because of his ability to judge of the struggle that was going on in Luther's mind; to weigh, to understand the causes which forced him slowly and all unwillingly into revolt. For the dominant character of Luther's mind was reverence for authority -authority ecclesiastical, till he was forced into antagonism; authority temporal, which continued to the end.

'It is the extremity of his Conservatism that has put him wrong, even with those who regard politics as quite distinct from ethics. He defended Passive Obedience; he claimed to be the inventor of Divine Right; and the constitution of the Lutheran Churches contributed even more than the revival of the Civil Law to establish the absolute sovereignty of States. He proclaimed religious liberty, believing that Rome had never persecuted; then he denounced Jews and Anabaptists, and required that there should never be two religions in the same place. He denounced the ruling classes in his country with extreme violence; but when the peasants rose, with their just and reasonable demands, and threatened Saxony, he issued a tract insisting that they should be cut to pieces. . . . The great fact which we have to recognise is that, with all the intensity of his passion for authority, he did more than any single man to make modern history the developement of revolution.'

The chapter on Luther is followed by one on the CounterReformation, which did not begin till the doctrines and principles of the Reformation seemed carrying everything before them. With admirable fairness the author has discussed the merits of the Inquisition, the Society of Jesus, and the Council of Trent, and has weighed their relative value in staying the advance of the encroaching tide. The Pope, Paul III., seems to have admitted the need of reform, and appointed a commission, largely composed of 'idealists who aspired after a regenerated 'Catholicism,' to advise as to things that wanted mending.

The reformers of the Renaissance seemed about to prevail, and to possess the ear of the Pontiff. Their common policy was reduction of prerogative, concession in discipline, conciliation in doctrine; and it involved the reversal of an established system. As they became powerful and their purpose clear, another group detached itself from them, under the flag of No Surrender, and the division of opinion... burst into open conflict. To men trained in the thought of the middle ages, with the clergy above the laity and the Pope above the King, the party that aimed at internal improvement by means the exact opposite of those which had preserved the Church in the past were feckless enthusiasts. They reverted to the old tradition of indefeasible authority wielding irresistible force.'

A strong party was thus formed under the leadership of Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti, who had been nuncio in Spain, and

was afterwards Pope under the name of Paul IV. These now urged the advisability of introducing the Spanish Inquisition into Italy, and this was done in 1542. Of Acton's many marked characteristics, none is more prominent than the liberality of his opinions, his toleration of differences, his abhorrence of constraint, under which head the Inquisition naturally falls; and in his hands the gruesome story loses none of its horror. The Inquisition at Rome was a new thing. In the south of France and in Spain, though nominally controlled by the Pope, it was not always in harmony with the Papal Court. Now, in 1542,

'It became part of the Roman machinery and an element of centralisation. A supreme body of cardinals governed it, with the Pope at their head. The medieval theory was that the Church condemned and the State executed, priests having nothing to do with punishment and requesting that it might not be excessive. This distinction fell away and the clergy had to conquer their horror of bloodshed. The delinquent was tried by the Pope as ruler of the Church, and burnt by the Pope as ruler of the State.'

Branches of the Holy Office were established in other parts of Italy, but only at Rome were executions frequent, and there the victims were allowed to be strangled before being burnt. We may presume that this was in deference to clerical susceptibilities; as also, perhaps, was another modification of a much more serious character.

'Roman experts regard it as a distinctive mark of the new tribunal that it allowed culprits who could not be caught and punished in the proper way to be killed without ceremony by anybody who met them. This practice was not unprecedented, but it had fallen into disuse with the rest during the profane Renaissance, and its revival was a portentous event, for it prompted the frequent murders and massacres which stain the story of the Counter-Reformation with crimes committed for the love of God.'

When it is added that the laws have not been repealed,' it means, of course, by the Papal Court; for we may be quite sure that the civil laws of the kingdom, which do not permit a murderer to be hanged, would not permit a heretic to be burnt with impunity, even within the precincts of the Vatican. Practically, however, the laws were dead within a hundred years, and the immediate objects were obtained in the first thirty years. The Reformation in Italy had by that time come to an end, and the Popes had been supplied with an 'instrument that enabled them to control the Council of Trent.' Next to the Inquisition, the great agent of the Counter

Reformation, was the Society of Jesus; and of this, its founder and foundation, Acton has left us an interesting appreciation.

'Nothing had done more to aid the Reformation than the decline and insufficiency of the secular clergy. By raising up a body of virtuous, educated, and active priests, the Jesuits met that argument. The theological difference remained, and they dealt with it through the best controversialists. And when their polemics failed, they strove as pamphleteers and as the confessors of the great to resist the Protestants with the arm of the flesh. For the multitudes that had never heard the Catholic case stated, they trained the most eloquent school of modern preachers. For security in the coming generation, they established successful colleges, chiefly for the study of good silver Latin; and they frequented the towns more than the country; the rich more than the poor. ... They so identified their order and the Church itself with the struggle for existence in Europe, that they were full of the same spirit long after the Counter-Reformation was spent.'

The further appreciation deals with the later and political developement of the Order: the conditional allegiance, the advocacy of tyrannicide, the support of absolutism, the theory ' of morals that made salvation easy '-all, in fact, that has given its sinister meaning to the word 'jesuitical.' Since Pascal wrote his Lettres Provinciales,' there is no such scathing criticism on the methods of the Order; and it is the more severe as being written in no hostile spirit; leaving, in fact, the condemnation implied rather than expressed.

