etexts, coming into existence. For the last two
centuries France had thus been the chief national opponent of the
centralising influence of Rome, and the University of Paris was, during
that time, the greatest theological school in the world. As such it had
maintained the doctrine that the church universal could have no absolute
monarch, but was bound to maintain its own self-government, and that its
proper organ for this was a general council. And in the early part of
the fifteenth century, when the schism caused by rival Popes had thrown
back the Church upon its native powers, the University of Paris was the
great influence which led the Councils of Constance and of Basle, not
only to assert this doctrine, but to carry it into effect.

But Major, when Knox met him, represented in this matter a cause already
lost. Even in the previous century the decrees of the reforming Councils
were at once frustrated by the successors of the Popes whom they
deposed, and in this sixteenth century a Lateran Council had already
anticipated the Vatican of the nineteenth by declaring the Pope to be
supreme over Council and Church alike. Even the anti-Papal Councils
themselves, too, were exclusively hierarchical, and accordingly they
opposed any independent right on the part of the laity, as well as all
serious enquiries into the earlier practice and faith of the Church. So
at Constance the Chancellor of Paris, _Doctor Christianissimus_ as well
as statesman and mystic, compensated for his successful pressure upon
Rome by helping to send to the stake, notwithstanding the Emperor's
safe-conduct, the pure-hearted Huss. The result was that, even before
the time of Major, the expectation, so long cherished by Europe, of a
great reform through a great Council had died out. And the University of
Paris, instead of continuing to act in place of that coming Council as
'a sort of standing committee of the French, or even of the universal,
Church,'[3] had become a reactionary and retarding power. It opposed
Humanism, and was the stronghold of the method of teaching which the new
generation knew as 'Sophistry.' It opposed Reuchlin, and was preparing
to oppose Luther, and to urge against its own most distinguished pupils
the law of penal fire. It continued to oppose the despotism of the Pope,
but it did so rather from the standpoint of a narrow and nationalist
Gallicanism, based largely upon the counter-despotism of the King. This
selfish policy attaine