was no prospect of agreement it was resolved for the meanwhile to omit the article.[666]

The question of the Sacrament of the Holy Supper evoked differences which were felt to be almost insuperable. It was inevitable. For here the one fundamental divergence between the new Evangelical faith and mediæval religion came to practical expression. Nothing could reconcile the Evangelical thought of a spiritual priesthood of all believers with the belief in a mediating priesthood who could give and could withhold God. Doctrines might be stated in terms which hid this fundamental difference; a definition of Justification by Faith alone might be conceded to the Protestants; but any thought of a priestly miracle in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper had to be repudiated by the one party and clung to by the other.

At first things went smoothly enough; it was conceded that special ways of dispensing the Sacraments were matters indifferent, but whenever the question of Transubstantiation emerged, things came to a deadlock. It was perhaps characteristic of Contarini's somewhat surface way of dealing with the whole question at stake between the two parties, that he never probed the deeper question. He rested his plea for Transubstantiation on the ground that an important article of faith which had been assented to for so long must not be questioned.[667] The Protestants held a private conference, at which all the theologians present were asked to give their opinions in turn. There Calvin spoke, dwelling on the thought that Transubstantiation implied adoration, which could never be conceded. His firmness produced unanimity. Melanchthon drafted their common opinion, which was given in writing to Granvelle, who refused in strong language to accept it, and the conference came to an end. The more difficult practical subjects of the sacrificial character of the Mass and of private Masses were not discussed.[668]

This conference at Regensburg may almost be said to be the parting of the ways. Up to 1525 the movement under Luther had the appearance of a Reformation of the whole Church in Germany. From 1525 to the date of this conference there was always the expectation that the Lutherans who had formed territorial Churches might yet be included in a general Reformation of the whole German Church. Joachim II. of Brandenburg cherished the idea long after 1541; and Charles v. still believed that what could not be effected by mutual compromise might be done by a mediating creed imposed upon all by the authority of the Emperor. But compromise failed at Ratisbon, and there was no further hope of its succeeding.

The decisive character of the Regensburg conference was seen in Italy almost at once. Its failure involved the destruction of the party of Italian Romanists who hoped to end the religious strife by a compromise. When Contarini returned to Italy he found that his influence was gone. He was rewarded with the Government of Bologna, which removed him from the centre of things. He died soon after (Aug. 24th, 1542), leaving none behind him to fill his place. Ghiberti survived him only sixteen months. Caraffa had become more and more alienated from his early friends. Sadoleto, Pole, and Morone remained, all of them men of intellect, but lacking the qualities which fit men to be leaders in trying times. Pole lived to make atonement for his liberalism by hounding on the persecutions in England, and Morone by becoming the champion of ultramontanism at the close of the Council of Trent. The conception of a Catholic Reformation disappeared; the idea of a Counter-Reformation took its place.

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IV. IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND THE COMPANY OF JESUS.[669]

§ 1. At Manresa.

The little mountainous province of Guipuzcoa, lying at the corner of the Bay of Biscay, bordering on France, was the district of Spain which produced one of the greatest of her sons, Iñigo de Recalde de Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. The tower which was the family seat still stands, rough and windowless as a Scottish border keep, adorned with one ornament only, a stone above the doorway, on which are carved the arms of the family--two wolves in quest of prey. Guipuzcoa had never been conquered by the Moors, and its nobles, poor in their barren highlands, boasted that the bluest Gothic blood ran in their veins. The Recaldes belonged to the very oldest nobility of the district, and possessed the highly valued privilege of the right of personal summons to the coronation of the Kings of Leon. Their younger sons were welcomed at Court as pages, and then as soldiers; and the young Iñigo was a page at the Court of Ferdinand. He was well educated for a Spanish noble; could read and write; composed ballads; and could illuminate manuscripts with miniatures. Most of his spare time was employed in reading those romances of chivalry then very popular. When older he became a soldier like his elder brothers.

In 1521, when twenty-eight years of age (b. 1493), he was the youngest officer in command of the garrison of Pampeluna, ordered to withstand a combined force of invading French troops and some revolting Spaniards. The enemy appeared before the place in such overwhelming numbers that all but the youngest officer wished to surrender without a struggle. Iñigo's eloquence persuaded the garrison to attempt a desperate defence. No priest was among the soldiers; the Spaniards, according to their custom, confessed each other, and were ready to die at their posts. A bullet struck the young officer as he stood in the breach encouraging his men. His fall gave the victory to the besiegers.

The conspicuous bravery of Iñigo had won the respect of his enemies. They extricated him from the heap of dead under which he was buried, and conveyed him to the old family castle. There his shattered leg was so badly set as to unfit him for a soldier's career. He had it twice broken and twice reset. The prolonged torture was useless; he had to believe that he would never fight on horseback again. The dream of taking a man's part in the conquests which all Spaniards of that age believed lay before their country, had to be abandoned. His body was a useless log.

But Iñigo was a noble of the Basque provinces, and possessed, in a superlative degree it was to be discovered, the characteristics of his race--at once taciturn and enthusiastic, wildly imaginative, and sternly practical. He has himself recorded that, as soon as he was convinced that he could never become a distinguished soldier, he asked himself whether he might not become a famous saint like Dominic or Francis, and that the question arose from no spiritual promptings, but simply from the determination to win fame before his death. As he lay bedridden, thinking much and dreaming more, it suddenly occurred to him that no one could become a saint unless he lived very near God, and that his life had not been of such a kind. He at once resolved that he would change; he would feed on herbs like a holy hermit; he would go to Jerusalem as a devout pilgrim. This vow, he tells us, was the earliest conscious movement of his soul towards God. His reward came soon in the shape of his first revelation. The blessed Virgin, with the Child Jesus in her arms, appeared to him in a dream. He awoke, hustled out of bed, dragged himself to the small window of his turret-room, and looked out. The earth was dark, an obscure mingling of black shadows; the heavens were a great vault of deepest blue strewn with innumerable stars. The sight was a parable and an inspiration. "How dull earth is," he cried, "how glorious heaven!" He felt that he must do something to get nearer God. He must be alone in some holy place to think things out with his own soul. His brother's servants hoisted the maimed body of the once brilliant soldier on an ass, one foot in a boot, the wounded leg still swathed in bandages and its foot in a large soft slipper, and Iñigo left the old castle determined to live a hermit's life on Montserrat, the holy hill of Aragon.

There in the church of Our Lady of Montserrat he resolved to dedicate himself to her service with all the ceremonies prescribed in that masterbook of mediæval chivalry, Amadis of Gaul. He hung his arms on her altar, and throughout the long night, standing or kneeling, he kept his watch, consecrating his knightly service to the Blessed Virgin. At daybreak he donned an anchorite's dress, gave his knightly robes to the first beggar he met, and, mounted on his ass, betook himself to the Dominican convent of Manresa, no longer Iñigo Recalde de Loyola, but simply Ignatius.

At Manresa he practised the strictest asceticism, hoping to become in heart and soul fitted for the saint life he wished to live. Then began a time of unexpected, sore and prolonged spiritual conflict, not unlike what Luther experienced in the Erfurt convent. Who was he and what had been his past life that he should presumptuously think that God would ever accept him and number him among His saints? He made unwearied use of all the mediæval means of grace; he exhausted the resources of the confessional; he consulted one spiritual guide after another without experiencing any relief to the doubts which were gnawing at his soul. The whole machinery of the Church helped him as little as it had Luther: it could not give peace of conscience. He has placed on record that the only real help he received during this prolonged period of mental agony came from an old woman. Confession, instead of soothing him, rather plunged him into a sea of intolerable doubt. To make his penitence thorough, to know himself as he really was, he wrote out his confession that he might see his sins staring at him from the written page. He fasted till his life was in danger; he prayed seven times and scourged himself thrice daily, but found no peace. He tells us that he often shrieked aloud to God, crying that He must Himself help him, for no creature could bring him comfort. No task would be too great for him, he exclaimed, if he could only see God. "Show me, O Lord, where I can find Thee; I will follow like a dog, if I can only learn the way of salvation." His anguish prompted him to suicide. More than once, he says, he opened his window with the intention of casting himself down headlong and ending his life then and there; but the fear of his sins and their consequences restrained him. He had read of a saint who had vowed to fast until he had been vouchsafed the Beatific Vision, so he communicated at the altar and fasted for a whole week; but all ended in vanity and vexation of spirit.

Then, with the sudden certainty of a revelation, he resolved to throw himself on the mercy of God, whose long-suffering pity would pardon his sins. This was the crisis. Peace came at last, and his new spiritual life began. He thought no longer about his past; he no longer mentioned former sins in his confessions; the certainty of pardon had begun a new life within him; he could start afresh. It is impossible to read his statements without being struck with the similarity between the spiritual experience of Ignatius and what Luther calls Justification by Faith; the words used by the two great religious leaders were different, but the experience of pardon won by throwing one's self upon the mercy of God was the same.

This new spiritual life was, as in Luther's case, one of overflowing gladness. Meditation and introspection, once a source of anguish, became the spring of overpowering joy. Ignatius felt that he was making progress. "God," he says, "dealt with me as a teacher with a scholar; I cannot doubt that He had always been with me." Many historical critics from Ranke downwards have been struck with the likeness of the experience gone through by Luther and Ignatius. One great contrast manifested itself at once. The humble-minded and quiet German, when the new life awoke in him, set himself unostentatiously to do the common tasks which daily life brought; the fiery and ambitious Spaniard at once tried to conquer all mysteries, to take them by assault as if they were a beleaguered fortress.

He had his visions as before, but they were no longer temptations of Satan, the source of doubt and torture. He believed that he could actually see with bodily eyes divine mysteries which the intelligence could not comprehend. After lengthened prayer, every faculty concentrated in one prolonged gaze, he felt assured that he could see the mystery of Transubstantiation actually taking place. At the supreme moment he saw Christ in the form of a white ray pass into the consecrated bread and transform it into the Divine Victim (Host). He declared that in moods of exaltation the most impenetrable mysteries of theology, the Incarnation of our Lord, the Holy Trinity, the personality of Satan, were translated into visible symbols which made them plainly understood. These visions so fascinated him, that he began to write them down in simple fashion for his own satisfaction and edification.

In all this the student of the religious life of Spain during the sixteenth century will recognise the mystical devotion which was then characteristic of the people of the Peninsula. The Spanish character, whether we study it in the romances of chivalry which the land produced, or in the writing of her religious guides, was impregnated by enthusiasm. It was passionate, exalted, entirely penetrated and possessed by the emotion which for the time dominated it. In no country were the national and religious sentiment so thoroughly fused and united. The long wars with the Moors, and their successful issue in the conquest of Grenada, had made religion and patriotism one and the same thing. Priests invariably accompanied troops on the march, and went into battle with them. St. James of Compostella was believed to traverse the country to bring continual succour to the soldiers who charged the Moors invoking his name. A victory was celebrated by a solemn procession in honour of God and of the Virgin, who had delivered the enemy into the hands of the faithful. This intensity of the Spanish character, this temperament distinguished by force rather than moderation, easily gave birth to superstition and burning devotion, and both furnished a fruitful soil for the extravagances of Mysticism, which affected every class in society. Statesmen like Ximenes, no less than the common people, were influenced by the exhortations or predictions of the Beatæ,--women who had devoted themselves to a religious life without formally entering into a convent,--and changed their policy in consequence. It was universally believed that such devotees, men and women, could be illuminated divinely, and could attain to a state of familiar intercourse with God, if not to an actual union with Him, by giving themselves to prayer, by abstinence from all worldly thoughts and actions, and by practising the most rigid asceticism. It was held that those who had attained to this state of mystical union received in dreams, trances, and ecstasies, visions of the divine mysteries.

The heads of the Spanish Inquisition viewed this Mysticism, so characteristic of the Peninsula, with grave anxiety. The thought that ardent believers could by any personal process attain direct intercourse, even union with God, apart from the ordinary machinery of the Church, cut at the roots of the mediæval penitential system, which always presupposed that a priestly mediation was required. If God can be met in the silence of the believer's soul, where is the need for the priest, who, according to mediæval ideas, must always stand between the penitent and God, and by his action take the hand of faith and lay it in the hand of the divine omnipotence? Other dangers appeared. The Mystic professed to draw his knowledge of divine things directly from the same source as the Church, and his revelations had the same authority. It is true that most of the Spanish Mystics, like St. Teresa, had humility enough to place themselves under ecclesiastical direction, but this was not the case with all. Some prophets and prophetesses declared themselves to be independent, and these illuminati, as they were called, spread disaffection and heresy. Hence the attitude of the Inquisition towards Mystics of all kinds was one of suspicious watchfulness. St. Teresa, St. Juan de la Cruz, Ignatius himself, were all objects of distrust, and did not win ecclesiastical approbation until after long series of tribulations.

It is necessary to insist on the fact that Ignatius had a deeply rooted connection with the Spanish Mystics. His visions, his methods, the Spiritual Exercises themselves, cannot be understood apart from their intimate relations to that Mysticism which was characteristic of the religion of his land and of his age.

