have secured the government and made France a
Protestant state.

[Sidenote: Protestantism came too late]

The second cause of the final failure of the Reformation was the
tardiness with which it came to France. It did not begin to make its
really popular appeal until some years after 1536, when Calvin's
writings attained a gradual publicity. This was twenty years later
than the Reformation came forcibly home to the Germans, and in those
twenty years it had made its greatest conquests north of the Rhine. Of
causes as well as of men it is true that there is a tide in their
affairs which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but which, once
missed, ebbs to defeat. Every generation has a different interest; to
every era the ideals of that immediately preceding become stale and
old-fashioned. The writings of every age are a polemic against those
of their fathers; every dogma has its day, and after every wave of
enthusiam [Transcriber's note: enthusiasm?] a reaction sets in. Thus
it was that the Reformation {231} missed, though it narrowly missed,
the propitious moment for conquering France. Enough had been said of
it during the reign of Francis to make the people tired of it, but not
enough to make them embrace it. By the time that Calvin had become
well known, the Catholics had awakened and had seized many of the
weapons of their opponents, a fresh statement of belief, a new
enthusiasm, a reformed ethical standard. The Council of Trent, the
Jesuits, the other new orders, were only symptoms of a still more
widely prevalent Catholic revival that came, in France, just in the
nick of time to deprive the Protestants of many of their claims to
popular favor.

[Sidenote: Beaten by the Renaissance]

But probably the heaviest weight in the scale against the Reformation
was the Renaissance--far stronger in France than in Germany. The one
marched from the north, while the other was wafted up from Italy. They
met, not as hostile armies but rather--to use a humble, commercial
illustration--as two competing merchants. The goods they offered were
not the same, not even similar, but the appeal of each was of such a
nature that few minds could be the whole-hearted devotees of both. The
new learning and the beauties of Italian art and literature sapped away
the interest of just those intelligent classes whose support was needed
to make the triumph of the Reformation complete. Terrible as were the
losses of the Huguenot