In his review of Ranke’s History of the Popes Lord Macaulay insists with brilliant eloquence upon the marvelous vitality and longevity of the Roman Catholic Church.  He describes the insurrection of the intellect against her rule in Provence, and her triumph in the Crusade which sacrificed a nation to the conception of mediaeval religious unity.  He dwells on her humiliation in exile at Avignon, her enfeeblement during the Great Schism, and her restoration to splendor and power at the close of the Councils.  Then he devotes his vast accumulated stores of learning and his force of rhetoric to explain the Reformation, the Catholic Revival, and the Counter-Reformation.  He proves abundantly what there was in the organism of the Catholic Church and in the temper of Papal Rome, which made these now reactionary powers more than a match for Protestantism.  ’In fifty years from the day on which Luther publicly renounced communion with the Papacy, and burned the bull of Leo before the gates of Wittenberg, Protestantism attained its highest ascendency, an ascendency which it soon lost, and which it never regained.’  This sentence forms the theme for Lord Macaulay’s survey of the Catholic Revival.  Dazzling and fascinating as that survey is, it fails through misconception of one all-important point.  Lord Macaulay takes for granted that conflict in Europe, since the publication of Luther’s manifesto against Rome, has been between Catholicism and Protestantism.  Even after describing the cataclysm of the French Revolution, he winds up his argument with these words:  ’We think it a most remarkable fact that no Christian nation, which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century, should ever have adopted them.  Catholic communities have, since that time, become infidel and Catholic again; but none has become Protestant.’  This is tantamount to regarding Protestantism as something fixed and final in itself, as a permanent and necessary form of Christianity.  Here lies the fallacy which makes his reasoning, in spite of all its eloquence, but superficial.  Protestantism, in truth, has never been more than a half-way house or halting-place between Catholicism and what may variously be described as free thought or science or rationalism.  Being in its origin critical—­being, as its name implies, a protest and an opposition—­Protestantism was doomed to sterility, whenever it hardened into one or other of its dogmatic forms.  As critics and insurgents, Luther and Calvin rank among the liberators of the modern intellect.  As founders of intolerant and mutually hostile Christian sects, Luther and Calvin rank among the retarders of modern civilization.  In subsequent thinkers of whom both sects have disapproved, we may recognize the veritable continuators of their work in its best aspect.  The Lutheran and Calvinist Churches are but backwaters and stagnant pools, left behind by the subsidence of rivers in flood, separated