ments which ripened to the great consummation which the promulgation of the Christian religion afforded. What could be more fitted than the calculating bravery of the Roman people to trace over the face of Europe channels of communication which would bind together the nations over which they passed? The imperial city itself became the heart of communication, from which every pulse that issued forth reached to, and operated on, the remotest extremities. Even in its temporal humiliation, Rome retained the moral advantages which its central position afforded it, and through the medium of the religion which it imparted to the conquering nations, preserved over them a spiritual supremacy. The priest who watched over a flock of the most distant barbarians, looked back to the episcopal city as the home of his childhood and the citadel of his faith. Missionary operations, even when conducted by authorities whose internal construction is in entire opposition to the more patriarchal form of church government, have been necessarily thrown into the hands of a general overseer; and in the situation of Christendom at the time, when, from the distance of the settlements and the dullness of communication between them, disunion would have led to the most irremediable errors, a system which should require relations of strict dependence to the mother church from her branches became essential for the preservation of the faith. More distant congregations, in the weakness of the attraction which would otherwise have existed between themselves and their centre, might have lost their balance as they approached the confines of some opposing system, and would have gradually slipped into its orbit. Like the chaff-puppets which are used to show the force with which electricity acts upon trifles, they would have been twirled into the most delusive extravagances as the atmosphere became infected. The Christian faith, in the hands of priests whose feeble information was unable to impart the orthodoxy which ecclesiastical discipline had failed to enforce, might have been grafted upon stocks that would receive it only so far as it tended to deck their mythology in a more decent and agreeable garb. It was with a well-disciplined army alone that the church militant could conquer; but how could discipline be preserved unless it acknowledged a common head? The influence which was wielded by the church of Rome before its corruptions, was fraught with good both to the cause itself and

the countries upon which it operated. Spain and Portugal, that had for a long time apostatized, whose face had been overrun with Saracens, whose faith had been distracted by schismatics, were brought again into the church; the French empire was carried from a mythologizing Christianity to absolute belief; and countries which, like Prussia and Scandinavia, had been till then in the regions of darkness, were converted in a mass, and invested with a creed, which, from that time till this, has been almost constant in its orthodoxy.

It was not until the pope had postponed the building up of the church of Christ to the erection of St. Peter's, that the advancement of the cause was checked. Missionaries were no longer sent out, because the holy see thought it more profitable to be occupied in the annoyance of the outguards of the Turks than in preaching to the northern nations. The slaughter of a Mahommedan troop would have merited a warmer blessing than the conversion of a whole community. The pope sat, in Passion-week, with a gold basin before him, and silken towels by his side, for the purpose of washing the feet of the royal pilgrims who, from remote and heathen countries, had come to do penance for their sins; but the heralds ransacked the lists for high-born suppliants in vain, and his holiness was forced to be content with the domestic paupers, who had been previously adorned for the ablution. "All nations of the west," said Gregory II. when counting over his beads to Leo the Isaurian, "have their eyes turned to our humble person; they regard us as a God upon earth." How vigorous was the constitution of the church of Rome, how powerful was the hold which it acquired over Christendom, can be seen from the extraordinary forces which it collected for the prosecution of the crusades. The resources which were there expended in vainly slaughtering tribes of wandering Arabs or of disciplined Turks, might have Christianized the face of Asia, had they been applied, as the apostles would have applied them, through the word of the missionary, and not by the sword of the soldier.

The extraordinary power of the church had become the cause of its extraordinary corruption. Had the pope, who first put forth his hand to clutch the province or the city which the devotion of a neighboring prince laid before him, been carried to the point where we now stand, and could he have cast his eye over that series of disasters and humilia

tions which have flowed from the fierce ambition and the unholy passions of those men of blood whom the temporal advantages of the papacy had tempted to its altar, he would have dropped in haste the gift as the most dangerous temptation by which Christianity had been yet assailed. How could the penitent who looked upon the enormities of Cæsar Borgia, place confidence in the ministrations of the father who allowed them? Could the pontiff, whose sons or whose nephews, as it might suit his delicacy to call them, were rioting on the treasures of Italy and throwing dissension among the kings of the earth, stand quietly by the sea and expect, when he drew in his net, to find in it a goodly concourse of souls who were waiting for consolation? The fisherman of St. Peter's angled for principalities, and not for proselytes. How was the pilgrim's purse to be wrung from him? How were the altars of martyrs and saints to be so built that, as the offering of the faithful was placed on their deceptive shrine, it might be transferred, by a kind of legerdemain familiar to the ancient priests of Memnon, to the pocket of the ghostly exhibiter? Luther was educated in a German cloister, in whose remote cells he had been taught to look with chivalric reverence on the austere splendor of the lady of his worship. Rome and her cathedral!-like the sun-bordered gates of paradise to the eye of the Mohammedan soldier, they appeared to him as enclosing whatever was pure and glorious in creation. He thought that his mind was acted upon by some Satanic impulse as he approached the city; and, with that honest incredulity to his own impressions which distinguished him throughout, he was about to turn back for the steps of St. Peter's, lest, by the profanation of his diseased vision, he might dishonor the temple of his faith. It was not until he had hunted out every latent mark by which the church was to be identified that he could be persuaded that the spectre before him was the same with the beautiful vision which had beamed upon him in his boyish dreams. But when at last it became plain that it was the catholic church that he saw, but decked out in the dishonorable robes in which her priests had attired her, he devoted his life, by a solemn offering, to the task of leading her forth in resumed purity from their dominion. He in part succeeded. The gates of the castle were unlocked. In a few years, England was emancipated; the papal supremacy in France was shaken to its base; the countries round the Baltic were loosened

