And, though the popes were unwilling servants, they, from Clement VII.'s time onward till long after the sixteenth century had terminated, were at the mercy of Spain and had to attend to her mandates. The independence of Italy, for which Julius, Leo, Clement himself had striven, had come to an end. Southern Italy was altogether Spanish, and the whole peninsula was held by Spanish arms and Spanish agents. The most curious and instructive study in Italian politics is presented in the Council of Trent. The Pope first shrinks from it in terror of Spain, then, reassured and reliant on Spain and for Catholic and Spanish ob

been with such modifications as were of hierarchical intrigue had spun itself! involved in the times-the Jesuits were How it encumbered Europe and the to be. The verses in Solomon's Song, known world! Castilian priests, who at which the Temple had applied to it- the commencement of Isabella the Cathoself, might be appropriated by the Com-lic's reign would have been checked by pany, would suit its distant wanderings, the Guadalquiver, might now roam from its wealth, the persecutions it inflicted the Paraná to the Yantsekiang. and underwent, its watchfulness, its perpetual peril. "Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant? Behold his bed, which is Solomon's; threescore valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel. They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night." The Jesuit was to bend his head forward a little, to keep his eyes downcast, to have on his face a pleasant and calm look, and so forth. Should the Church define that what appears to the sight as white is black, he is to maintain the definition. In his Superior, the Sol-jects, carries it on and concludes it. The dier of Christ is to recognize and to wor- Council was a diplomatic training ground ship the Presence, as it were, of Christ. | for all the nations which took part in it. He is to have no will of his own, he is to The rough sketch for the Council was disbe as a log of wood, as a corpse, as a cussed by Charles V. and a Venetian carstick, which the old man can turn how dinal, who had lived amid the business of and whither he likes. At first, a Jesuit the republic and had written a book on might not accept a bishopric; we have the Venetian Constitution. The author quite lately seen with what difficulty a of a careful essay on French diplomacy member of the Order was persuaded to during the sixteenth century, M. Edoureceive a cardinal's hat. But from its ard Frémy, gives up, and in our opinfoundation, the greatest names flocked ion very rightly, his first chapter to an into the society. Francis Borgia, who account of the behaviour of the French when Ignatius died stood over the ambassadors at the later sittings of the seven Pyrenean provinces, who was after- Council. The narrative of the Council wards the third General, had been a of Trent was a fine subject for political duke and a viceroy. When the next cen-historians. It was written by a man who tury opens, the Jesuits are, in all four cared to unmask its treacherous diplomcontinents, at the seats of political life.acy, by a Venetian, Sarpi. It was writThe Fathers are in Akbar's palace at La- ten again, as against Sarpi, by a Jesuit, hore, in the Imperial Chamber at Pekin, Pallavicino. In an appendix to the last at the court of the Emperor of Ethiopia. volume of his work on the Popes, ProOne Jesuit founded 300 churches in fessor von Ranke has criticised Sarpi and Japan. Among the Indians of Paraguay his opponent. The German historian is, the noblest and most enlightened philan- by much, the best living authority on the thropy of the Order showed itself in the history of diplomacy: he calls Sarpi the so-called "Reductions," a new exper- second of modern Italian historians; the iment in the way of Christian republics. first rank he awards to Macchiavelli.' In Europe the Catholic nobility and gentry were schooled in Jesuit seminaries, and the confidential spiritual direction of Catholic monarchs was, nearly universally we may say, exercised by specially trained Jesuit casuists. That Spanish power, which had shot up so rapidly, what a real strength it had put forth! Out of that series of marriages, from Ferdinand and Isabella to Philip and Mary, what a network of domestic and political and also