Ignatius was no ordinary Mystic, however. What seemed the whole or the end to Teresa or Osuna was to him only a part, or the means to something better. While he received and rejoiced in the visions vouchsafed to him, he practised the keenest introspection. He observed and analysed the moods and states of mind in which the visions came most readily or the reverse, and made a note of them all. He noted the postures and gestures of the body which helped or hindered the reception of visions or profitable meditation on what had been revealed. He saw that he could reproduce or at least facilitate the return of his visions by training and mastering his mind and body, and by subjecting them to a spiritual drill which might be compared with the exercises used to train a soldier in the art of war. Out of these visions, introspections, comparisons, experiments experienced in solitude at Manresa, came by long process of gradual growth and elaboration the famous Spiritual Exercises, which may be called the soul of the Counter-Reformation, as Luther's book on The Liberty of the Christian Man contains the essence of Protestantism.

Ignatius spent nearly a year at Manresa. He had accomplished his object--to find himself at peace with God. It remained to fulfil his vow of pilgrimage. He laid aside his hermit's garb, and with it his ascetic practices; but he believed it to be his duty to renounce all property and live absolutely poor. He left all the money he possessed upon a bench and walked to Barcelona, supporting himself by begging. There he was given a passage to Venice, and thence he sailed for the Holy Land. His enthusiasm, and above all his project for beginning a mission among the Turks, alarmed the chief of the Franciscans in Jerusalem, who insisted on shipping him back to Italy. He reached Barcelona determined to pursue such studies as would enable him to know theology. He had never learned Latin, the gateway to all theological learning, and the man of thirty entered school, and seated himself on the bench with boys. Thence he went to Alcala and to Salamanca, and attended classes in these towns. Before he had quitted Manresa he had begun to speak to others about his visions, and to persuade them to submit themselves to the spiritual drill of his Exercises. Some ladies in Barcelona had become his devoted disciples. At Alcala and Salamanca he had tried to make converts to his system. The ecclesiastical authorities of the districts, fearing that this was a new kind of dangerous Mysticism, seized him, and he was twice incarcerated in the episcopal Inquisition. It would probably have fared ill with him had it not been for the intercession of some of the distinguished ladies who had been his disciples. His imprisonment in both cases was short, but he was forbidden to discriminate between mortal and venial sins (a thing essential if he acted as a spiritual director) until he had studied theology for four years.

§ 2. Ignatius at Paris.

With prompt military obedience Ignatius decided to study at Paris. He reached the city in the beginning of 1528, driving an ass laden with his books and clothes. He went naturally to the College Montaigu, which under its Principal, Noël Béda, was the most orthodox in Paris; but with his well known determination to see and judge everything for himself, he soon afterwards obtained leave to reside in the College Ste. Barbe, one of the most liberal, in which George Buchanan was then a Regent.[670]

His sojourn in Paris could not fail to make a deep impression on the middle-aged Spaniard, consumed with zeal to maintain in its minutest details the old religion, and to destroy heresy and disobedience. Two passions possessed him, both eminently Spanish. He could say with St. Teresa that he suffered so much to see the Lutherans, whose baptism had rendered them members of the Church, lose themselves unhappily, that had he several lives he would willingly give them to deliver only one of them from the horrible torments which awaited them; but he also believed that it was for God a point of honour to avenge Himself on those who despised His word, and that it belonged to all the faithful to be instruments of the vengeance of the Almighty.

His keen practical nature grasped the religious situation in Paris (City and University), and suggested his lifework. He saw the strength of the Roman Catholic democracy face to face with the Reformation, and to what power it might grow if it were only organised and subjected to a more than military discipline. Ignatius was in Paris during the years when partisan feelings ran riot.

Francis I. was by taste and training a man of the Renaissance. It pleased him to be called and to imagine himself to be the patron of men of letters. He was as devoted as his selfish, sensual nature permitted him to be, to his sister Marguerite d'Angoulême, and for her sake countenanced such Reformers as Lefèvre and the "group of Meaux." He had a grudge against the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris for their attempts to baffle the Concordat of 1516; while he recognised the power which these two formidable associations possessed. He was an anti-Sorbonnist, who feared the Sorbonne (the great theological faculty of the University of Paris), and could not help displaying his dread. He had long dreamed of instituting a Collége de France, a free association of learned teachers, men who could introduce the New Learning and form a counterpoise to the Sorbonne which dominated the University. The project took many forms, and never came to full fruition until long after the days of Francis; but the beginnings were sufficient to encourage Reformers and to irritate to fury the supporters of the Sorbonne. The theological faculty of the University was then ruled by Noël Béda, a man of no great intellectual capacity, who hated everything which seemed to menace mediævalism. Béda, by his dogged courage, by his unflinching determination, by his intense conviction that he was in the right, was able to wage a pitiless warfare against the New Learning and every appearance of religious reform. He was able to thwart the King repeatedly, and more than once to attack him through Marguerite, his sister. His whole attitude and activity made him a forerunner of the Romanist League of two generations later, and, like the Leaguers, he based his power on organising the Romanist fanaticism lying in the populace of Paris and among the students of the Sorbonne. All this Loyola saw under his eyes during his stay in Paris. He heard the students of the Sorbonne singing their ferocious song:

"Prions tons le Roi de gloire Qu'il confonde ces chiens mauldicts, Afin qu'il n'en soit plus mémoire, Non plus que de vielz os pourris. Au feu, au feu! c'est leur repére Fais-en justice! Dieu l'a permys";

and the defiant answer:

"La Sorbonne, la bigotte, La Sorbonne se taira! Son grand hoste, l'Aristote, De la bande s'ostera! Et son escot, quoi qu'il coste, Jamais ne la soûlera! La Sorbonne, la bigotte, La Sorbonne se taira!

La saincte Escriture toute Purement se preschera, Et toute doctrine sotte Des hommes on oublîra! La Sorbonne, la bigotte, La Sorbonne se taira!"[671]

Amidst this seething crowd of warring students and teachers, Ignatius went, silent, watchful, observing everything. He cared little for theological speculation, being a true and typical Spaniard. The doctrines of the mediæval theology were simply military commands to his disciplined mind; things to be submitted to whether understood or not. Heresy was mutiny in the ranks. He had a marvellous natural capacity for penetrating the souls of others, and had cultivated and strengthened it by his habits of daily introspection and of writing down whatever, good or bad, passed through his own soul. It is told of him that in company he talked little, but quietly noted what others said, and that he had infinite genius for observing and storing details.[672] He sought to learn the conditions of life and thought outside Paris and France, and made journeys to the Low Countries and to England, saying little, thinking much, observing more. All the time he was winning the confidence of fellow-students, and taking infinite pains to do so--weighing and testing their character and gifts. He played billiards with some, paid the college expenses of others, and was slowly, patiently making his selection of the young men whom he thought fit to be the confidants of his plans for the regeneration of Christendom, and to be associates with him in the discipline which the Exercises gave to his own soul.[673]

He finally chose a little band of nine disciples--Peter Faber, Diego Lainez, Francis Xavier, Alonzo Salmeron, Nicholas Boabdilla, Simon Rodriguez, Paul Broet, Claude Jay, and Jean Codure. Codure died early. Faber, the first selected, was a Savoyard, the son of a poor peasant, with the unbending will and fervent spiritual imagination of a highlander. No one of the band was more devoted to his leader. Francis Xavier belonged, like Loyola himself, to an ancient Basque family; none was harder to win than this proud young Spaniard. Lainez and Salmeron were Castilians, who had been fellow-students with Ignatius at Alcala. Lainez had always been a prodigy of learning, "a young man with the brain of an ancient sage." He, too, had been hard to win, for his was not a nature to kindle easily; but once subdued he was the most important member of the band. Salmeron, his early companion, was as impetuous and fiery as Lainez was cool and logical. He was the eloquent preacher of the company. Boabdilla, also a Spaniard, was a man of restless energy, who needed the strictest discipline to make him keep touch with his brothers. Rodriguez, a Portuguese, and Jay, from Geneva, were young men of insinuating manners, and were the destined diplomatists of the little company. Broet, a phlegmatic Netherlander among these fiery southerners, endeared himself to all of them by his sweet purity of soul.

Such were the men whom Ignatius gathered together on the Feast of the Ascension of Mary in 1534 in the Church of St. Mary of Montmartre, then outside the walls of Paris. There they vowed that if no insuperable difficulty prevented, they would go together to Palestine to work for the good of mankind. If this became impossible, they would ask the Pope to absolve them from their vow and betake themselves to whatever work for the good of souls His Holiness directed them to do. No Order was founded; no vows of poverty and obedience were taken; the young men were a band of students who looked on each other as brothers, and who promised to leave family and friends, and, "without superfluous money," work together for a regeneration of the Church. Faber, already in priest's orders, celebrated Mass; the company dined together at St. Denys. Such was the quiet beginning of what grew to be the Society of Jesus.

The companions parted for a season to meet again at Venice.

§ 3. The Spiritual Exercises.

All the nine associates had submitted themselves to the spiritual guidance of Ignatius, and had all been subjected to the training contained in the Exercitia Spiritualia. It is probable that this manual of military drill for the soul had not been perfected at the date of the meeting at Montmartre (1534), for we know that Loyola worked at it from 1522 on to 1548, when it was approved by Pope Paul III.; but it may be well at this stage to give some account of this marvellous book, which was destined to have such important results for the Counter-Reformation.[674]

The thought that the spiritual senses and faculties might be strengthened and stimulated by the continuous repetition of a prescribed course of prayer and meditation, was not a new one. The German Mystics of the fourteenth century, to name no others, had put their converts through such a discipline, and the practice was not unusual among the Dominicans. It is most likely that a book of this kind, the Exercitatorio dela vida spirital of Garcia de Cisneros, Abbot of the Monastery of Montserrat (1500), had been studied by Ignatius while he was at Manresa. But this detracts nothing from the striking and unique originality of the Exercitia Spiritualia, they stand alone in plan, contents, and intended result.[675] They were the outcome of Loyola's protracted spiritual struggles, and of his cool introspection of his own soul during these months of doubt and anguish. Their evident intention is to guide the soul through the long series of experiences which Loyola had endured unaided, and to lead it to the peace which he had found.

It is universally admitted that Ignatius had always before him the conception of military drill. He wished to discipline the soul as the drill-sergeant moulds the body. The Exercises are not closet-rules for solitary believers seeking to rise to communion with God by a ladder of meditation. A guide was indispensable, the Master of the Exercises, who had himself conquered all the intricacies of the method, and who, besides, must have as intimate a knowledge as it was possible to acquire of the details of the spiritual strength and weakness of his pupil. It was the easier to have this knowledge, as the disciple must be more than half won before he is invited to pass through the drill. He must have submitted to one of the fathers in confession; he must be made to understand the absolute necessity of abandoning himself to the exercises with his whole heart and soul; he must promise absolute submission to the orders of the director; he must by frequent confession reveal the recesses of his soul, and describe the most trivial thoughts which flit through it; above all, he must enter on his prolonged task in a state of the liveliest expectation of the benefits to be derived from his faithful performance of the prescribed exercises.[676] A large, though strictly limited, discretion is permitted to the Master of the Exercises in the details of the training he insists upon.

The course of drill extends over four weeks[677] (twenty-five days). It includes prolonged and detailed meditations on four great subjects:--sin and conscience; the earthly Kingdom of Christ; the Passion of Jesus; and the Love of God with the Glory of the Risen Lord.[678] During all this time the pupil must live in absolute solitude. Neither sight nor sound from the world of life and action must be allowed to enter and disturb him. He is exhorted to purge his mind of every thought but the meditation on which he is engaged; to exert all his strength to make his introspection vivid and his converse with the Deity unimpeded.

True meditation, according to Ignatius, ought to include four things--a preparatory prayer; præludia, or the ways of attuning the mind and sense in order to bring methodically and vividly some past historical scene or embodiment of doctrine before the soul of the pupil; puncta, or definite heads of each meditation on which the thoughts are to be concentrated, and on which memory, intellect, and will are to be individually exercised; colloquia, or ecstatic converse with God, without which no meditation is supposed to be complete, and in which the pupil, having placed the crucifix before him, talks to God and hears His voice answering him.

