professed by skeptical philosophers and indulgent free-thinkers in the South, while it repelled those refined persons by theological fervor and moral indignation which they could not comprehend.  Thus the Italian and the German children of humanism failed to make common cause against Catholicism, with which the former felt no sympathy and which the latter vehemently attacked.  Meanwhile the Church awoke to a sense of her peril.  The Papacy was still a force of the first magnitude; and it only required a vigorous effort to place it once more in an attitude of domination and resistance.  This effort it made by reforming the ecclesiastical hierarchy, defining Catholic dogma, and carrying on a war of extermination against the twofold Liberalism of Renaissance and Reformation.

That reactionary movement against the progress of free thought which extinguished the Italian Renaissance and repelled the Reformation, has formed the subject of the two preceding volumes of my work.  It could not have been conducted by the Court of Rome without the help of Spain.  The Spanish nation, at this epoch paramount in Europe, declared itself fanatically and unanimously for the Catholic Revival.  In Italy it lent the weight of arms and overlordship to the Church for the suppression of popular liberties.  It provided the Papacy with a spiritual militia specially disciplined to meet the exigencies of the moment.  Yet the center of the reaction was still Rome; and the Spanish hegemony enabled the Roman hierarchy to consolidate an organism which has long survived its own influence in European affairs.

VI.

After the close of the Great Schism Rome began to obey the national impulses of the Italians, entered into their confederation as one of the five leading powers, and assumed externally the humanistic culture then in vogue.  But the Church was a cosmopolitan institution.  Its interests extended beyond the Alps, beyond the Pyrenees, beyond the oceans traversed by Portuguese and Spanish navigators.  The Renaissance so far modified its structure that the Papacy continued politically to rank as an Italian power.  Its headquarters could not be removed from the Tiber, and by the tacit consent of Latin Catholicism the Supreme Pontiff was selected from Italian prelates.  Yet now, in 1530, it began to play a new part more consonant with its mediaeval functions and pretensions.  Rome indeed had ceased to be the imperial capital of Europe, where the secular head of Christendom assumed the crown of Empire from his peer the spiritual chieftain.  The Eternal City in this new phase of modern history, which lasted until Vittorio Emmanuele’s entrance into the Quirinal in 1870, gave the Pope a place among Catholic sovereigns.  From his throne upon the seven hills he conducted with their approval and assistance the campaign of the Counter-Reformation.  Instead of encouraging and developing what yet remained of Renaissance in Italy, instead of directing that movement