Emperor, with the same views, actually demanded that the council should reform the Popedom, that clerical celibacy should be abolished, and that the monasteries should be reformed; the last, as Ranke satirically remarks, for this special reason, that their great wealth might not be expended in so profligate a manner. This was obviously a revival of those schemes of secularization of the monastic property which Luther had suggested, and which had led the princes to support him. It is impossible to believe that such suggestions from such sources were inspired by sincere desire to reform the religious orders. It is, on the contrary, abundantly attested that the Holy See was sincere, and found itself obstructed by the local hierarchies and the secular powers.

And under its auspices the council proceeded, and the important canons respecting clerical ordination and indulgences, in fact, all the principal measures of reform adopted by the assembly were decided on in the last three sessions of 1563. The Pope complained that the Spanish and the imperial bishops had been his principal opponents, and Ranke explains the reason. The king, holding the nomination of bishops himself, had a personal interest in the extension of episcopal authority. This indicates significantly the real source of all the difficulties in the way of reform. The most rigid performance of their duties was enjoined on the bishops, more especially of that involving the supervision of the clergy. This was precisely what the Popes had been inculcating for six centuries past. It was the subject of the struggles of Pontiffs with the emperors of the Swabean line, and the object of reiterated remonstrances since the accession of the house of Hapsburgh, especially during the last two centuries. And all the canons of the Council of Trent as to discipline, were directed to the extirpation of local abuses, which had grown up since the Papal power over provincial churches had been restrained, and chiefly had arisen from the corruption of the clergy through the abuse of local patronage. Repeatedly had the sessions of the council been interrupted by the aggressions of the secular princes, especially the Emperor, on the Holy See, and its labours had been prolonged and obstructed by the interested opposition of the

* P. 251.

provincial hierarchies, under the influence of the princes who held the patronage in their hands. And it was wholly owing to the zeal and wisdom of the Apostolic See, and entirely against the influence of the secular power, that in 1563 the council brought its long labours to a successful close.

The moment it was closed, the Holy See eagerly availed itself of the powers it had gained for the purpose of effecting the reforms it had so long struggled to introduce. Its decrees were immediately sent to the ecclesiastical courts of Germany, and were brought before the diet held at Augsburg in 1566. Mark the result, as stated by Ranke. "This was the first diet in which the Catholic princes opposed an effectual resistance to the Protestant demands. The Pope's exhortation found attentive listeners, and in a special assembly of the ecclesiastical princes, the decrees of the Council of Trent were provisionally accepted."* Once more, we ask, what was the result? We will again answer in the words of Ranke. "A new life may be said to have commenced from this moment in the Catholic Church of Germany." A new life, the result of the labours of the Holy See. "These decrees were gradually published in the provincial synods." The most rigid visitation of the churches commenced, and the bishops, who had hitherto been extremely negligent, now displayed the utmost zeal and devotion." This testimony is most important for the vindication of the Papacy, and the condemnation of the so-called "Reformation. It proves what we have all along been contending, that the abuses of the Church were to be ascribed not to the Holy See, but to the neglect and decline of its authority, and that their reform proceeded not from the secular princes, the promoters of the pretended reformation, but from the Holy See itself. These reforms were those which the Holy See had been urging on the empire and its hierarchies for centuries, and which had been resisted by the interested opposition of the emperors and the hierarchies. They were reforms which, had the Holy See been obeyed, would have been effected six centuries before, and to effect which the Holy See had found it necessary to convene a council to support its power, by securing the co-operation of the hierarchies,

* P. 426.

and thus enable itself to enforce the decrees which it caused to be passed. "Thus it was," writes Ranke, "that Catholicism, which might have been thought conquered, once more arose in Germany with renewed strength." Luther had scarcely been dead a quarter of a century before Lutheranism began to decline. And it declined so soon as the Papal power obtained the ascendancy over the Imperial, and by the aid of a council enforced its decrees.