General Councils had been numerous in the preceding century, in which, in fact, they had gone far to supply the place of the papacy. The desire of another Council had been strongly felt under Leo; had very possibly been felt by Adrian, in many respects so excep tional a pope; that desire was urged anew upon Clement. Popes hated Councils. A Medicean pope was likely to have Councils in special hatred. Leo

had taken pains to have it recorded that a stimulus from within prompted each a pope was above a council. Clement step, was a very different process from might dread that, were he arraigned be- that into which countries were rapidly fore such an assembly, his use of his own torn of conflict with powerful, pressing, money at the time of his election, his use foreign principles, which, moreover, often of the funds of the Church since that seemed to set them at variance with event, and especially the illegitimacy of their own past and the piety of their his birth, might cost him his chair. ancestors. How far were these boldly to- aggressive movements, these revolts, At last in 1545 the Council came gether. The leaders of the reforming justifiable? how far were they natural? party among the cardinals were there. How far was their universal spread stimBut they were soon met by the disputants ulated and artificial? how far was it the of the new order, the Spaniards Lainez work of a few selfish and licentious and Salmeron, to whom the word of com- leaders? Never were the imperfections We almand had been given by Ignatius Loy- of human nature seen more plainly, felt ola to oppose every change, every nov- more keenly, than in that age. elty. Thus the Jesuits entered into the luded, a little while ago, to the influence arena of Theology and European Politics. of the Society of Jesus at courts. And From that moment to this they have pre- that influence was in no small measure vented or prejudged General Councils. due to the pains and skill devoted, of set The persuasion of Loyola had already purpose, by the Order to the managehelped to determine the Pope to listen to ment of the confessional. In the comCardinals Caraffa and Burgos, to re-or- bats of interest and opinion, conscience, ganize the Inquisition, and to establish where a man was honest, was constantly its head-quarters at Rome. We need not baffled; a person, from whom his posifurther accompany the Council of Trent tion demanded that he should lead others, through its scholastic windings, its ver- would be in continual want of a guide bose controversies, its pilgrimages from himself. The same needs existed, where city to city; it is thenceforward in the the prescriptions of the Jesuits have never been, on any large scale, applied, hands of Pope and Order. The history of the sixteenth century is, where the hostility to Rome was strongMen in general were doubtful about first and foremost, the history of state- est. craft. This maxim will be our best their acts and about their motives, which guide, while we pick our way through the they desired should be approved by God last fifty years of it. In some degree it as well as by government. The very is a history of great diplomatists on the same causes, which in some countries Imperial and Papal thrones, and it is threw such power into the hands of the from those heights that a storm threatens Jesuits, in other countries produced a which stirs panic and rouses energy. multiplication of sects, until it looked But it is ultimately a history of politicians with narrower and, as we might say, modern views, lovers of new institutions and constitutions. It is a marked era in the Wherever a man would undertake the life of nations. Still more does its in- control and cure of souls, there was sure terest lie in its grand biographies, in to be no lack of souls anxious and wishwhich, as in representative statuary, are ful to be cared for. Many explained modelled beforehand, naked and defiant, these symptoms in communities to mean the instincts and features of peoples. the dissolution of the whole life of comStatesmen never had harder work before munities. They refused to believe that them and never had such reason to mis- a Henry VIII. or a Gustavus Wasa could trust themselves. A kind of authority, be a saviour of society. The real quesclaiming to be parental, had been long tion to them, they said, was not at all a disregarded, it might be, and disliked; question of ecclesiastical doctrine or of but, to dislike and disregard an infirm and inactive parent is quite a different thing from altogether disowning and denying him. For countries to develop not monarchs usually so? slowly, to become stage by stage the homes of national dynasties and churches, the contradiction never becoming very perceptible between their traditions and inclinations, the feeling always being that

probable that Christianity would soon have as many various subdivisions as Christian congregations. there were

royal supremacy. It involved the first rules of morality. And, though popes Would it do might sometimes be bad in morals, were

not to hold reserved the highest place, in the sight of all nations, for a potentate, who had once embodied and who might again embody Moral Greatness. What was happening? Lassitude was sapping

the vital force of the people, luxury that of the courts. What prospect could be more doleful? One saw cities swayed by the filthiest and most blasphemous ravings of demagogues, and, in the country, peasants were rallying on behalf of the lowest of the older superstitions or on the behalf of communistic heresies.