When the soul's progress on the long spiritual journey in which it is led during these meditations is studied, one can scarcely fail to note the crass materialism which envelops it at every step. The pupil is required to see in the mirror of his imagination the boundless flames of hell, and souls encased in burning bodies; to hear the shrieks, howlings, and blasphemies; to smell the sulphur and intolerable stench; to taste the saltness of the tears, and to feel the scorching touch of the flames.[679] When the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane is the subject of meditation, he must have in the camera obscura of his imagination a garden, large or small, see its enclosing walls, gaze and gaze till he discerns where Christ is, where the Apostles sleep, perceive the drops of sweat, touch the clothes of our Lord.[680] When he thinks of the Nativity, he must conjure up the figures of Joseph, Mary, the Child, and a maid-servant, hear their homely family talk, see them going about their ordinary work.[681] The same crass materialism envelops the meditations about doctrinal mysteries. Thinking upon the Incarnation is almost childishly limited to picturing the Three Persons of the Trinity contemplating the broad surface of the earth and men hurrying to destruction, then resolving that the Second is to descend to save; and to the interview between the angel Gabriel and the Virgin.[682]

A second characteristic of this scheme of meditation is the extremely limited extent of its sphere. The attention is confined to a few scenes in the life of our Lord and of the Virgin. No lessons from the Old Testament are admitted. All theological speculation is strictly excluded. What is aimed at is to produce an intense and concentrated impression which can never be effaced while life lasts. The soul is alternately torn by terror and soothed by the vision of heavenly delights. "The designed effect was to produce a vivid and varied hypnotic dream of twenty-five days, from the influence of which a man should never wholly free himself."[683]

The outstanding feature, however, of the Exercises and of the Directory is the minute knowledge they display of the bodily conditions and accompaniments of states of spiritual ecstasy, and the continuous, not to say unscrupulous, use they make of physical means to create spiritual abandon. They master the soul by manipulating the body. Not that self-examination, honest and careful recognition of sins and weaknesses in presence of temptation, have no place in the prolonged course of discipline. This is inculcated with instructions which serve to make it detailed, intense, almost scientific. The pupil is ordered to examine himself twice a day, in the afternoon and in the evening, and to make clear to himself every sin and failure that has marked his day's life. He is taught to enter them all, day by day, in a register, which will show him and his confessor his moral condition with arithmetical accuracy. But during his own period of spiritual struggle and depression at Manresa, Ignatius, in spite of the mental anguish which tore his soul, had been noting the bodily accompaniments of his spiritual states; and he pursued the same course of introspection when rejoicing in the later visions of God and of His grace. The Exercises and the Directory are full of minute directions about the physical conditions which Ignatius had found by experience to be the most suitable for the different subjects of meditation. The old Buddhist devotee was instructed to set himself in a spiritual trance by the simple hypnotic process of gazing at his own navel; the Ignatian directions are much more complex. The glare of day, the uncertainty of twilight, the darkness of night are all pressed into service; some subjects are to be pondered standing upright motionless, others while walking to and fro in the cell, when seated, when kneeling, when stretched prone on the floor; some ought to be meditated upon while the body is weak with fasting, others soon after meals; special hours, the morning, the evening, the middle of the night, are noted as the most profitable times for different meditations, and these vary with the age and sex of the disciple. Ignatius recognises the infinite variety that there is in man, and says expressly that general rules will not fit every case. The Master of Exercises is therefore enjoined to study the various idiosyncrasies of his patients, and vary his discipline to suit their mental and physical conditions.

It is due chiefly to this use of the conditions of the body acting upon the mind that Ignatius was able to promise to his followers that the ecstasies which had been hitherto the peculiar privilege of a few favoured saints should become theirs. The Reformation had made the world democratic; and the Counter-Reformation invited the mob to share the raptures and the visions of a St. Catherine or a St. Teresa.

The combination of a clear recognition of the fact that physical condition may account for much in so-called spiritual moods with the use made of it to create or stimulate these moods, cannot fail to suggest questions. It is easy to understand the Mystic, who, ignorant of the mysterious ways in which the soul is acted upon by the body, may rejoice in ecstasies and trances which have been stimulated by sleepless nights and a prolonged course of fasting. It is not difficult to understand the man who, when he has been taught, casts aside with disdain all this juggling with the soul through the body. But it is hard to see how anyone who perceived with fatal clearness the working of the machinery should ever come to think that real piety could be created in such mechanical ways. To believe with some that the object Ignatius had was simply to enslave mankind, to conquer their souls as a great military leader might master their lives, is both impossible and intolerable. No one can read the correspondence of Loyola without seeing that the man was a devout and earnest-minded Christian, and that he longed to bring about a real moral reformation among his contemporaries. Perhaps the key to the difficulty is given when it is remembered that Ignatius never thought that the raptures and the terrors his course of exercises produced were an end in themselves, as did the earlier Mystics. They were only a means to what followed. Ignatius believed with heart and soul that the essence of all true religion was the blindest submission to what he called the "true Spouse of Christ and our Holy Mother, which is the orthodox, catholic, and hierarchical Church." We have heard him during his time of anguish at Manresa exclaim, "Show me, O Lord, where I can find Thee; I will follow like a dog, if I only learn the way of salvation!" He fulfilled his vow to the letter. He never entered into the meaning of our Lord's saying, "Henceforth I call you not servants ... but friends"; he had no understanding of what St. Paul calls "reasonable service" (=logikê latreia=). The only obedience he knew was unreasoning submission, the obedience of a dog. His most imperative duty, he believed, lay in the resignation of his intelligence and will to ecclesiastical guidance in blind obedience to the Church. It is sometimes forgotten how far Ignatius carried this. It is not that he lays upon all Christians the duty of upholding every portion of the mediæval creed, of mediæval customs, institutions, and superstitions; or that the philosophy of St. Thomas of Bonaventura, of the Master of the Sentences, and of "other recent theologians," is to be held as authoritative as that of Holy Writ;[684] but "if the Church pronounces a thing which seems to us white to be black, we must immediately say that it is black."[685] This was for him the end of all perfection; and he found no better instrument to produce it than the prolonged hypnotic trance which the Exercises caused.

§ 4. Ignatius in Italy.

In the beginning of 1537 the ten associates found themselves together at Venice. A war between that Republic and the Turks made it difficult for them to think of embarking for Palestine; and they remained, finding solace in intercourse with men who were longing for a moral regeneration of the Church. Contarini did much for them; Vittoria Colonna had the greatest sympathy with their projects; Caraffa only looked at them coldly. The mind of Ignatius was then full of schemes for improving the moral tone of society and of the Church--daily prayer in the village churches, games of chance forbidden by law; priests' concubines forbidden to dress as honest women did, etc.;--all of which things Contarini and Vittoria had at heart.

After a brief stay in Venice, Ignatius, Lainez, and Faber travelled to Rome, and were joined there by the others in Easter week (1538). No Pontiff was so accessible as Paul III., and the three had an audience, in which they explained their missionary projects. But this journey through Italy had evidently given Ignatius and his companions new ideas. The pilgrimage to Palestine was definitely abandoned, the money which had been collected for the voyage was returned to the donors, and the associates took possession of a deserted convent near Vicenza to talk over their future. This conference may be called the second stage in the formation of the Order. They all agreed to adopt a few simple rules of life--they were to support themselves by begging; they were to go two by two, and one was always to act as the servant for the time being of the other; they were to lodge in public hospitals in order to be ready to care for the sick; and they pledged themselves that their chief work would be to preach to those who did not go to church, and to teach the young.

The Italian towns speedily saw in their midst a new kind of preachers, who had caught the habits of the well-known popular improvisatori. They stood on the kerb-stones at the corners of streets; they waved their hats; they called aloud to the passers-by. When a small crowd was gathered they began their sermons. They did not preach theology. They spoke of the simple commands of God set forth in the Ten Commandments, and insisted that all sins were followed by punishment here or hereafter. They set forth the prescriptions of the Church. They described the pains of hell and the joys of heaven. The crowds who gathered could only partially understand the quaint mixture of Italian and Spanish which they heard. But throughout the Middle Ages the Italian populace had always been easily affected by impassioned religious appeals, and the companions created something like a revival among the masses of the towns.

It was this experience which made Ignatius decide upon founding a Company of Jesus. It was the age of military companies in Italy, and the mind of Ignatius always responded to anything which suggested a soldier's life, Other Orders might take the names of their founders; he resolved that his personality should be absorbed in that of his Crucified Lord. The thought of a new Order commended itself to his nine companions. They left their preaching, journeyed by various paths to Rome, each of them meditating on the Constitution which was to be drafted and presented to the Pope.

The associates speedily settled the outlines of their Constitution. Cardinal Contarini, ever the friend of Loyola, formally introduced them to the Pope. In audience, Ignatius explained his projects, presented the draft Constitution of the proposed new Order, showed how it was to be a militia vowed to perpetual warfare against all the enemies of the Papacy, and that one of the vows to be taken was: "That the members will consecrate their lives to the continual service of Christ and of the Popes, will fight under the banner of the Cross, and will serve the Lord and the Roman Pontiff as God's Vicar upon earth, in such wise that they shall be bound to execute immediately and without hesitation or excuse all that the reigning Pontiff or his successors may enjoin upon them for the profit of souls or for the propagation of the faith, and shall do so in all provinces whithersoever he may send them, among Turks or any other infidels, to the farthest Ind, as well as in the region of heretics, schismatics, or unbelievers of any kind." Paul III. was impressed with the support that the proposed Order would bring to the Papacy in its time of stress. He is reported to have said that he recognised the Spirit of God in the proposals laid before him, and he knew that the associates were popular all over Italy and among the people of Rome. But all such schemes had to be referred to a commission of three Cardinals to report before formal sanction could be given.

Then Loyola's troubles began. The astute politicians who guided the counsels of the Vatican were suspicious of the movement. They had no great liking for Spanish Mysticism organised as a fighting force; they disliked the enormous powers to be placed in the hands of the General of the "Company"; they believed that the Church had suffered from the multiplication of Orders; eight months elapsed before all these difficulties were got rid of. Ignatius has placed on record that they were the hardest months in his life.

During their prolonged audience Paul III. had recognised the splendid erudition of Lainez and Faber. He engaged them, and somewhat later Salmeron, as teachers of theology in the Roman University, where they won golden opinions. Ignatius meanwhile busied himself in perfecting his Exercises, in explaining them to influential persons, and in inducing many to try their effect upon their own souls. Contarini begged for and received a MS. copy. Dr. Ortiz, the Ambassador of Charles V. at Rome, submitted himself to the discipline, and became an enthusiastic supporter. "It was then," says Ignatius, "that I first won the favour and respect of learned and influential men." But the opposition was strong. The old accusations of heresy were revived. Ignatius demanded and was admitted to a private audience of the Pope. He has described the interview in one of his letters.[686] He spoke with His Holiness for more than an hour in his private room; he explained the views and intentions of himself and of his companions; he told how he had been accused of heresy several times in Spain and at Paris, how he had even been imprisoned at Alcala and Salamanca, and that in each case careful inquiry had established his innocence; he said he knew that men who wished to preach incurred a great responsibility before God and man, and that they must be free from every taint of erroneous doctrine; and he besought the Pope to examine and test him thoroughly.[687] On Sept. 27th, 1540, the Bull Regimini militantis ecclesiæ was published, and the Company of Jesus was founded. The student band of Montmartre, the association of revivalist preachers of Vicenza, became a new Order, a holy militia pledged to fight for the Papacy against all its assailants everywhere and at all costs. In the Bull the members of the Company were limited to sixty, whether as a concession to opponents or in accordance with the wishes of Ignatius, is unknown. It might have been from the latter cause. In times of its greatest popularity the number of members of full standing has never been very large--not more than one per cent of those who bear the name.[688] The limitation, from whatever motive it was inserted, was removed in a second Bull, Injunctum nobis, dated March 14th, 1543.

§ 5. The Society of Jesus.

On April 4th, 1541, six out of the ten original members of the Order (four were absent from Rome) met to elect their General; three of those at a distance sent their votes in writing; Ignatius was chosen unanimously. He declined the honour, and was again elected on April 7th. He gave way, and on April 22nd (1541) he received the vows of his associates in the church of San Paolo fuori le mura.

The new Order became famous at once; numbers sought to join it; and Ignatius found himself compelled to admit more members than he liked. He felt that the more his Society increased in numbers and the wider its sphere of activity, the greater the need for a strict system of laws to govern it. All other Orders of monks had their rules, which stated the duties of the members, the mode of their living together, and expressed the common sentiment which bound them to each other. The Company of Jesus, which from the first was intended to have a strict military discipline, and whose members were meant to be simply dependent units in a great machine moved by the man chosen to be their General, required such rules even more than any other. Ignatius therefore set himself to work on a Constitution. All we know of the first Constitution presented by the ten original members when they had their audience with Pope Paul III., is contained in the Bull of Foundation, and it is evident that it was somewhat vague. It did contain, however, four features, perhaps five, if the fourth vow of special obedience to the Pope be included, which were new. The Company was to be a fighting Order, a holy militia; it was to work for the propagation of the faith, especially by the education of the young; the members were not to wear any special or distinctive dress; and the power placed in the hands of the General was much greater than that permitted to the heads of any other of the monastic Orders. At the same time, constitutional limitations, resembling those in other Orders, were placed on the power of the General. There was to be a council, consisting of a majority of the members, whom the General was ordered to consult on all important occasions; and in less weighty matters he was bound to take the advice of the brethren near him. Proposed changes tending to free the General from these limitations were given effect to in the Bulls, Licet debitum pastoralis officii (Oct. 18th, 1549) and Exposcit pastoralis officii (July 21st, 1550); but the Bulls themselves make it clear that the Constitution had not taken final form even then. It is probable that the completed Constitution drafted by Ignatius was not given to the Society until after his death.