The remainder of Ranke's "History of the Popes" is occupied with describing the reaction against Protestantism, and the triumphs of revived Catholicism. We have purposely confined ourselves chiefly to Protestant historians, that we might at once confirm the authority of Audin, and from unimpeachable testimony supply his deficiencies. He is deficient principally in respect to that which has formed the subject of our argument, the political character of Lutheranism. But if Audin is deficient in this, Dr. Dollinger is far more so. That which in Audin indeed is defective, in Dollinger is absent. We speak especially of the abridged life of Luther, a little work, not less important however because it is little, and in one sense nothing that comes from the pen of such a writer can be little. The abridgement was, we understand, executed under his own care, and certainly does justice to the larger work. And as Dr. Dollinger permits himself to speak of Audin's Life as written with great ignorance of "the whole state of Germany at the time," we venture to remark that, on the contrary, it is written with greater reference to the state of Germany than Dr. Dollinger's. We avoid saying "with greater knowledge" of it; for of want of knowledge we will not accuse Dr. Dollinger, but certainly he has not used his knowledge in this respect so well as the writer he accuses of "ignorance." He wholly ignores that which we have endeavoured to show was the main motive, the real origin and cause of the movement called the Reformation; viz.: the sordid views and interested schemes of the German Princes, of whom Luther made himself for a selfish purpose the servile tool. Scarcely a quarter of a century was necessary to expose the true character of the Lutheran heresy. From its origin it had proved itself less a heresy than a rebellion.

* P. 430.

It was a revolt from faith for the purposes of lust and rapine. It did not originate in any objection to doctrine, for in its origin no doctrine was distinctly impugned. Neither did it arise from impatience at abuse, for it, instead of specifying abuses, resorted to calumnies, and arose at the very period when a council had been convened for the reformation of discipline, and a series of Pontiffs succeeded in the Apostolic Chair, zealous for the restoration of an apostolic spirit. It had nothing spiritual in its nature, for from the first it was characterized by an anxious and artful subserviency to the secular power, and propitiated its support and procured its aid by crafty schemes of spoliation and pillage. It was in its essence destructive; it was merely as an after thought, and as a sort of necessity, that it set up a sort of religious system of its own, to fill up the dreary waste of unbelief it had created. And having no foundation in faith, that system crumbled away, or became a cold and lifeless skeleton, so soon as the secular power, satiated by spoliation, ceased to cherish it. And, on the other hand, no sooner was the Church liberated from the pressure of the secular power, than she effected those reforms which, but for that pressure, she would centuries before have carried out, and which she had vainly urged upon the secular power and the local hierarchies to admit. And thus, hardly had the heretic's great patron been laid in his grave ere Catholicism began to revive, and the scene of his blasphemies became the theatre of her triumphs. His was but a revival of the heresy of Huss;-as the Bohemian heretic did but put into theory the rude despotism of Barbarossa, so the Saxon made himself a useful instrument of an emperor who imitated the barbarity and surpassed the hypocrisy of his predecessors; an emperor who, like them, invaded Italy, robbed the Holy See of its patrimony, and sought to enslave the Church to his despotic will. Luther in short was but the tool of a tyrant, whose bad passions he pandered to, that he might indulge his own. His principles spread rapidly, for they were the principles of self-indulgence, taught monks to lust and princes to commit rapine. But having no root of religious feeling, no basis of belief, they could not long sustain a religious aspect, could not resist the first shock of revived Catholicism, and speedily degenerated into rationalism, so that Lutheranism, which has no principle really in it but that of revolt from the

authority of the Holy See, has verified the sage aphorism of Hurter, and vindicated the very authority against which it revolted, by exhibiting in itself a proof that a religion separated from the Holy See must inevitably become like paganism, a mere state function.

ART. II.-Food and its Adulterations, comprising the Reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commission of the Lancet. By ARTHUR HILL HASSELL, M.D. London: Longmans, 1855.

IT

T is impossible to read the earlier writers upon country management and domestic economy, without perceiving that each household prepared almost every thing for itself, and also without having a feeling of envy at the apparent picture of rural felicity that such a mode of management presents. The ox and the swine that, when salted, afforded the winter staple food, were not only raised and fattened, but cured upon their owner's land; the sheep and poultry that supplied food in summer had also been brought up by their possessor; the "coneys" and game, the latter invariably caught by what are now termed poaching practices, were furnished by the fields or the adjacent common; the brook yielded trout and chub, the fishponds carp, tench, eels, &c., (for until comparatively lately, owing to the slowness of locomotion and transit, save within a few miles of the coast, fresh fish was never seen in country places); the arable land grew the wheat which, when ground at the neighbouring soak mill, came back diminished perhaps a little improperly in weight, but not doctored with alum or stuff, and was in the kitchen converted into bread, and the garden supplied every kind of fruit and vegetable that was needed. Honey, for which we substitute sugar, was procured from the apiary, and the home dairy gave plenty of cheese and butter.