from the chains which so long had bound them; and Germany herself, which had been the cradle, became the citadel of the reformed belief.

It is not our purpose, at present, to trace the early triumphs of the reformed faith. The object to which professor Ranke has devoted the greater part of the work before us, is of a more painful, though, we hope, not of a less instructive nature. If we look at a map of Europe on which the protestant and catholic countries are distinguished by different colors, it will be seen that states which, at the era of the reformation, were ranked among the supporters of the protestant faith, have fallen back from their profession and sit again under the same shadow as Italy and the peninsula. We shall employ the remainder of this article in considering the circumstances which attended a retrogression so remarkable in the history of our faith, under the belief that a slight consideration of their character will be sufficient to show that the check which it then received, so far from having arisen from its own inefficiency, was the result of a combination of political influences so strong and so powerful that the equal battle, waged against it by the protestant church, was as honorable a proof of the vigor of its principles as its earlier victories against a less active foe.

It would be injustice, it might be premised, to the wisdom. of the holy see, as well as to the purity of those who, with a sincere attachment to the gospel itself, were still unwilling to wander from her precincts, to suppose that she disregarded the warning that was thus thundered upon her. During the long procrastination of the dark ages, in which the church had from day to day postponed the reform which was necessary to her safety, she had stood at the centre of the continental system, and while around her was a continual whirl of religious crusade or of temporal encroachment, she had preserved an equipoise so complete that her waters became gradually corrupt from stagnation. But as soon as the balance was unsettled, and Rome found that at Wittemberg a rival sun was revolving which carried with it its own satellites and might soon draw off the remainder of the system, she looked round her for the means of preserving her supremacy. Cardinals who had passed lives of secure indulgence hurried to the conclave on the death of Leo X., and, in the terror of self-conviction, looked for a successor among the recesses of those distant monasteries whose atmosphere had not been corrupted by the contagion of court intrigue.

Councils were talked of which should remodel the tenets of the church, and place them on a basis on which protestants would not scruple to join. Devout monasteries, which in older times had been merely the niches in that great whispering gallery which echoed the pope's sentiments, began to collect their senses, and to murmur, as if just roused from a sleep of centuries, the unaccustomed words of reform and purification. There was not a prince in Europe, there was not a priest in Christendom, who did not recommend, silently or strongly, conciliation, if not concession.

Gaspar Contarini, who became afterward the most distinguished upholder of the doctrines of reformation among those who remained within the pale of the church, and whose life affords a distinct illustration of a class which we cannot but believe were at one time numerous, was the eldest son of a noble house of Venice, and had devoted himself to the study of theology from his childhood, rather in expectation of bearing a silent testimony to its truth than of becoming engaged in the active promulgation of its tenets. In the senate of his native city, to which, as the representative of one of its oldest branches, he was early admitted, he neglected for a time to do justice to those great resources of natural wisdom and of digested learning of which his mind was the storehouse. But when Charles V., who had just mounted the imperial throne, reached Germany to take possession of those vast dominions whose possession had been looked to by every prince in Christendom as the consummation of earthly grandeur, the republic looked round for an ambassador whose rank and whose attainments should qualify him to be their first representative at the imperial court. Contarini was chosen; and having reached Madrid on the day when the ship Vittoria arrived home after her voyage round the world, was the first to solve the problem why in her circuitous passage she had lost a day. He had scarcely returned home, laden with the large but hollow promises with which Charles buoyed up the heavier articles of commercial negotiation, when, as he was standing in the senate-chamber, leaning on the alabaster urn in which the votes were deposited, he was informed that pope Paul, with whom he had no connection, to whom he had even been in opposition, had elevated him, without reference to the lower grades, to the rank of cardinal. Lord Thurlow is said to have raised himself to a degree of personal influence which no chancellor had ever