as the beginner of a new era,
while he was at the same time the last continuator of the old. The
Cardinals whom he promoted on his accession included the chief of those
men who strove in vain for a concordat between Rome and Reformation; it
also included the man who stamped Rome with the impress of the
Counter-Reformation. Yet Caraffa would not have had the fulcrum needed
for this decisive exertion of power, had it not been for another act of
Paul's reign. This was the convening of a Council at Trent. Paul's
attitude toward the Council, which he summoned with reluctance, which he
frustrated as far as in him lay, and the final outcome of which he was
far from anticipating, illustrates in a most decisive manner his destiny
as Pope of the transition.

The very name of a Council was an abomination to the Papacy. This will
be apparent if we consider the previous history of the Church during the
first half of the fifteenth century, when the conciliar authority was
again invoked to regulate the Papal See and to check Papal encroachments
on the realms and Churches of the Western nations. The removal of the
Papal Court to Avignon, the great schism which resulted from this
measure, and the dissent which spread from England to Bohemia at the
close of the fourteenth century, rendered it necessary that the
representative powers of Christendom should combine for the purpose of
restoring order in the Church. Four main points lay before the powers of
Europe, thus brought for the first time into deliberative and
confederated congress to settle questions that vitally concerned them.
The most immediately urgent was the termination of the schism, and the
appointment of one Pope, who should represent the mediaeval idea of
ecclesiastical face to face with imperial unity. The second was the
definition of the indeterminate and ever-widening authority which the
Popes asserted over the kingdoms and the Churches of the West. The third
was the eradication of heresies which were rending Christendom asunder
and threatening to destroy that ideal of unity in creed to which the
Middle Ages clung with not unreasonable passion. The fourth was a reform
of the Church, considered as a vital element of Western Christendom, in
its head and in its members.

The programme, very indistinctly formulated by the most advanced
thinkers of the age, and only gradually developed by practice into
actuality, was a vast one. It involved the embitterment of national
jeal