The lives which have been, in their example and result, most beneficent to humanity, have been at the last consumed by a sense of loneliness and failure; and it may be, that always after intense effort, whether on the part of a person or a combination of persons, a corresponding slackness of mental fibre is inevitable.

pher, and historian, and poet, dear even to the satirist, of modern Europe — Mont Blanc, the Rhone, Lake Leman, the delight of the large intellects of Rousseau, Gibbon, Byron, and Voltaire, enliven and define the landscape of Geneva.

as

In Carolingian times a count of Geneva had governed on behalf of the Roman Empire. In Swabian times, the Emperor had made the bishop of Geneva count. The bishop in his turn gave secular rule under himself to the Count of Savoy, who bore the title of "Vidomne." By degrees this title of vidomne passed the count at Turin willing it so in order that his relations with Geneva might lose as much "Post tenebras lux" is the ancient as possible the traces of their origin in a motto of the town of Geneva, on which delegated authority from the Count of the dawn and the warmth of the sun Savoy to his local officer, the custodian break from behind the wall of the Alps of the island-fortress in the Rhone. We and of eternal snow. In the heraldic are led to remark how, in the early hisbearings of the city meet the Eagle and tory of the House of Savoy, the design the Keys, the symbols of Cæsar and of to reach and enclose Geneva was St. Peter. On the very geography of warmly nursed and as persistently mainGeneva and on all her fortunes there is set tained as, in the later history of that the seal of an international vocation. House, the design to reach and to enFable makes Geneva four centuries older close Rome. Amadeus VIII. of Savoy, than Rome, and the eldest daughter of in the variety and incongruity of the disTroy. History connects the site with tinctions he accumulated, claims celebthe opening event in Cæsar's Western rity as having surpassed all his succescampaigns. Here was the frontier of the sors. He became, one after the other, Allobroges, the allies of the Romans, Count and Duke of Savoy, Pope of Rome, where Cæsar met and turned aside the and Bishop of Geneva (A.D. 1444); at unwieldy caravan of the Helvetians. In intervals in his career he let his beard our own time, Geneva stands in a way of grow and lived a hermit at Ripaille. her own between the divergent interests From the times of Amadeus VIII. the of nations, of labour and capital, of eccle- bishops of Geneva were mostly members siastical establishments; she offers a of the ducal family. The ambitious theatre for Alabama arbitrations, for house was increased and extended; at social congresses, for the preaching of last Geneva was on all sides encompassed Père Hyacinthe. Throughout the Mid- by the possessions of the Duke of Savoy. dle Ages and at the rise of modern his- The line which separated the rights of tory she took a very prominent part in the duke over Geneva from his rights over the progress of commerce, and was the the territories beyond the city-proper had home of much literary and military ac- become the slightest imaginable. tivity. "Clef et Boulevard de la Suisse," under the shadow of the Cathedral of St. the city has been styled. Geneva stood Peter at Geneva had sprung up-the on the confines of three languages, of plant is a common one in mediæval episthree political organisms, Italy, France, copal purlieus - a further Power, a deand the Empire. She had a close con- termined democracy. So far back as nection with the trade of Northern and 1387 a charter of liberties was granted, Western Europe through Cologne, with which made an important landmark on that of the South and East through Flor- the road toward the full enjoyment by ence and Venice; she was in closer Geneva of the forms of a republic. Thus neighbourhood and more intimate rela- the city was one of most diverse populations with, at about equal distances, Bern, tion and opinions. It had a most compliLyons, and Turin. And the mountain, cated jurisdiction and police. Bishop, the river, the lake above all natural Vidomne, and Syndicate were bound by objects most suggestive to the mind of oath to uphold each other's privileges the traveller on the Continent in the and administration. Then there was the nineteenth century, inviting and familiar action of the Chapter, of the Vidomne's as they have been to the typical philoso-lieutenant, of the various civic com

