. Hefele, _Conciliengeschichte_ (2nd ed., 9 vols.,
Freiburg, 1873-1890). (A. H.*)

C. THE MODERN CHURCH

The issue in 1564 of the canons of the council of Trent marks a very
definite epoch in the history of the Christian Church. Up till that
time, in spite of the schism of East and West and of innumerable
heresies, the idea of the Church as Catholic, not only in its faith but
in its organization, had been generally accepted. From this conception
the Reformers had, at the outset, no intention of departing. Their
object had been to purify the Church of medieval accretions, and to
restore the primitive model in the light of the new learning; the idea
of rival "churches," differing in their fundamental doctrines and in
their principles of organization, existing side by side, was as
abhorrent to them as to the most rigid partisan of Roman
centralization. The actual divisions of Western Christendom are the
outcome, less of the purely religious influences of the Reformation
period than of the political forces with which they were associated and
confused. When it became clear that the idea of doctrinal change would
find no acceptance at Rome, the Reformers appealed to the divine
authority of the civil power against that of the popes; and princes
within their several states succeeded, as the result of purely political
struggles and combinations, in establishing the form of religion best
suited to their convictions or their policy. Thus over a great part of
Europe the Catholic Church was split up into territorial or national
churches, which, whatever the theoretical ties which bound them
together, were in fact separate organizations, tending ever more and
more to become isolated and self-contained units with no formal
intercommunion, and, as the rivalry of nationalities grew, with
increasingly little even of intercommunication.

It was not, indeed, till the settlement of Westphalia in 1648, after the
Thirty Years' War, that this territorial division of Christendom became
stereotyped, but the process had been going on for a hundred years
previously; in some states, as in England and Scotland, it had long been
completed; in others, as in South Germany, Bohemia and Poland, it was
defeated by the political and missionary efforts of the Jesuits and
other agents of the counter-Reformation. In any case, it received a vast
impetus from the action of the council of Trent. With the issue of the
Tridentine canons, all hope even of