The way in which he went to work was characteristic of the man, at once sternly practical and wildly visionary. He first busied himself with arrangements for starting the educational work which the Company had undertaken to do; he assorted the members of his Society into various classes;[689] and then he turned to the Constitution. He asked four of his original companions, Lainez, Salmeron, Broet, and Jay, all of whom were in Rome, to go carefully over all the promises which had been made to the Pope, or what might be implied in them, and from this material to form a draft Constitution. He gave them one direction only to guide them in their work: they were to see that nothing was set down which might imply that it was a deadly sin to alter the rules of the Company in time to come. The fundamental aim of his Company was different from that of all other Orders. It was not to consist of societies of men who lived out of the world to save their own souls, as did the Benedictines; nor was it established merely to be a preaching association, like the Dominicans; it was more than a fraternity of love, like the Franciscans. It was destined to aid fellow-men in every way possible; and by fellow-men Ignatius meant the obedient children of the catholic hierarchical Church. It was to fight the enemies of God's Vicar upon earth with every weapon available. The rules of other Orders could not help him much. He had to think all out for himself. During these months and years Ignatius kept a diary, in which he entered as in a ledger his moods of mind, the thoughts that passed through it, the visions he saw, and the hours at which they came to him.[690] Every possible problem connected with the Constitution of his Company was pondered painfully. It took him a month's meditation ere he saw how to define the relation of the Society to property. Every solution came to him in a flash with the effect of a revelation, usually in the short hour before Mass. Once, he records, it took place "on the street as I returned from Cardinal Carpi." It was in this way that the Constitution grew under his hands, and he believed that both it and the Exercises were founded on direct revelations from God.

This was the Constitution which was presented by Lainez to the assembly which elected him the successor of Loyola (July 2nd, 1558). The new General added a commentary or Directorium of his own, which was also accepted. It received papal sanction under Pius IV.

In this Constitution the Society of Jesus was revealed as an elaborate hierarchy rising from Novices through Scholastics, Coadjutors, Professed of Four Vows, with the General at its head, an autocrat, controlling every part, even the minutest, of the great machine. Nominally, he was bound by the Constitution, but the inner principle of this elaborate system of laws was apparent fixity of type qualified by the utmost laxity in practice. The most stable principles of the Constitution were explained or explained away in the Directorium, and by such an elaborate labyrinth of exceptions that it proved no barrier to the will of the General. He stood with his hand on the lever, and could do as he pleased with the vast machine, which responded in all its parts to his slightest touch. He had almost unlimited power of "dispensing with formalities, freeing from obligations, shortening and lengthening the periods of initiation, retarding or advancing a member in his career." Every member of the Society was bound to obey his immediate superiors as if they stood for him in the place of Christ, and that to the extent of doing what he considered wrong, of believing that black was white if the General so willed it. The General resided at Rome, holding all the threads of the complicated affairs of the Society in his hands, receiving minute reports of the secret and personal history of every one of its members, dealing as he pleased with the highest as well as the lowest of his subordinates.

"Yet the General of the Jesuits, like the Doge of Venice, had his hands tied by subtly powerful though almost invisible fetters. He was subjected at every hour of the day and night to the surveillance of five sworn spies, especially appointed to prevent him from altering the type or neglecting the concerns of the Order. The first of these functionaries, named the Administrator, who was frequently also the confessor of the General, exhorted him to obedience, and reminded him that he must do all things for the glory of God. Obedience and the glory of God, in Jesuit phraseology, meant the maintenance of the Company. The other four were styled Assistants. They had under their charge the affairs of the chief provinces; one overseeing the Indies, another Portugal and Spain, a third France and Germany, a fourth Italy and Sicily. Together with the Administrator, the Assistants were nominated by the General Congregation (an assembly of the Professed of the Four Vows), and could not be removed or replaced without its sanction. It was their duty to regulate the daily life of the General, to control his private expenditure on the scale which they determined, to prescribe what he should eat and drink, to appoint his hours for sleep, and religious exercises, and the transaction of public business.... The Company of Jesus was thus based upon a system of mutual and pervasive espionage. The novice on entering had all his acts, habits, and personal qualities registered. As he advanced in his career, he was surrounded by jealous brethren, who felt it their duty to report his slightest weakness to a superior. The superiors were watched by one another and by their inferiors. Masses of secret information poured into the secret cabinet of the General; and the General himself ate, slept, prayed, worked, and moved beneath the fixed gaze of ten vigilant eyes."[691]

Historians have not been slow to point out the evils which this Society has wrought in the world, its purely political aims, the worldliness which deadened its spiritual life, and its degradation of morals, which had so much to do with sapping the ethical life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is frequently said that the cool-headed Lainez is responsible for most of the evil, and that a change may be dated from his Generalship. There seems to be a wide gulf fixed between the Mystic of Manresa, the revival preacher of Vicenza, the genuine home mission work in Rome, and the astute, ruthless worldly political work of the Society. Yet almost all the changes may be traced back to one root, the conception which Ignatius held of what was meant by true religion. It was for him, from first to last, an unreasoning, blind obedience to the dictates of the catholic hierarchic Church. It was this which poisoned the very virtues which gave Loyola's intentions their strength, and introduced an inhuman element from the start.

He set out with the noble thought that he would work for the good of his fellow-men; but his idea of religion narrowed his horizon. His idea of "neighbour" never went beyond the thought of one who owed entire obedience to the Roman Pontiff--all others were as much outside the sphere of the brotherhood of mankind as the followers of Mahomet were for the earliest Crusaders. Godfrey of Bouillon was both devout and tender-hearted, yet when he rode, a conqueror, into Jerusalem up the street filled with the corpses of slaughtered Moslems, he saw a babe wriggling on the breast of its dead mother, and, stooping in his saddle, he seized it by the ankle and dashed its head against the wall. For Ignatius, as for Godfrey, all outside the catholic and hierarchic Church were not men, but wolves.

He was filled with the heroic conception that his Company was to aid their fellow-men in every department of earthly life, and the political drove out all other considerations; for it contained the spheres within which the whole human life is lived. Thus, while he preferred for himself the society of learned and devout men, his acute Basque brain soon perceived their limitations, and the Jesuit historian Orlandino tells us that Ignatius selected the members of his Company from men who knew the world, and were of good social position. He forbade very rightly the follies of ascetic piety, when the discipline of the Exercises had been accomplished; it was only repeated when energies flagged or symptoms of insubordination appeared. Then the General ordered a second course, as a physician sends a patient to the cure at some watering-place. The Constitution directs that novices were to be sought among those who had a comely presence, with good memories, manageable tempers, quick observation, and free from all indiscreet devotion. The Society formed to fight the Renaissance as well as Protestantism, borrowed from its enemy the thought of general culture, training every part of the mind and body, and rendering the possessor a man of the world.

No one can read the letters of Ignatius without seeing the fund of native tenderness that there was in the stern Spanish soldier. That it was no mere sentiment appears in many ways, and in none more so than in his infinite pity for the crowds of fallen women in Rome, and in his wise methods of rescue work. It was this tenderness which led him to his greatest mistake. He held that no one could be saved who was not brought to a state of abject obedience to the hierarchic Church; that such obedience was the only soil in which true virtues could be planted and grow. He believed, moreover, that the way in which the "common man" could be thoroughly broken to this obedience was through the confessional and the directorate, and therefore that no one should be scared from confession or from trust in his director by undue severity. In his eagerness to secure these inestimable benefits for the largest number of men, he over and over again enjoined the members of his Society to be very cautious in coming to the conclusion that any of their penitents was guilty of a mortal sin. Such was the almost innocent beginning of that Jesuit casuistry which in the end almost wiped out the possibility of anyone who professed obedience committing a mortal sin, and occasioned the profane description of Father Bauny, the famous French director--"Bauny qui tollit peccata mundi per definitionem."

The Society thus organised became powerful almost at once. It made rapid progress in Italy. Lainez was sent to Venice, and fought the slumbering Protestantism there, at Brescia, and in the Val Tellina. Jay was sent to Ferrara to counteract the influence of Renée of France, its Duchess. Salmeron went to Naples and Sicily. The chief Italian towns welcomed the members of the new Order. Noble and devout ladies gave their aid. Colleges were opened; schools, where the education was not merely free, but superior to what was usually given, were soon crowded with pupils. Rome remained the centre and stronghold of the Company.

Portugal was won at once. Xavier and Rodriguez were sent there. They won over King John, and he speedily became their obedient pupil. He delivered into their hands his new University at Coimbra, and the Humanist teachers, George Buchanan among them, were persecuted and dispersed, and replaced by Jesuit professors.

Spain was more difficult to win. The land was the stronghold of the Dominicans, and had been so for generations; and they were unwilling to admit any intruders. But the new Order soon gained ground. It was native to the soil. It had its roots in that Mysticism which pervaded the whole Peninsula. Ignatius gained one distinguished convert, Francis Borgia, Duke of Candia and Viceroy of Catalonia. He placed the University he had founded in their hands. He joined the Order, and became the third General. His influence counterbalanced the suspicions of Charles V., who had no liking for sworn bondmen of the Vatican, and they soon laid firm hold on the people.

In France their progress was slow. The University and the Parlement of Paris opposed them, and the Sorbonne made solemn pronouncement against their doctrine. Still they were able to found Colleges at St. Omer, Douai, and Rheims.

Ignatius had his eye on Germany from the first. He longed to combat heresy in the land of its birth. Boabdilla, Faber, and Jay were sent there at once. Boabdilla won the confidence of William, Duke of Bavaria; Jay insinuated himself into the counsels of Ferdinand of Austria, and Faber did the most important work of the three by winning for the Society, Petrus Canisius. He was the son of a patrician of Nymwegen, trained in Humanist lore, drawn by inner sympathy to the Christian Mysticism of Tauler, and yet steadfast in his adherence to the theology of the mediæval Church. Faber soon became conscious of his own deficiencies for the work to be done in Germany. His first appearance was at the Religious Conference at Worms, where he found himself face to face with Calvin and Melanchthon, and where his colleagues, Eck and Cochlæus, were rather ashamed of him. The enthusiastic Savoyard lacked almost everything for the position into which, at the bidding of his General, he had thrust himself. Since then he had been wandering through those portions of Germany which had remained faithful to Rome, seeking individual converts to the principles of the Society, and above all some one who had the gifts for the work Ignatius hoped to do in that country. It is somewhat interesting to note that almost all the German Roman Catholics who were attracted by him to the new Order were men who had leanings towards the fourteenth century Mystics--men like Gerard Hammond, Prior of the Carthusians of Köln. Faber caught Canisius by means of his Mysticism. He met him at Mainz, explained the Exercitia Spiritualia to him, induced the young man to undergo the course of discipline which they prescribed, and won him for Loyola and the Company. "He is the man," wrote Faber to Ignatius, "whom I have been seeking--if he is a man, and not rather an angel of the Lord."

Ignatius speedily recognised the value of the new recruit. He saw that he was not a man to be kept long in the lower ranks of the Company, and gave him more liberty of action than he allowed to his oldest associates. Faber had sent him grievous reports about the condition of affairs in Germany. "It is not misinterpretation of Scripture," he wrote, "not specious arguments, not the Lutherans with their preaching and persuasions, that have lost so many provinces and towns to the Roman Church, but the scandalous lives of the ministers of religion." He felt his helplessness. He was a foreigner, and the Germans did not like strangers. He could not speak their language, and his Latin gave him a very limited audience. People and priests looked on him as a spy sent to report their weaknesses to Rome. When he discoursed about the Exercitia, and endeavoured to induce men to try them, he was accused of urging a "new religion." When he attempted to form student associations in connection with the Company, it was said that he was urging the formation of "conventicles" outside the Church's ordinances. But the adhesion of Canisius changed all that. He was a German, one of themselves; his orthodoxy was undisputed; he was an eminent scholar, the most distinguished of the young masters of the University of Köln, a leader among its most promising students. Under his guidance the student associations grew strong; after his example young men offered themselves for the discipline of the Exercises. Loyola saw that he had gained a powerful assistant. He longed to see him personally at Rome; but he was so convinced of his practical wisdom that he left it to himself either to come to Italy or to remain in Germany. Canisius decided to remain. Affairs at Köln were then in a critical state. The Archbishop-Elector, Hermann von Wied, favoured the Reformation. He had thoughts of secularising his Electorate, and if lie succeeded in his design his example might be followed in another ecclesiastical Electorate, with the result that the next Emperor would be a Protestant. Canisius organised the people, the clergy, the University authorities against this, and succeeded in defeating the designs of the Archbishop. When his work at Köln was done, he went to Vienna. There he became the confessor and private adviser of Ferdinand of Austria, administered the affairs of the diocese of Vienna during a long episcopal interregnum, helped to found its Jesuit College, and another at Ingolstadt. These Colleges became the centres of Jesuit influence in Germany, and helped to spread the power of the Society. But with all this activity it can scarcely be said that the Company was very powerful in that country until years after the Council of Trent.

The foreign mission activity of the Jesuits has been often described, and much of the early progress of the Company has been attributed to the admiration created by the work of Francis Xavier and his companions. This was undoubtedly true; but in the earliest times it was the home mission successes that drew most attention and sympathy; and these have been too often left unmentioned.