But

Anyhow the term had a political before it had a religious meaning, and, whether it be the same with the French party-epithet or not, which is sometimes still a subject of dispute, this description of the term would still be true in both localities. Bezanson Hugues and Berthelier were much more political than ecclesiastical reformers; Bezanson Hugues remained in life and death a Catholic; even Bonnivard's revolt from the papal

mittees, from the General Council, the famous nickname of faction came into Smaller Council, the Council of Sixty, vogue at Geneva. The partisans of the down to the numerous and restless clubs Freiburg and Bern "combourgeoisie and confraternities - abbayes et com-were called Huguenots, the adherents of pagnies — in which the youth of Geneva Savoy Mamelukes. The word Eygueenrolled itself for the discussion of affairs not may with most probability be deand for drill and the practice of archery. rived from the German "Eidgenoss," the A street of Geneva was called after the Swiss league being best known as the German, a market-hall after the French, "Eidgenossen," the "sworn comrades; " merchants. In one part of the city rose with less probability from the name of a Franciscan, in another an unusually the ablest Genevan leader, Bezanson spacious Dominican convent ("le Grand Hugues.* Palais "). Pilgrims crowded to the shrine of St. Victor. A band of the hungry shaggy mountaineers from the Italian side of the Alps, who formed the garrison, might be seen to pass vociferating in their vile Piedmontese jargon on one side of the road, while on the other might stand a group of high-born cathedral dignitaries paying their respects to each other in Ciceronian Latin. Processions, manœuvres, fairs, festivals, traffic kept the town in an unintermittent bustle. There and monastic system had its root in and were as many as fifty notaries-public. took its savour from literary rather than The fondness of the Genevans for amuse- moral tendencies in his generation. Of ment and gaiety, in particular their pat- the two implicated towns, Freiburg was ronage of allegorical and comic repre- strongly Catholic and Bern was Protestsentations, became proverbial. But the ant. It was from Freiburg that, in the joyous and prosperous city had its turbu- first instance, the citizens of Geneva had lent and bitter moods, and these recurred most support and sympathy; later inmore and more often. It knew what it deed, though not because Geneva freely was to be under interdict and under mar-willed or wished it so, Bern supplanted tial law. The first decades of the six- Freiburg. Geneva passed, without knowteenth century were spent at Geneva in ing well how and in what direction she internal dissensions, quarrels between was being moved, out of one relation into duke and bishop, bishop and citizens, another. Very slowly and under the duke and citizens. Some of the leading sheer compulsion of the Duke of Savoy's citizens had been admitted to the free- policy, with which fell in after countless dom of Freiburg and Bern. Three men subterfuges and hesitations that of the of the popular party are famous above bishop, Peter de la Baume, a policy bent the rest: the versatile and eloquent on confounding and causing to be conFrançois de Bonnivard, who has some-founded the desire for local franchises times been styled the Erasmus of the Genevan Reformation; Philibert Berthelier the favourite of the multitude, with a humorous and a melancholy vein in him, fond of music and conviviality, but amid the clatter of wine-cups imparting to the friend next him his prevision of a violent death, Berthelier has been called the Egmont of the Genevan struggle for independence; then Bezanson Hugues, the coolest and, as it strikes us, the noblest of the trio, whom, continuing the comparison between Geneva and the Netherlands, we would take leave to think of as a companion spirit to John of

Barneveld.

with the taint of those reviled heresies which were known, like every other novelty, to have made some way in the place,-most slowly was Geneva as a city pressed into pronounced antagonism to Catholic doctrine and the system of the Catholic Church. When the bishop had excommunicated Geneva; when the Archbishop of Vienne, who was metropolitan, and the Pope had confirmed the excommunication; when it was an

*Kampschulte's "Calvin," p. 49. We have to acknowledge great obligations to this book. Not only the University of Bonn and the Old Catholic move

ment, but historical literature generally, suffered a great loss in the premature death of Professor Kampschulte. Only one out of the three volumes he meant to write on Calvin, had been published when he died. This fragment is a very remarkable example of learn aing, a still more remarkable example of impartiality.

