hrone. His accession marked the opening of a new era in
the history of the Papacy. Till now the fortunes of Catholicism had been
steadily sinking to a lower ebb. With the Peace of Passau the Empire
seemed lost to it. The new Protestant faith stood triumphant in the
north of Germany, and it was already advancing to the conquest of the
south. The nobles of Austria were forsaking the older religion. A
Venetian ambassador estimated the German Catholics at little more than a
tenth of the whole population of Germany. Eastward the nobles of Hungary
and Poland became Protestants in a mass. In the west France was yielding
more and more to heresy, and England had hardly been rescued from it by
Mary's accession. Only where the dead hand of Spain lay heavy, in
Castille, in Aragon, or in Italy, was the Reformation thoroughly crushed
out; and even the dead hand of Spain failed to crush heresy in the Low
Countries. But at the moment when ruin seemed certain the older faith
rallied to a new resistance. While Protestantism was degraded and
weakened by the prostitution of the Reformation to political ends, by
the greed and worthlessness of the German princes who espoused its
cause, by the factious lawlessness of the nobles in Poland and the
Huguenots in France, while it wasted its strength in theological
controversies and persecutions, in the bitter and venomous discussions
between the Churches which followed Luther and the Churches which
followed Zwingli or Calvin, the great communion which it assailed felt
at last the uses of adversity. The Catholic world rallied round the
Council of Trent. In the very face of heresy the Catholic faith was anew
settled and defined. The Papacy was owned afresh as the centre of
Catholic union. The enthusiasm of the Protestants was met by a
counter-enthusiasm among their opponents. New religious orders rose to
meet the wants of the day; the Capuchins became the preachers of
Catholicism, the Jesuits became not only its preachers but its
directors, its schoolmasters, its missionaries, its diplomatists. Their
organization, their blind obedience, their real ability, their fanatical
zeal, galvanized the pulpit, the school, the confessional, into a new
life.

[Sidenote: Paul the Fourth.]

It was this movement, this rally of Catholicism, which now placed its
representative on the Papal throne. At the moment when Luther was first
opening his attack on the Papacy Giovanni Caraffa had laid down his
sees of Chieti