Nothing lay nearer the hearts of devout persons who refused to accept the Reformation than the condition of the great proportion of the Roman Catholic priests in all countries, and the depravity of morals among laity and clergy alike. Ignatius was deeply affected by both scandals, and had resolved from the first to do his best to cure them. It was this resolve and the accompanying strenuous endeavours which won Ignatius the respect and sympathy of all those in Italy who were sighing for a reform in the moral life of people and clergy, and brought the Company of Jesus into line with Italian Reformers like Contarini, Ghiberti, and Vittoria Colonna. His system of Colleges and the whole use he made of education could have only one result--to give an educated clergy to the Roman Church. It was a democratic extension of the work of Caraffa and Gaetano da Thiene. Ignatius had also clear views about the way to produce a reformation of morals in Rome. Like Luther, he insisted that it must begin in the individual life, and could not be produced by stringent legislation; "it must start in the individual, spread to the family, and then permeate the metropolis." But meanwhile something might be done to heal the worst running sores of society. Like Luther, Ignatius fastened on three--the waste of child life, the plague of begging, and what is called the "social evil"; if his measure of success in dealing with the evils fell far short of Luther's, the more corrupted condition of Italy had something to do with his failure.

His first measure of social reform was to gather Roman children, either orphans or deserted by their parents. They were gratuitously housed, fed, and taught in a simple fashion, and were instructed in the various mechanical arts which could enable them to earn a living. In a brief time, Ignatius had over two hundred boys and girls in his two industrial schools.

How to cure the plague of beggars which infested all Roman Catholic countries, a curse for which the teaching of the mediæval Church was largely responsible,[692] had been a problem studied by Ignatius ever since his brief visit to his native place in 1535. There he had attempted to get the town council of Azpeitia to forbid begging within the bounds of the city, and to support the deserving and helpless poor at the town's cost. He urged the same policy on the chief men in Rome. When he failed in his large and public schemes, he attempted to work them out by means of charitable associations connected with and fostered by his Society.

Nothing, however, excited the sympathy of Loyola so much as the numbers and condition of fallen women in all the larger Italian towns. He was first struck with it in Venice, where he declared that he would willingly give his life to hinder a day's sin of one of these unfortunates. The magnitude of the evil in Rome appalled him. He felt that it was too great for him to meddle with as a whole. Something, however, he could attempt, and did. In Rome, which swarmed with men vowed to celibacy simply because they had something to do with the Church, prostitution was frequently concealed under the cloak of marriage. Husbands lived by the sinful life of their wives. Deserted wives also swelled the ranks of unfortunates. Loyola provided homes for any such as might wish to leave their degrading life. At first they were simply taken into families whom Ignatius persuaded to receive them. The numbers of the rescued grew so rapidly that special houses were needed. Ignatius called them "Martha-Houses." They were in no sense convents. There was, of course, oversight, but the idea was to provide a bright home where these women could earn their own living or the greater part of it. The scheme spread to many of the large Italian towns, and many ladies were enlisted in the plans to help their fallen sisters.

Loyola's associations to provide ransom for Christian captives among the Moslems, his attempts to discredit duelling, his institutions for loans to the poor, can only be alluded to. It was these works of Christian charity which undoubtedly gained the immediate sympathy for the Company which awaited it in most lands south of the Alps.

Almost all earlier monastic Orders provided a place for women among their organisation. An Order of Nuns corresponded to the Order of Monks. Few founders of monastic Orders have owed so much to women as Ignatius did. A few ladies of Barcelona were his earliest disciples, were the first to undergo the discipline of the Exercises, then in an imperfect shape, and encouraged him when he needed it most by their faith in him and his plans.[693] One of them, Isabella Roser (Rosel, Rosell), a noble matron, wife of Juan Roser, heard Ignatius deliver one of his first sermons, and was so impressed by it, that she and her husband invited him to stay in their house, which he did. She paid all his expenses while he went to school and college in Spain. She and her friends sent him large sums of money when he was in Paris. Ignatius could never have carried out his plans but for her sympathy and assistance. In spite of all this, Ignatius came early to the conclusion that his Company should have as little as possible to do with the direction of women's souls (it took so much time, he complained); that women were too emotional to endure the whole discipline of the Exercises; and that there must never be Jesuit nuns. The work he meant his Company to do demanded such constant and strained activity--a Jesuit must stand with only one foot on the ground, he said, the other must be raised ready to start wherever he was despatched--that women were unfit for it. That was his firm resolve, and he was to suffer for it.

In 1539 he had written to Isabella Roser that he hoped God would forget him if he ever forgot all that she had done for him; and it is probable that some sentences (unintentional on the part of the writer) had made the lady, now a widow, believe that she was destined to play the part of Clara to this Francis. At all events (1543) she came to Rome, accompanied by two friends bringing with them a large sum of money, sorely needed by Ignatius to erect his house in Rome for the Professed of the Four Vows. In return, they asked him to give some time to advise them in spiritual things. This Ignatius did, but not with the minuteness nor at the length expected. He declared that the guidance of the souls of the three ladies for three days cost him more than the oversight of his whole Society for a month. Then it appeared that Isabella Roser wanted more. She was a woman of noble gifts, no weak sentimental enthusiast. She had studied theology widely and profoundly. Her learning and abilities impressed the Cardinals whom she met and with whom she talked. She desired Ignatius to create an Order of Jesuit nuns of whom she should be the head. When he refused there was a great quarrel. She demanded back the money she had given; and when this was refused, she raised an action in the Roman courts. She lost her case, and returned indignant to Spain.[694] Poor Isabella Roser--she was not a derelict, and so less interesting to a physician of souls; but she needed comforting like other people. She forgave her old friend, and their correspondence was renewed. She died the year before Ignatius.

When the Society of Jesus was at the height of its power in the seventeenth century, another and equally unsuccessful attempt was made to introduce an Order of Jesuit nuns.

Ignatius died at the age of sixty-five, thirty-five years after his conversion, and sixteen after his Order had received the apostolic benediction. His Company had become the most powerful force within the reanimated Roman Church; it had largely moulded the theology of Trent; and it seemed to be winning back Germany. It had spread in the swiftest fashion. Ignatius had seen established twelve Provinces--Portugal, Castile, Aragon, Andalusia, Italy (Lombardy and Tuscany), Naples, Sicily, Germany, Flanders, France, Brazil, and the East Indies.

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V. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.[695]

§ 1. The Assembling of the Council.

The General Council, the subject of many negotiations between the Emperor and the Pope, was at last finally fixed to meet at Trent in 1545.[696] The city was the capital of a small episcopal principality, its secular overlord was the Count of the Tyrol, whose deputy resided in the town. It was a frontier place with about a thousand houses, including four or five fine buildings and a large palace of the Prince Bishop. It contained several churches, one of which, Santa Maria Maggiore, was reserved for the meetings of the Council.[697] Its inhabitants were partly Italian and partly German--the two nationalities living in separate quarters and retaining their distinctive customs and dress. It was a small place for such an assembly, and could not furnish adequate accommodation for the crowd of visitors a General Council always involved.

The Papal Legates entered Trent in state on the 13th of March (1545). Heavy showers of rain marred the impressive display. They were received by the local clergy with enthusiasm, and by the populace with an absolute indifference. Months passed before the Council was opened. Few delegates were present when the papal Legates arrived. The representatives of the Emperor and those of Venice came early; Bishops arrived in straggling groups during April and May and the months that followed. The necessary papal Brief did not reach the town till the 11th of December, and the Council was formally opened on the 13th. The long leisurely opening was symptomatic of the history of the Council. Its proceedings were spread over a period of eighteen years:--under Pope Paul III., 1545-47, including Sessions i. to x.; under Pope Julius III., 1551-52, including Sessions xi. to xvi.; under Pope Pius IV., 1562-1563, including Sessions xvii. to xxv.[698]

The Papal Legates were Gian Maria Giocchi, Cardinal del Monte, a Tuscan who had early entered the service of the Roman Curia, a profound jurist and a choleric man of fifty-seven (first President); Marcello Cervini, Cardinal da Santa Croce; and Cardinal Reginald Pole, the Englishman. The three represented the three tendencies which were apparent in ecclesiastical Italy. The first belonged to the party which stood by the old unreformed Curia, and wished no change. Cervini represented the growing section of the Church, which regarded Cardinal Caraffa as their leader. They sought eagerly and earnestly a reform in life and character, especially among the clergy; but refused to make any concessions in doctrines, ceremonies, or institutions to the Protestants. They differed from the more reforming Spanish and French ecclesiastical leaders in their dislike of secular interference, and believed that the Popes should have more rather than less power. Reginald Pole was one of those liberal Roman Catholics of whom Cardinal Contarini was the distinguished leader. He was made a Legate probably to conciliate his associates. He was a man whom most people liked and nobody feared--a harmless, pliant tool in the hands of a diplomatist like Cervini. The new Society of Jesus was represented by Lainez and Salmeron, who went to the Council with the dignity of papal theologians--a title which gave them a special standing and influence.

According to the arrangement come to between the Emperor and the Pope, the Bull summoning the Council declared that it was called for the three purposes of overcoming the religious schism; of reforming the Church; and of calling a united Christendom to a crusade against unbelievers. By general consent the work of the Council was limited to the first two objects. They were stated in terms vague enough to cover real diversity of opinion about the work the Council was expected to do.

Almost all believed that the questions of reforming the Church and dealing with the religious revolt were inseparably connected; but the differences at once emerged when the method of treating the schism was discussed.

Many pious Roman Catholics believed that the Lutheran movement was a divine punishment for the sins of the Church, and that it would disappear if the Church was thoroughly reformed in life and morals. They differed about the agency to be employed to effect the reformation. The Italian party, who followed Cardinal Caraffa, maintained that full powers should be in the hands of the Pope; non-Italians, especially the Spaniards, thought it vain to look for any such reformation so long as the Curia, itself the seat of the greatest corruption, remained unreformed, and contended that the secular authority ought to be allowed more power to put down ecclesiastical scandals.

The Emperor, Charles V., had come to believe that there were no insuperable differences of doctrine between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics, and that mutual explanations and a real desire to give and take, combined with the removal of scandals which all alike deplored, would heal the schism. He had never seen the gulf which the Lutheran principle of the spiritual priesthood of all believers had created between the Protestants and mediæval doctrines and ceremonies.[699] He persisted in this belief long after the proceedings at Trent had left him hopeless of seeing the reconciliation he had expected brought about by the Council he had done so much to get summoned. The Augsburg Interim (1548) shows what he thought might have been done.[700] He was badly seconded at Trent. The only Bishop who supported his views heartily was Madruzzo, the Prince Bishop of Trent; his representative, Diego de Mendoza, fell ill shortly after the opening of the Council, and his substitute, Francisco de Toledo, did not reach Trent until March 1546.

§ 2. Procedure at the Council.

Tho ablest of the three Legates, Cervini, had a definite plan of procedure before him. He knew thoroughly the need for drastic reforms in the life and morals of the clergy and for purifying the Roman Curia; but, with the memories of Basel and Constance before him, he dreaded above all things a conflict between the Pope and the Council, and he believed that such a quarrel was imminent if the Council itself undertook to reform the Curia. His idea was that the Council ought to employ itself in the useful, even necessary task of codifying the doctrines of the Church, so that all men might discern easily what was the true Catholic faith. While this was being done, opportunity would be given to the Pope himself to reform the Curia--a task which would be rendered easier by the consciousness that he had the sympathy of the Council behind him. He scarcely concealed his opinion that such codification should make no concessions to the Protestants, but would rather show them to be in hopeless antagonism to the Catholic faith. He did not propose any general condemnation of what he thought to be Lutheran errors; but he wished the separate points of doctrine which the Lutherans had raised--Justification, the authority of Holy Scripture, the Sacraments--to be examined carefully and authoritatively defined. In this way heretics would be taught the error of their ways without mentioning names, and without the specific condemnation of individuals. He expounded his plan of procedure to the Council.

His suggestions were by no means universally well received by the delegates. The proposal to leave reforms to the Pope provoked many speeches from the Spanish Bishops, full of bitter reproaches against the Curia; and his conception of codifying the doctrines of the Church with the avowed intention of irrevocably excluding the Lutherans was by no means liked by many.