We agree with Acton in placing the Council of Trent as the third of the forces which produced and directed the CounterReformation; others have put it as the first, counting defensive before aggressive strategy. But mere defence will not win victories; and the Counter-Reformation would have been a very different thing from what it was if it had rested mainly on the work of the Council. That, indeed, went scarcely beyond drawing the line of demarcation between Catholic and Protestant. That in no sense was it a Council of the Church is, of course, familiarly known; how exclusive it really was, a meeting of a small but energetic minority, is brought out most clearly by Acton. It was intended to be, and it was, an assembly from which Protestants were excluded; at which their interests were debated and-so far as it was concerned-decided by men whose function it avowedly was to take their lives. The purpose for which a Council had been originally demanded was lost beforehand. 'The Council did not tend to reconcile, but to confirm separa'tion.' It is thus very properly relegated to the third position, and summing up the whole question, Acton has said:

'It may be doubted whether Italian Protestants ever gave promise of vitality. . . . The Italian movement was crushed by violence. The scene of the authentic Counter-Reformation was central Europe, and especially those countries which were the scene of the Reformation itself, Germany and Austria. There the tide, which with little interruption had flowed for fifty years, was effectually turned back, and regions which were Protestant became Catholic again. There, too, the means employed were not those prevailing under the crown of Spain. They were weapons supplied and suggested by the Peace of Religion, harmoniously forged by the Lutherans themselves at the Diet of 1555.'

And the story is brought to an end with an account of the cruel persecution which was no persecution, inasmuch as it did not involve torture or imprisonment or banishment or death, but only deprivation of church and school and social position, oppression and all those nameless arts with which the rich used to coerce the poor in the good old days,' and which— mutatis mutandis-are not unknown even now.

6

Even in these chapters on the Reformation, where Acton is at his best, a critical reader cannot but be struck by the inequality of his references to ecclesiastical and political affairs, and by his relative weakness when he had to speak of military or naval operations. This is still more noticeable in later chapters. It is as if-like Aaron's rod-the ecclesiastical element in history had swallowed all others. It is thus made to appear that the French Wars of Religion were simply and solely religious: that they were provoked by the massacre of Vassy, itself caused by Guise's determination to prevent or put a stop to Catherine's 'surrender of Counter-Reformation policy, and the ruin which 'it portended to the Church in France.' The sentence is complete in itself; the meaning is perfectly clear; and we feel, therefore, bound to protest against the necessary inference. For the cause of these terrible and devastating wars was far indeed from being so simple as is here represented; all the evidence tends to show that the 'massacre of Vassy' was of the nature of a chance affray, due to the insolence of the Huguenots quite as much as to the arrogance of Guise or the brutality of his followers; and that the attributing the wars to religion alone is curiously ignoring the personal enmity and the conflicting ambitions of the Guises and the Bourbons, the intrigues of Elizabeth of England on the one hand and of Philip of Spain on the other. Similarly, in speaking of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the text of the lectures would lead us to conclude that it was entirely a religious outbreak. It is indeed said, without reference to religion,

'It is perfectly certain that it was not a thing long and carefully prepared, as was believed in Rome; and those who deny premeditation, in the common sense of the word, are in the right. But for ten years the Court had regarded a wholesale massacre as the last resource of monarchy. Catherine herself said that it had been in contemplation, if opportunity offered, from the year 1562.'

Naturally, where Catherine was concerned, murder was always possible; but it does not appear that in 1562 she had quite made up her mind whom she most wanted to murder; or that, if she had, they were the same as in 1572. However that may have been, Acton has curtly attributed her later resolve to a religious impulse. She was resolved not to submit to Protestant ascendency, and she knew a short way out of it; and this was the handle which started the engine, though the motive power was the 'blood-feud of nine years' standing between the House of Guise and the Admiral.' It is, however. as certain as anything can be that the impulse to Catherine did not come from religion or from fear of Protestant ascendency, but from jealousy of Coligny's influence over the King: an influence which she judged as dangerous politically as it was personally obnoxious. To her it seemed that 'Un homme cherchait à l'écarter du pouvoir, compromettait la paix et la sûreté 'du royaume ; il fallait qu'il disparût.'* So far as her motive was not personal, it was political.

'La peur saisit la Reine des armes espagnoles. L'Amiral, déjà odieux, devenait dangereux. Elle trouvait partout cet homme sur sa route chef de parti, il avait tenu en échec toutes les forces du royaume; conseiller de la couronne, il lançait son fils dans une aventure dangereuse. Ami, ennemi, il était également à craindre. L'idée d'un assassinat dut se présenter alors à son esprit. Justement, l'ambassadeur florentin signale à la date du 23 juillet les conférences de Catherine avec Madame de Nemours, la mère des Guise.' †

The assassination, as attempted, failed, and the scope of the projected murder was necessarily, from Catherine's point of view enlarged. It became a wild outbreak of the most bloodthirsty mob in Europe, which gladly seized the opportunity and exulted in calling it religion. But with Catherine, who had unchained the passions of these hell-hounds, which she could not control, religion had no place.

'Elle avait voulu tuer Coligny pour se débarrasser d'un rival; le coup manqué, elle avait été poussée par la peur à anéantir le *Lavisse, Histoire de France,' VI. i. 125.

† Ib. 124.