What they might and did answer to arguments like these, of course we know. But we may admit that Catholicism had now assumed a position in which, if it chose to call itself exclusively the Christian Church, it would have all tradition on its side. The malcontents had appealed to a general council; a general council had now spoken. Reformation had been clamorously demanded; reformation had been granted. Objections might perhaps be urged to the procedure of the council; but, on the whole, which party had followed precedent more faithfully, that which reformed the Church altogether by means of a council, or that which reformed it piece by piece through the agency of a town council excited by the eloquence of a preacher?

Catholicism then became after 1564 the conservatism of Christendom, and we use conservatism here in its better sense. It was neither the conservatism of indifference nor that of dulness and sloth, but a conservatism such as pious and modest minds might embrace and a conservatism favorable to practical reform. Such it was on the Continent; but we in Britain, as I have said, were unaffected by the movement which called it into existence.

It rested in the first place upon this broad basis of conservative feeling. In the second place, it rested upon a most powerful coalition between the great sovereigns and the papacy. That GuelfGhibelline discord which had paralyzed the Church in the time of Charles V had disappeared. Philip, Ferdinand, and Charles IX were now substantially at one, and united with the pope in favor of the dogmatic part of the work of the council. Pius IV had deliberately invoked and purchased the aid of these secular princes.

But we are now further to note that the spiritual power had by no means made itself purely subservient to the temporal. It is the peculiar feature of this age that within the Catholic party the religious influence is once more supreme. The new-born religious zeal of the papacy did not soon pass away. Caraffa was the first of a long line of popes who all alike were either themselves inspired by it or found themselves hurried along by the current. The model pope of this school is the Ghislieri, Pius V, who died in 1572. His zeal was purely religious, nor could any man hold himself more superior to those worldly considerations or those intrigues which had made the whole policy of the Medicean papacy.

The result is that after 1564 international politics begin to be controlled by a new influence. Hitherto we have seen them determined by the family interests of the great European houses, the Habsburg and the Valois. But now for a time the religious influ

ence is supreme. The regenerated Catholic Church is for a while the mistress of the world, as in the time of the Crusades. It is felt that the Council of Trent ought to be followed by the suppression of heresy everywhere, as of a thing no longer excusable.

What has been called here the reconversion to Christianity of the Papal See is one of the most remarkable passages in the whole history of the Church. It has been, however, obscured from the view of Protestants by the fact that the Christianity of a Caraffa or a Ghislieri seems to them no Christianity. Assuredly it was not the evangelical religion that we find in the New Testament. It had little of "sweet reasonableness" or of "sweetness and light." It was in one word not the Christianity of Jesus but the Christianity of Hildebrand and Innocent. It was a religion of Crusades and of the Inquisition. Its principal achievements were the St. Bartholomew and the autos da fe of Philip II, and it may no doubt be argued with much plausibility that a Medicean surrounded by artists and humanists did more real good at the Vatican than a Ghislieri among his inquisitors. Indeed, the decline of Italian genius both in art and literature went hand in hand with this revival of religion. But though it may have been a dark type of religion, yet the new spirit which began at this time to animate the papacy has all the characteristics of religion, as the old spirit with all its amiability and urbanity was consciously and frankly irreligious. A Luther would not have regarded Pius V with the feeling of horror with which Leo X affected him. Luther, full of religious feeling, seemed to see in Leo Antichrist in person, and none the less because of the pictures and the poems. But perhaps there never lived a man who conveyed a more pure impression of religiousness than Pius V. He who brought Carnesecchi to the stake, who charged his soldiers, when they parted for France, to give no quarter to Huguenots, he of whom no one doubted that had he lived four months longer so as to see the St. Bartholomew, he would have yielded up his breath with a most exultant Nunc dimittis, was nevertheless a saint, if devotion, single-mindedness, unworldly sincerity, can make a saint.

It has often been remarked that Christianity has taken several great typical forms. We see in Cyprian and Augustine the gradual growth of a Latin Christianity, the characteristics of which Milman has so luminously discriminated. Luther may be said to have created Teutonic Christianity. The new development we have now before us resembles these in being the result of a blending of Christianity with the spirit of a particular nation. It is

Spanish Christianity. Its precursors in past time had been Dominic in the distant thirteenth century, and more recently Queen Isabella, whose image may be traced among ourselves in her granddaughter, Mary Tudor. Caraffa himself had passed many years in Spain. Philip and Alva, both Spaniards, were the statesmen of the movement. The Spaniard Ignatius Loyola was its apostle. In Spain alone it seems a natural growth, and thus, while in Italy we find it fatal to genius, it exerts a less withering influence there, and in its great literary representative, Calderon, can boast of one of the great poets of the world. The circumstances of Spanish history explain the peculiarity of it. Its merciless rigor toward heterodoxy is not only in accordance with the Spanish character, but it was the natural result of a historic development which had been wholly determined by wars of religion.

These general remarks prepare us to regard the year 1564 as introducing a new age. A final attempt was now to be made to restore the unity of Christendom in accordance with the decrees of the Council of Trent by putting down the heretical sects which in nearly half a century since the first appearance of Luther had been allowed to acquire such influence. Thus a great trial is preparing for England.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Cheney, International Law under Elizabeth, in the English Historical Review, October, 1905. Ranke, History of England, Vol. I, pp. 280 ff., on the European situation. Froude, Lectures on the Council of Trent. Beesly, Queen Elizabeth, chaps. iii, vi, vii, and x. Blok, History of the People of the Netherlands, Vol. III. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II. Robinson, Readings in European History, Vol. II, chap. xxviii.

CHAPTER IX

THE GROWTH OF PURITANISM

THE religious beliefs which were to complicate the political and constitutional questions of the seventeenth century had gained strong hold in England before the death of Queen Elizabeth. The revolt against the old Church had given authority a severe blow; the multiplication of books through printing had helped to break up the uniformity of ignorance and indifference which characterized the lower classes in the Middle Ages. Weighty theological questions which had been reserved to the learned in earlier days became matters of common controversies. The ferment of intellectual activity began to work among the people, and quite naturally theology was the subject-matter of that newly awakened interest. Thus it was that Puritanism, with its emphasis on moral discipline and individual conscience, sprang into existence, and contributed greatly to that independence among the people which resisted political as well as religious authority. On this topic, John Richard Green wrote with great sympathy and insight.

§ 1. Position of the Bible in Elizabethan Literature1

No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the years which parted the middle of the reign of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was as yet the one English book which was familiar to every Englishman; it was read at churches and read at home, and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened, kindled a startling enthusiasm. When Bishop Bonner

1 Green, Short History of the English People, pp. 460 ff. By permission of Mrs. John Richard Green.

set up the first six Bibles in St. Paul's, "many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible voice to read to them.". . . "One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature, and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every home. The popularity of the Bible was owing to other causes besides that of religion. The whole prose literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of Wycliffe, has grown up since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale.

So far as the nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry, save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round Bonner's Bibles in the nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on the words of the Geneva Bible in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war-song and psalm, stateroll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome.

Classical letters, therefore, remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the tongue of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument, the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the