A great debate took place on Jan. 18th, which revealed to the Legate that probably the majority of the delegates did not favour his proposed course of procedure. Madruzzo, the eloquent Prince Bishop of Trent, and a Cardinal, made a long speech, in which he asserted that the Council should not rashly take for granted that the Lutherans were irreconcilable. They ought to acknowledge frankly that the corrupt morals of the mediæval clergy had done much to cause dissatisfaction and to justify revolt. Let them therefore assume that these evils for which the Church was responsible had produced the schism. Let them invite the Protestants to come among them as brethren. Let them show to those men, who had no doubt erred in doctrine, that the Catholic Church was sincerely anxious to reform the abounding evils in life and morals, and, with this fraternal bond between them, let them reason amicably together about the doctrinal differences which now separated them. The eloquent and large-minded Cardinal condensed the recommendations in his speech in one sentence: "Cum corrupti mores ecclesiasticorum dederint occasionem Lutheranis confingendi falsa dogmata, sublata causa, facilius tolletur effectus; subdens optimum fore, si protestantes ipsos amicabiliter et fraterne literis invitaremus, ut ipsi quoque ad synodum venirent, et se etiam reformari paterentur."[701] We are told that this speech raised great enthusiasm among the delegates, and that the Legates had some difficulty in preventing its proposal from being universally accepted. At the most they were able to prevent any definite conclusion being come to about the procedure at the close of the sitting. Cervini saw that he could not get his way adopted. He agreed that proposals for reform and for the codification of doctrine should be discussed simultaneously, his knowledge of theological nature telling him that if he once got so many divines engaged in doctrinal discussions two things would surely follow: their eagerness would make them neglect everything else, and their polemical instincts would carry them beyond the point where a conciliation of the Protestants required them to come to a halt. So it happened. The Council found itself committed to a codification and definition of Catholic doctrine. The suggestion of the Bishop of Feltre (Thomas Campeggio) was adopted, that the discussion of doctrines and the proposals for reform should be discussed by two separate Commissions, whose reports should come before the Synod alternately. The Legates obtained a large majority for this course, and the protest of Madruzzo was unavailing.

The decision to attack the question of reform was very unacceptable to the Pope. He went so far as to ask the Legates to get it rescinded; but that was impossible, and he had to content himself with the assurances of Cervini that no real harm would come of it.

This important question being settled, the Council decided upon the details of procedure. The whole Synod was divided into three divisions or Commissions, to each of which allotted work was given. Each question was first of all to be prepared for the section by theologians and canonists, then discussed in the special Commission to which it had been entrusted. If approved there, it was to be brought before a general Congregation of the whole Synod for discussion. If it passed this scrutiny, it was to be promulgated in a solemn session of the Council.

§ 3. Restatement of Doctrines.

It ought to be said, before describing the doctrinal labours of the Council, that the work done at Trent was not to give Conciliar sanction to the whole mass of mediæval doctrinal tradition. There was a thorough revision of doctrinal positions in which a great deal of theology which had been current during the later Middle Ages was verbally rejected, and the rejection was most apparent in that Scotist theology which had been popular before the Reformation, and which had been most strongly attacked by Luther. The Scotist theology, with its theological scepticism, was largely repudiated in name at least--whether its spirit was banished is another question which has to be discussed later. A great many influences unknown during the later Middle Ages pressed consciously and unconsciously upon the divines assembled at Trent and coloured their dogmatic work. Although the avowed intention of the theologians there was to defeat both Humanism and the Reformation, they could not avoid being influenced by both movements. Humanism had led many of them to study the earlier Church Fathers, and they could not escape Augustine in doing so. They were led to him by many paths. The Dominican theologians had begun, quite independently of the Reformation, to study the great theologian of their Order, and Thomas had led them back to Augustine. The Reformation had laid stress on the doctrines of sin, of justification, and of predestination, and had therefore awakened a new interest in them and consequently in Augustine. The New Thomism, with Augustinianism behind it, was a feature of the times, and was the strongest influence at work among the theologians who assembled at Trent. It could not fail to make their doctrinal results take a very different form from the theology which Luther was taught by John Nathin in the Erfurt convent. Christian Mysticism, too, had its revival, especially in Spain and in Italy, and among some of the reconstructed monastic orders. If it had small influence on the doctrines, it worked for a more spiritual conception of the Church. What has been called Curialism, the theory of the omnipotence of the Pope in all things connected with the Church's life, practice, and beliefs, was also a potent factor with some of the assembled fathers. But above all things the theologians who met at Trent were influenced by the thought and fact of the Lutheran Reformation. This is apparent in the order in which they discussed theological questions, in the subjects they selected and in those they omitted. All these things help us to understand how the theology of the Council of Trent was something peculiar, something by itself, and different both from what may be vaguely called mediæval theology and from that of the modern Church of Rome.[702]

The Council, in its third session, laid the basis of its doctrinal work by reaffirming the Niceo-Constantinopolitan Creed with the filioque clause added, and significantly called it: Symbolum fidei quo sancta ecclesia Romana utitur. This done, it was ready to proceed with the codification and definition of doctrines.

On the 18th of April 1546, the Commission which had to do with the preparation of the subject reported, and the Council proceeded to discuss the sources of theological knowledge or the Rule of Faith. The influence of the Reformation is clearly seen not merely in the priority assigned to this subject, but also in the statement that the "purity of the Gospel" is involved in the decision come to. The opposition to Protestantism was made emphatic by the Council declaring these four things:

It accepted as canonical all the books contained in the Alexandrine Canon (the Septuagint), and therefore the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, and did so heedless of the fact that the editor of the Vulgate (afterwards pronounced authoritative), Jerome, had thought very little of the Apocrypha. The Reformers, in their desire to go back to the earliest and purest sources, had pronounced in favour of the Hebrew Canon; the Council, in spite of Jerome, accepted the common mediæval tradition.

It declared that in addition to the books of Holy Scripture, it "receives with an equal feeling of piety and reverence the traditions, whether relating to faith or to morals, dictated either orally by Christ or by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in continuous succession within the Catholic Church."[703] The practical effect of this declaration, something entirely novel, was to assert that there was within the Church an infallibly correct mode of interpreting Scripture, and to give the ecclesiastical authorities (whoever they might be) the means of warding off any Protestant attack based upon Holy Scripture alone. The Council were careful to avoid stating who were the guardians of this dogmatic tradition, but in the end it led by easily traced steps to the declaration of Pope Pius IX.: Io sono la tradizione, and placed a decision of a Pope speaking ex cathedra on a level with the Word of God.

It proclaimed that the Vulgate version contained the authoritative text of Holy Scripture. This was also new, and, moreover, in violent opposition to the best usages of the mediæval Church. It cast aside as worse than useless the whole scholarship of the Renaissance both within and outside of the mediæval Church, and, on pretence of consecrating a text of Holy Scripture, reduced it to the state of a mummy, lifeless and unfruitful.[704]

It asserted that every faithful believer must accept the sense of Scripture which the Church teaches, that no one was to oppose the unanimous consensus of the Fathers--and this without defining what the Church is, or who are the Fathers.[705] The whole trend of this decision was to place the authoritative exposition of the Scriptures in the hands of the Pope, although at the time the Council lacked the courage to say so.

It must not be supposed that these decisions were reached without a good deal of discussion. Some members of the Council would have preferred the Hebrew Canon. Nacchianti, Bishop of Chioggia, protested against placing traditions on the same level as Holy Scripture;[706] some wished to distinguish between apostolical traditions and others; but the final decision of the Council was carried by a large majority. The most serious conflict of opinion, however, arose about the clause which declared that the Vulgate version was the only authoritative one. It was held that such a decision entailed the prohibition of using translations of the Scripture in the mother tongue. The Spanish Bishops, in spite of the fact that translations of the Scriptures into Spanish had once been commonly used and their use encouraged, would have had all Bible reading in the mother tongue prohibited. The Germans protested. The debate waxed hot. Madruzzo, of Trent, eloquently declared that to prohibit the translation of the Scriptures into German would be a public scandal. Were children not to be taught the Lord's Prayer in a language they could understand? A Bull of Pope Paul II. was cited against him. He replied that Popes had erred and were liable to err; but that the Apostle Paul had not erred, and that he had commanded the Scriptures to be read by every one, and that this could not be done unless they were translated. A compromise was suggested, that each country should decide for itself whether it would have translations of the Scriptures or not. In the end, however, the Vulgate was proclaimed the only authentic Word of God.

In the fifth session (June 17th, 1546) and in the sixth session (Jan. 13th, 1547) the Council attacked the subjects of Original Sin and Justification. The Reformation had challenged the Roman Church to say whether it had any spiritual religion at all, or was simply an institution claiming to possess a secret science of salvation through ceremonies which required little or no spiritual life on the part of priests or recipients. The challenge had to be met not merely on account of the Protestants, but because devout Romanists had declared that it must be done. The answer was given in the two doctrines of Original Sin and Justification, as defined at the Council of Trent. They both deserve a much more detailed examination than space permits.

The Legates had felt that the Council as constituted might come to decisions giving room for Protestant doctrine, and pled with the Pope to send them more Italian Bishops, whose votes might counteract the weight of northern opinion (June 2nd, 1546). They were extremely anxious about the way in which the Council might deal with those two doctrines.

The first, the definition of Original Sin, seems to reject strongly that Pelagianism or Semi-Pelagianism which had marked the later Scholasticism which Luther had been taught in the Erfurt convent. It appears to rest on and to express the evangelical thoughts of Augustine. But a careful examination shows that it is full of ambiguities--intentional loop-holes provided for the retention of the Semi-Pelagian modes of thought. Space forbids our going over them all, but one example may be selected from the first chapter. It is there said that Adam lost the holiness and righteousness in which he had been constituted. Why not created? The phrase may mean created, and all the New Thomists at the Council doubtless read it in that way. By the Fall man lost what Thomas, following Augustine, had called increated righteousness. But the phrase in qua constitutus fucrat could easily be interpreted to mean that what man did lose were the superadded dona supernaturalia whose loss in no way impaired human nature; and, if so interpreted, room is provided for Pelagianism.[707] Again, while the Augustinian doctrine of the Fall seems to be taught, it is added that by Original Sin liberum arbitrium is minime extinctum viribus licet attenuatum, which is Semi-Pelagian.[708] The whole definition closes with a statement that it is not to be applied to the Blessed Virgin, the doctrine about whom has been expressed in the Constitutions of Pope Sixtus IV. of happy memory.[709]

The statement of the Doctrine of Justification is a masterpiece of theological dexterity, and deserves much more consideration than can be given it. The whole treatment of the subject was the cause of considerable anxiety outside the Council. On the one hand, the Emperor Charles V., who was greatly disappointed at the course taken by the Council, and saw the chance of conciliating the Protestants diminishing daily, wished to defer all discussion; while the Pope, bent on making it impossible for the Protestants to return, desired the Council to define this important doctrine in such a way that none of the Reformed could possibly accept it. The Emperor's wishes were speedily overruled; but it was by no means easy for the Legates to carry out the desires of the Pope. There was a great deal of Evangelical doctrine in the Roman Church which had to be reckoned with. So much existed that at one time it had actually been proposed at the Vatican to approve of the first part of the Augsburg Confession in order to win the Protestants over. The day for such proposals was past; but the New Thomism was a power in the Church, and perhaps the strongest theological force at the Council of Trent, and had to be reckoned with. If the Protestant conception of Justification be treated merely as a doctrine,--which it is not, being really an experience deeper and wider than any form of words can contain,--if it be stated scholastically, then it is possible to express it in propositions which do not perceptibly differ from the doctrine of Justification in the New Thomist theology. At the conference at Regensburg (Ratisbon) in 1541, Contarini was able to draft a statement of the doctrine which commended itself to such opponents as Calvin and Eck.[710] Harnack has remarked that the real difference between the two doctrines appeared in this, that "just on account of the doctrine of Justification the Protestants combated as heretical the usages of the Roman Church, while the Augustinian Thomists could not understand why it should be impossible to unite the two."[711] But the similarity of statement shows the difficulty of the Legates in guiding the Council to frame a decree which would content the Pope. They were able to accomplish this mainly through the dexterity of the Jesuit Lainez.

The discussion showed how deeply the division ran. Some theologians were prepared to accept the purely Lutheran view that Justification was by Faith alone. They were in a small minority, and were noisily interrupted. One of them, Thomas de San Felicio, Bishop of La Cava, and a Neapolitan, came to blows with a Greek Bishop. The debate then centred round the mediating view of the doctrine, which Contarini had advocated in his Tractatus de Justificatione, and which may be said to represent the position of the New Thomists. It seemed to commend itself to a majority of the delegates. The leader of the party was Girolamo Seripando (1493-1553), since 1539 the General of the Augustinian Eremites, the Order to which Luther had belonged.[712] He distinguished between an imputed and an inherent righteousness, a distinction corresponding to that between prevenient and co-operating grace, and to some extent not unlike that between Justification and Sanctification in later Protestant theology. In the former, the imputed righteousness of Christ, lay the only hope for man; inherent righteousness was based upon the imputed, and was useless without it. The learning and candour of Seripando were conspicuous; his pleading seemed about to carry the Council with him, when Lainez intervened to save the situation for the strictly papal party. The Jesuit theologian accepted the distinction made between imputed and inherent righteousness; he even admitted that the former was alone efficacious in Justification; but he alleged that in practice at least the two kinds of righteousness touched each other, and that it would be dangerous to practical theology to consider them as wholly distinct. His clear plausible reasoning had great effect, and the ambiguities of his address are reflected in the looseness of the definitions in the decree.

The definition of the doctrine of Justification which was adopted by the Council is very lengthy. It contains sixteen chapters followed by thirty-three canons. It naturally divides into three divisions--chapters i.-ix. describing what Justification is; chapters x.-xiii. the increase of Justification; and chapters xiv.--xvi. the restoration of Justification when it is lost. Almost every chapter includes grave ambiguities.