nounced that the Duke of Savoy and the | Geneva become the byword of Europe

for the wildest scenes of debauchery, for as wild scenes of iconoclasm! The frenzied passion for excitement, change, and destruction had but to overleap another hedge or two, and it would have consummated political suicide. What were the materials for a future? Here a poor remnant of the old Genevan stock, the cringing and unworthy children of noble

liefs for the sake of having none, who had broken with Catholicism and its dignified official protectors, because they wanted to break with all religion and order; there an unreasoning, insurgent mob collected together by refugee revolutionary preachers, who, as soon as controversy and church-storming were over, lost all love for their untractable flocks, and found, day by day, their posts more untenable.

Bishop of Geneva in concert were levying troops and preparing to take the field against Geneva,- then, and not till then, did Genevan councillors begin to advise with a foreign missionary at whom hitherto they had looked askance, a protégé of Bern, which had given him introductions that had hitherto been of small service to him, "the Welsh Luther," the particular bête noire of Erasmus, William ¦ names, who had given up their old beFarel; not until then did Farel become a political personage at Geneva, though thenceforward a forward enough station was taken by him; not until then did the Protestant watchwords become those of Genevan patriotism. By the act of her enemies two courses only were at all open to Geneva. She must make her choice if she would have those enemies thrust back, kept at bay, between two, the only possible allies. Bern or France! Alliance with France could have but one result union with France. As it was, when, with the help of Bern, Geneva was safe from her old tyrants, she found Bernese statesmen-they had far and wide the reputation not much less covetous than French, and she was put to no little trouble to preserve her autonomy. Had it not been for her professedly sincere and thorough Protestantism, for the thus assured guarantees of religious affinity and fellowship, Bern would have enforced, as she demanded, the most substantial pledges; she would have annexed the town she had rescued. At the conclusion of a contest of about thirty years' duration, Geneva had shaken off the yoke of her bishop and of the Duke of Savoy. She had secured what men called her liberty; had she not sacrificed her character? 66 A tottering republic, a wavering faith, a nascent church," the sceptical and alarmist observer would have been able to see, as nowhere else, at Geneva, the picture traced for him vaguely in the whole condition of Europe, reproduced in a speaking and highly-finished miniature. The chiefs who had begun the movement had nearly all passed away, and their righteous and moderate enthusiasm was gone with them. In the place of old ecclesiastical foundations, of old patrician and civic authorities, what remained? In numbers the leading Genevan families had gone into exile with all the corporate and ceremonial, all the time-worn and time-honoured, furniture of the past. They had left a blank. The very soul of the city was extinct. How quickly did

At this very darkest moment a work was to commence at Geneva, beside which every other previous and later enterprise originated within her walls sinks into insignificance. In July 1536, a poor French man of letters, travelling under an assumed name, tired with his journey, arrived, intending to rest for one night, at Geneva. He met a former companion, Louis du Tillet, who chanced to inform Farel that the author of the "Institutes of the Christian Religion" was in the city. Farel had been for some time at his wit's end; he was through and through conscious of his incompetence as an organizer and legislator; he was full of fear lest, master of so many battle-fields, he should never succeed in making any use of victory. Here, the thought flashed on him at the instant, was in Geneva the very man Geneva required, the writer of a book which, published only a few months before, was on the lips of the entire learned and inquisitive world, which had become already the programme of Protestantism, or, as the Romanist historian Florimund de Raemund put it, "the Koran, the Talmud of Heresy." The man who had set forth the theory of Protestantism should bring into action the practice of Protestantism. From the bottom of his overtasked, perplexed, ardent, bold heart, Farel determined that Calvin should not leave the spot. He hastened to the stranger's lodgings, and in a few impetuous words forced upon him his plan. Calvin showed astonishment and annoyance. He was, he stated, a young, shy student; his tastes were for quiet, aca