Professor Hase and by M.
Guizot, that the auspicious issue of the Council was an object of vital
care to all denominations of Christian men.

The Council of Trent impressed on the Church the stamp of an intolerant
age, and perpetuated by its decrees the spirit of an austere
immorality. The ideas embodied in the Roman Inquisition became
characteristic of a system which obeyed expediency by submitting to
indefinite modification, but underwent no change of principle. Three
centuries have so changed the world that the maxims with which the
Church resisted the Reformation have become her weakness and her
reproach, and that which arrested her decline now arrests her progress.
To break effectually with that tradition and eradicate its influence,
nothing less is required than an authority equal to that by which it was
imposed. The Vatican Council was the first sufficient occasion which
Catholicism had enjoyed to reform, remodel, and adapt the work of Trent.
This idea was present among the motives which caused it to be summoned.
It was apparent that two systems which cannot be reconciled were about
to contend at the Council; but the extent and force of the reforming
spirit were unknown.

Seventeen questions submitted by the Holy See to the bishops in 1867
concerned matters of discipline, the regulation of marriage and
education, the policy of encouraging new monastic orders, and the means
of making the parochial clergy more dependent on the bishops. They gave
no indication of the deeper motives of the time. In the midst of many
trivial proposals, the leading objects of reform grew more defined as
the time approached, and men became conscious of distinct purposes based
on a consistent notion of the Church. They received systematic
expression from a Bohemian priest, whose work, _The Reform of the Church
in its Head and Members_, is founded on practical experience, not only
on literary theory, and is the most important manifesto of these ideas.
The author exhorts the Council to restrict centralisation, to reduce the
office of the Holy See to the ancient limits of its primacy, to restore
to the Episcopate the prerogatives which have been confiscated by Rome,
to abolish the temporal government, which is the prop of hierarchical
despotism, to revise the matrimonial discipline, to suppress many
religious orders and the solemn vows for all, to modify the absolute
rule of celibacy for the clergy, to admit the use of the vernacular in