The first section is the most important. It begins with statements which are in themselves evangelical. All men have come under the power of sin, and are unable to deliver themselves either by their strength of nature or by the aid of the letter of the law of Moses.[713] Our Heavenly Father sent His Son and set Him forth as the propitiator through faith in His blood for our sins.[714] It is then said that all do not accept the benefits of Christ's death, although He died for all, but only those to whom the merit of His passion is communicated; and this statement is followed by a rather confused sentence which suggests but commits no one to the Augustinian doctrine of election.[715] This is followed up by saying that Justification is the translation from that condition in which man is born into a condition of grace through Jesus Christ our Saviour; and it is added that this translation, in the Gospel dispensation, does not happen apart from Baptism or the wish to be baptized.[716] In spite of some ambiguities, these first four chapters have quite an Evangelical ring about them; but with the fifth a change begins. While some sentences seem to maintain the Evangelical ideas previously stated, room is distinctly made for Pelagian work-righteousness. It is said, for example, that Justification is wrought through the gratia præveniens or vocatio in which adults are called apart from any merit of their own; but then it is added that the end of this calling is that sinners may be disposed, by God's inciting and aiding grace, to convert themselves in order to their own justification by freely assenting to and co-operating with the grace of God.[717] This was the suggestion of Lainez. The good disposition into which sinners are to be brought is said to consist of several things, of which the first is faith--defined to be a belief that the contents of the divine revelation are true. In the two successive chapters faith is declared to be only the beginning of Justification; and Justification itself, in flat contradiction to what had been said previously, is no longer a translation from one state to another; it becomes the actual and gradual conversion of a sinner into a righteous man. It is scarcely necessary to pursue the definitions further. It is sufficient to say that the theologians of Trent do not seem to have the faintest idea of what the Reformers meant by faith, and never appear to see that there is such a thing as religious experience.

The second and third sections of the decree treating of the increase of Justification and of its renewal in the Sacrament of Penance, were drafted still more emphatically in an anti-evangelical spirit, though here and there they show concessions to the Augustinian feeling in the Church. The result was that the Pope obtained what he wanted, a definition which made reconciliation with the Protestants impossible. The New Thomists were able to secure a sufficient amount of Augustinian theology in the decree to render Jansenism possible in the future; while the prevailing Pelagianism or Semi-Pelagianism foreshadowed its overthrow by Jesuit theology.

While these theological definitions were being discussed and framed, the Council also occupied itself with matters of reform. They began to make regulations about preaching and catechising, and this led them insensibly to the question of exemptions from episcopal control. The Popes had for some centuries been trying to weaken the authority of the Bishops, by placing the regular clergy or monks beyond the control of the Bishops within whose diocese their convents stood, and this exemption had been the occasion of many ecclesiastical disorders. The discussion was long and excited. It ended in a compromise.

When the decree on Justification was settled, the Council, guided by the Legates, proceeded to discuss the doctrine of the Sacraments, with the intention of still more thoroughly preventing any doctrinal reconciliation with the Protestants. This action called forth remonstrances from the Emperor, whose successes at the time in Germany were alarming the Pope, and making him anxious to withdraw the Council from Germany altogether. He sent orders to the Legates to endeavour to persuade the members at Trent to vote for a transfer to Bologna, where the papal influence would be stronger, and where it would be easier to pack the Synod with a pliant Italian majority. A pretext was found in the appearance of the plague at Trent; and although a strong minority, headed by Madruzzo of Trent, opposed the scheme, the majority (38 to 14) decided that they must leave Trent and establish themselves at the Italian city. The Spanish Bishops, however, remained at Trent awaiting the Emperor's orders.

Charles V. had suffered many disappointments from the Council he had laboured to summon, and this action made him lose all patience. He ordered the Spanish Bishops not to leave Trent; the Diet of Augsburg refused to recognise the prelates who had gone to Bologna as the General Council. After much hesitation, Pope Paul III. felt compelled to suspend the proceedings of the Council at Bologna (September 17th, 1549). This ended the first part of the sittings of the Council.

§ 4. Second Meeting of the Council.

Pope Paul III. died November 10th, 1549. At the Conclave which followed, the Cardinal del Monte, the senior Legate of the Council, was chosen Pope, and took the title of Julius III. (February 7th, 1550). He and the Emperor soon came to an agreement that the Council should return to Trent. It accordingly reopened there on May 1st, 1551. The Cardinal Marcello Crescentio was appointed sole Legate, and two assistants, the Archbishop of Siponto and the Bishop of Verona, were entitled Nuncios. The second meeting of the Council did not promise well. The Pope had agreed that something was to be done to conciliate the Protestants, and that it should be left an open question whether the preceding decisions of the Council might not be revised. But before its assembly the policy of the Pope again ran counter to that of the Emperor, and the Protestants had ceased to expect much. The delegates themselves showed little eagerness to come to the place of meeting. The Council was forced to adjourn, and it was not until the 1st of September that it began its work.

The earlier proceedings showed that there was little hope of conciliatory measures. There was no attempt to revise these former decisions, and the Council began its work of codifying doctrine and reformation at the place where it had dropped it.

During the later months of the first meeting, the question of the Sacraments had been under discussion, and so far as the second meeting is concerned it may be said that the whole of its theological work was confined to this subject.

Little pains were taken to conciliate the Protestants. The decisions arrived at pass over in contemptuous silence all the Protestant contendings. The relations of the Sacraments to the Word and Promises of God, and to the faith of the recipient, are not explained. The thirteen Canons which sum up the doctrine of the Sacraments in general, and the anathemas with which they conclude, are the protest of the Council against the whole Protestant movement.

This did not prevent the Council being confronted with great difficulties in their definitions--difficulties which arose from the opposition between the earlier and more Evangelical Thomist and the later Scotist and Nominalist theology. It would almost appear that the fathers of Trent despaired of harmonising the multitude of Scholastic theories on the nature of the Sacraments in general. They did not venture on constructing a decree, but contented themselves for the most part with merely negative definitions. They declare that there are seven Sacraments, neither more nor fewer, all positively instituted by Christ. They sever the intimate connection between faith and the Sacraments, attributing to them a secret and mysterious power. They practically deny the universal priesthood of believers (Can. 10). Perhaps the most important Canon is the last: "If any one shall say that the received and approved rites of the Catholic Church, commonly used in the solemn administration of the Sacraments, may be contemned, or without sin omitted at pleasure by the ministrants, or be changed by any pastor of the churches into other new ones: let him be anathema" (Can. 13). It enables us to see how, while not going beyond the verbal limits of the definitions of the Thomist theology, the Council provided room for subsequent aberrations of doctrine by raising the use and wont of the Roman Church to the level of dogma.

In their definitions of the single Sacraments the Council could and did found on the Decretum pro Armenis of the Council of Florence (1439), incorporated in the Bull Exultate Deo of Pope Eugenius IV. The real substance of the definition of Baptism is found in that Canon (3), which declares that "the Roman Church, which is the mother and mistress of all Churches, has the true doctrine of the Sacrament of Baptism." The common practice for the Bishop to confirm, an historical testimony to the original position of Bishops as pastors of congregations, is elevated to the rank of a dogma. The decree and canons on the Eucharist are a dexterous dove-tailing of sentences making a mosaic of differing scholastic theories. One detail only need concern us. Most of the theologians present wished the denial of the cup to the laity to be elevated into a dogma, and a decree was actually prepared. But the secular princes and a widespread public opinion made the theologians hesitate, and the question was settled in a late meeting (Session xxi., July 16th, 1562) in a dexterously ambiguous way. It was declared that "from the beginning of the Christian religion the use of both species has not been unfrequent," but it was added that no one of the laity was permitted to demand the cup ex Dei præcepto, or to believe that the Church was not acting according to just and weighty reasons when it was refused, or that the "whole and entire Christ" was not received "under either species alone." Few statements have been made in such defiance of history as this decree, with its corresponding canons, when one and another practice of the mediæval Church are said to have existed from the beginning.

The decree on Penance is one of the most carefully constructed and least ambiguous. It is a real codification of Scholastic doctrine. On one portion only was there need for dexterous manipulation, and it received it. The immoral conception of attrition was verbally abandoned and really retained. Contrition, which is godly sorrow, is declared to be necessary; and attrition is declared to be only a salutary preparation. But the real distinction thus established is at once cancelled by calling attrition an imperfect contrition, by distinguishing between contrition itself and a more perfect contrition--contrition perfected by love; and place is provided for the reintroduction of the immoral conceptions of the later Scotist theologians.[718]

When the theological decrees and canons of the Council of Trent are read carefully in the light of past Scholastic controversies and of varying principles at work in the Roman Catholic Church of the sixteenth century, it is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that while the older and more Evangelical Thomist theology gained a verbal recognition, the real victory lay with the Scotist party now represented by the Jesuits. On one side of its activity, the general tendency of Scotist theology had been to produce what was called "theological Scepticism"--a state of mind which was compelled to dissent intellectually from most of the great doctrines of the mediæval Church, and at the same time to accept them on the external authority of the Church--to show that there were no really permanent principles in dogmatic, and that there was need everywhere for reference to a permanent and external source of authority who could be no other than the Roman Pontiff.

The Curialist position, that the Universal Church was represented by the Roman Church, and that the Roman Church was, as it were, condensed in the Pope, was not confined to the sphere of jurisdiction only. It had its theological side. Scripture, it was held, was to be interpreted according to the tradition of the Church, and the Pope alone was able to determine what that tradition really was. Hence, the more indefinite theology was, the fewer permanent principles it contained, the more indispensable became the papal authority, and the more thoroughly religion could be identified with a blind unreasoning submission to the Church identified as the Pope. This had been the thought of Ignatius Loyola; the training of the mind to such a state of absolute submission had been the motive in his Spiritual Exercises and the Jesuit theologians at the Council, Lainez and Salmeron, did very much to secure the practical victory won by Scotist theology, in spite of the fact that the phrases of the decrees came from the theology of their opponents.

The second meeting of the Council of Trent ended on April 28th, 1552. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) showed that the Protestants had acquired a separate legal standing within the Empire, and most people thought that the work of the Council had been wasted. Things were as if it had never been in existence. Pope Paul III. died on March 24th, 1555, and the Conclave elected Cervini, who took the title of Marcellus II. The new Pope survived his elevation only three weeks. He was succeeded by Cardinal Caraffa, Paul IV., and the Counter-Reformation began in earnest.

Paul IV., hater of Spaniards as he was, was the embodiment of the Spanish idea of what a reformation should be. He believed that the work of reform could be done better by the Pope himself than by any Council, and he set to work with the thoroughness which characterised him. There was to be no tampering with the doctrines, usages, or institutions of the mediæval Church. Heresy and Schism were to be crushed by the Inquisition, and the spread of new ideas was to be prevented by the strict examination of all books, and the destruction of those which contained what the Pope conceived to be unwholesome for the minds or morals of mankind. But the Church needed to be reformed thoroughly; the lives of the clergy, and especially of the higher clergy, had to be amended; and abuses which had crept into administration had to be set right.

For some time any real reformation was retarded by the influence of his nephews, who played on the old Pontiff's hatred of the Spaniards, and easily persuaded him that his first duty was to expel the Spaniards from the Italian peninsula. But the evil deeds of these near kinsmen gradually reached his ears. In an assembly of the Inquisition, held in 1559, he was told by Cardinal Pacheco that "reform must begin with us." The old man retired to his apartments, instituted a searching inquiry into the conduct of his nephews, and within a month had deprived them of all their offices and emoluments, and banished them from Rome. Free from this family embarrasment, the Pope prosecuted vigorously his plans for reformation. The secular administration of the States of the Church was thoroughly purified. A Congregation was appointed to examine, classify, and remedy ecclesiastical abuses. Many of the abuses of the Curia were swept away. The Jesuits taught him, although he had no great love for the Order, that spiritual services should not be sold for money. He prohibited taking fees for marriage dispensations. He was a stern censor of the morals of the higher clergy. Under his brief rule Rome became respectable if not virtuous. He restored some of the privileges of the Bishops which had been absorbed by the Papacy. All the while his zeal for purity of doctrine made him urge on the Inquisition and the Index to use their terrible powers. He spared no one. Cardinal Morone, one of the few survivals of the liberal Roman Catholics, was imprisoned, and the suppression of all liberal ideas was sternly prosecuted.[719]

§ 5. Third Meeting of the Council.

Paul IV. died on the 18th of August 1559. He was succeeded by Giovanni de' Medici (Dec. 26th, 1559), a man of a very different type of character, who took the title of Pius IV. The new Pope was by training a lawyer rather than a theologian, and a man skilled in diplomacy. He recognised, as none of his predecessors had done, the difficulties which confronted the Church of Rome. The Lutheran Church had won political recognition in Germany. Scandinavia and Denmark were hopelessly lost. England had become Protestant, and Scotland was almost sure to follow the example of her more powerful neighbour. The Low Countries could not be coerced by Philip and Alva. More than half of German Switzerland had declared for the Reformation. Geneva had become a Protestant fortress, and Calvin's opinions were gaming ground all over French Switzerland. France was hopelessly divided. Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland were alienated from Rome, and might soon revolt altogether. The Pope was convinced that a General Council was necessary to reunite the forces still on the side of the Roman Catholic Church. He saw that it was vain to expect to do this without coming to terms with the Romanist sovereigns. It was the age of autocracy. He pleaded for an alliance of autocrats to confront and withstand the Protestant revolution. He tried to persuade the Emperor (now Ferdinand), Francis II. of France, and Philip of Spain that the independent rule of Bishops was one side of the feudalism which was hostile to monarchy, and that the Pope and the Kings ought to work together. His representations had some effect as time went on.

A papal Bull (Nov. 29th, 1560) summoned a Council at Trent on April 6th, 1561. Five Legates were appointed to preside, at their head Ercole di Gonzaga, Cardinal of Mantua. They reached Trent on the 16th of April (1561), and were received by Ludovico Madruzzo, who had succeeded his uncle, the Cardinal, in the bishopric. The delegates came slowly. The first session (xvii^{th}) was not held till Jan. 18th, 1562, and was unimportant. The real work began at the second session (xviii^{th}), held on Feb. 26th (1562).

The Protestants had been invited to attend, but it was well known that they would not; the assembly represented the Roman Catholic Powers, and them alone. Its object was not to conciliate the Protestants, but to organise the Romanist Church. The various Roman Catholic Powers, however, had different ideas of what ought to be involved in such a reorganisation.

The Emperor knew that there were many lukewarm Protestants on the one hand and many disaffected Romanists on the other. He believed that the former could be won back and the latter confirmed by some serious modifications in the usages of the Church. His scheme of reform, set down in his instructions to his Ambassadors, was very extensive. It included the permission to give the cup to the laity, marriage of the priests, mitigation of the prescribed fasts, the use of some of the ecclesiastical revenues to provide schools for the poor, a revision of the service books in the sense of purging them of many of their legends, singing German hymns in public worship, the publication of a good and simple catechism for the instruction of the young, a reformation of the cloisters, and a reduction of the powers of the Roman Pontiff according to the ideas of the Council of Constance. These reforms, earnestly pressed by the Emperor in letters, had the support of almost all the German Roman Catholics.

The French Bishops, headed by the Cardinal Lorraine, supported the German demands. They were especially anxious for the granting the cup to the laity, the administration of the Sacraments in French, French hymns snug in public worship, and that the celebration of the Mass should always be accompanied by instruction and a sermon. They also pressed for a limitation of the powers of the Pope, according to the decisions of the Council of Basel.

The Spanish Bishops, on the other hand, were thoroughly opposed to any change in ecclesiastical doctrine or usages. They did not wish the cup given to the laity; they abhorred clerical marriage; they protested against the idea of the services or any part of them in the mother tongue. But they desired a thorough reformation of the Curia, of the whole system of dispensations; they wished a limitation of the powers of the Pope, and to see the Bishops of the Church restored to their ancient privileges.

France and Germany desired that the Council should be considered a new Synod; Spain and the Pope meant it to be simply a continuation of the former sessions at Trent.

These difficulties might well have daunted the Pope; but the suave diplomatist faced the situation, trusting mainly to his own abilities to carry matters through to a successful issue. He knew that he must have command of the Council, and to that end several resolutions were passed mainly by the adroit generalship of the Legates. It was practically, if not formally, resolved that the Synod should be simply a continuation of that Council which had begun at Trent in 1545. This got rid at once of a great deal of difficult doctrinal discussion, and provided that all dogmas had to be discussed on the lines laid down in previous sessions. It was decreed that no proxies should be allowed. This enabled the Pope to keep up a constant majority of Italian Bishops, who outnumbered those of all other nations put together. By a clever ruse the Council was induced to vote that the papal Legates alone should have the privilege of proposing resolutions to the Council. This made it impossible to bring before the Council any matter to which the Pope had objection.

The Pope knew well, however, that it mattered little what conclusions the Council came to, if its decisions were to be repudiated by the Roman Catholic Powers. He therefore carried on elaborate negotiations with the Emperor and the Kings of Spain and France while the Council was sitting, and arranged with them the wording of the decrees to be adopted. His tactics, which never varied during the whole period of the Council, and which were finally crowned with success, were simple. He maintained at all costs a numerical majority in the Synod ready to vote as he directed. This was done by systematic drafts of Italian Bishops to Trent. Many of the poorer ones were subsidised through Cardinal Simonetta, whose business it was to see that the mechanical majority was kept up, and to direct it how to vote. His Legates had the exclusive right of proposing resolutions; couriers took the proposals drafted by the various Congregations to Rome, and the Pope revised them there before they were laid before the whole Council to be voted upon; spies informed him what were the objections of the French, Spanish, or German Bishops, and the Pope was diligent to bring all manner of influences to bear upon them to incline them to his mind; if he failed, he prevented the proposals being laid before the Council until he had consulted and bargained with the monarchs through special agents. The papal post-bags, containing proposed decrees or canons, went the round of the European Courts before they were presented to the Council, and the Bishops spoke and voted upon what had been already settled behind their backs and without their knowledge.

In spite of all this dexterous manipulation, the Council, composed of so many jarring elements, did not work very smoothly. The papal diplomacy sometimes increased the disturbances. Men chafed under the thought that they were only puppets, and that the matters they had been called together to discuss were already irrevocably settled.

"Better never to have come here at all," said a Spanish Bishop, "than to be reduced to mere spectators." Few ecclesiastical assemblies have seen stormier scenes than took place during these later sittings of the Council of Trent.

In the end, the papal diplomacy prevailed. His conciliatory manner helped Pius through difficulties in which another would have failed. No man was readier to give way in things which he did not consider essential, and what he promised he scrupulously performed. The success of the last meeting of the Council was due to bargaining and dexterous persuasion. When the critical point arrived, and it seemed as if the Council must fall to pieces, his agents, Morone and Peter Canisius, the great German Jesuit, won Ferdinand over to the Pope's side. Similar persuasive diplomacy secured the influence of the Cardinal of Lorraine. Even Philip of Spain was brought to see that the Spanish Bishops were asking too much.

It must also be remembered that while Pius IV. refused to tolerate any loss of papal rights or privileges, he consented to and did his best to carry out numberless salutary reforms; and that the Council of Trent not only reorganised, but greatly purified the Roman Church. Almost all that was good in the reformation wrought by his predecessor Paul IV. was made part of the Tridentine regulations.

The special matter in dispute between the Pope and the great majority of non-Italian Bishops concerned the relations in which the Bishops of the Catholic Church stood to the Bishop of Rome, whom all acknowledged as their head. The Spanish, French, and German Bishops were strongly opposed to that doctrine of papal supremacy which had been assiduously taught by the canonists of the Roman Curia for at least two centuries, and which was called curialism. Curialism taught that the Pope was lord of the Church in the sense that all the clergy were his servants, and that Bishops in particular were mere assistants whom he had appointed for the purpose of oversight to act as his vicars. Whatever powers of jurisdiction they possessed came from him, and from him alone. The opposite conception, that insisted on at Trent by the northern and Spanish Bishops, that maintained at the great Councils of Constance and Basel, was that every Bishop had his power directly from Christ, and that the Pope, while he was the representative of the unity of the Church, and therefore to be recognised as its head, was only a primus inter pares, and subject to the episcopate as a whole in Council assembled. The question kept cropping up in almost all the discussions in the Council which turned on reform. It began as early as the fifth session (June 17th, 1546) and went on intermittently; but it positively raged in the later sessions.

The question was raised on its practical side. One of the standing abuses in the mediæval Church was the non-residence of Bishops. The Council was passionately called upon by the Spanish and northern Bishops to declare that residence was a necessary thing, and unanimously responded that it was. Their function was the oversight of their dioceses, and this could only be done when they were resident. But how was this to be enforced? To compel the Bishops to reside within their dioceses would depopulate the Court of Rome, and make it very much poorer. Bishops from every country in Europe were attached to the Roman Court, and their stipends, drawn from the countries in which their Sees lay, were spent in Rome, and aided the magnificence of the papal entourage. The reformers felt that a theoretical question lay behind the practical, and insisted that the oversight and therefore the residence of Bishops was de jure divino and not merely de lege ecclesiastica--something enjoined by God, and therefore beyond alteration by the Pope. Behind this lay the thought, first introduced by Cyprian, that every Bishop was within his congregation or diocese the Vicar of Christ, and in the last resort responsible to Him alone. Thus the old conciliar conception, maintained at Constance and at Basel, faced the curial at Trent; and both were too powerful to give way entirely. In spite of his Italian majority, the Pope could not get a majority for a direct negative denying the de jure divino theory. At the final vote, sixty-six fathers declared for the de jure divino theory, while seventy-one either rejected it altogether or voted for remitting it to the decision of the Pope. The Pope dared not make use of the liberty of decision thus accorded to him by a majority of five. If he did he would then be left to face the European Roman Catholic Courts of Germany, France, and Spain--all of whom supported the conciliar view. Thus the theoretical question was left undecided at Trent, but the papal diplomacy prevailed to the extent of creating a bias in favour of curialist ideas, which left the Pope in a stronger position as regards the episcopate than any other General Council had ever placed him in.

The prominence given to the Roman (i.e. the papal) Church throughout the decisions of the Council, beginning with the way in which the Constantinopolitan (Nicene) Creed was affirmed;[720] the insertion of the phrase His own Vicar upon earth;[721] the injunction that Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and all others who of right and custom ought to be present at a provincial council ... promise and profess true obedience to the Sovereign Roman Pontiff;[722] the 10th clause in the Professio Fidei Tridentinæ: "I acknowledge the holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church for the mother and mistress of all Churches; and I promise and swear true obedience to the Bishop of Rome, successor to St. Peter, Prince of Apostles, and Vicar of Jesus Christ"; the way in which the Council at its last session (Dec. 4th, 1563) left entirely in the Pope's hands the confirmation of its decrees and the measures to be used for carrying them out; and above all its calm acquiescence in the Bull Benedictus Deus (Jan. 24th, 1564), in which Pope Pius IV. reserved the exposition of its decrees to himself[723]--all testify to the triumph of curialist ideas at the Council of Trent. The Roman Catholic Church had become, in a sense never before universally accepted, the "Pope's House."

This Council, so eagerly demanded, so greatly protracted, twice dissolved, buffeted by storms in the political world, exposed, even in its later sessions, to many a danger, ended in the general contentment of the Roman Catholic peoples. When the prelates met together for the last time on the 4th of December 1563, ancient opponents embraced, and traces of tears were seen in many of the old eyes.

It had done three things for the Roman Catholic Church. It had provided a compact system of doctrine, stript of many of the vagaries of Scholasticism, and yet opposed to Protestant teaching. Romanism had an intellectual basis of its own to rest on. It had rebuilt the hierarchy on what may be called almost a new foundation, and made it symmetrical. It had laid down a scheme of reformation which, if only carried out by succeeding Pontiffs, would free the Church from many of the crying evils which had given such strength to the Protestant movement. It had insisted on and made provisions for an educated clergy--perhaps the greatest need of the Roman Church in the middle of the sixteenth century.

All this was largely due to the man who ruled in Rome. Pope Pius IV., sprung from the shrewd Italian middle-class, caring little for theology, by no means distinguished for piety, had seen what the Church needed, and by deft diplomacy had obtained it. A stronger man would have snapped the threads which tied all parties together; one more zealous would have lacked his infinite patience; a deeply pious man could scarcely have employed the means he continually used. He was magnificently assisted by the new Company of Jesus. No theologians had so much influence at Trent as Lainez and Salmeron; the Council would have broken down altogether but for the aid given by Canisius to Morone in his negotiations with the Emperor.

Pius IV. was not slow to fulfil the promises he had made to sovereigns and Council. The Breviary and the Missal were revised, as Ferdinand had requested. Ecclesiastical music was purified. Exertions were made to establish colleges and theological seminaries. But a sterner Pontiff was needed to guide the battle against the growing Protestantism. He was found in the next, Pope Pius V.

The influence of Cardinal Borromeo, the pious nephew of Pius IV., was powerful in the Conclave, and was exerted to procure the election of Michele Ghislieri, Cardinal of Alessandria, who took the name of Pius V. The new Pontiff had entered a Dominican convent when fourteen years of age, and had given himself up heart and soul to the strictest life his Order enjoined. He had all the zeal for strict orthodoxy which characterised the Dominicans, an asceticism which never spared himself, and a detestation of the immoralities and irregularities which too often disgraced the lives of ecclesiastics. He carried the habits of the cloister with him into the Vatican. He never missed attendance at the prescribed services of the Church, and in his devotion there was no trace of hypocrisy. He was a Pope to lead the new Romanism, with its intense hatred of heresy, its determination to reform the moral life, and its contempt for the Renaissance and all its works. Philip II. of Spain sent a special letter of congratulation to Cardinal Borromeo to thank him for his efforts in the Conclave.

The new Pontiff believed, heart and soul, in repression. He meant to fight the Reformation by the Inquisition and the Index; and these two instruments were unsparingly used.

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