ritual requirements of individual souls and
consciences. The second plan was that of inquiry into the existing order
of the Church and detailed amendment of its flagrant faults, with
preservation of the main system. The Council adopted satisfactory
measures of reform on neither of these methods. It contented itself with
stipulations and concordats, guaranteeing special privileges to the
Churches of the several nations. But in the following century it became
manifest that the Teutonic races had declared for the method suggested
by Hus; while the Latin races, in the Council of Trent, undertook a
purgation of the Church upon the second of the two plans. The
Reformation was the visible outcome of the one, the Counter-Reformation
of the other method.

The Council of Constance was thus important in causing the recognition
of a single Pope, and in ventilating the divergent theories upon which
the question of reform was afterwards to be disputed. But perhaps the
most significant fact it brought into relief was the new phase of
political existence into which the European races had entered.
Nationality, as the main principle of modern history, was now
established; and the diplomatic relations of sovereigns as the
representatives of peoples were shown to be of overwhelming weight. The
visionary mediaeval polity of Emperor and Pope faded away before the
vivid actuality of full-formed individual nations, federally connected,
controlled by common but reciprocally hostile interests.[18]

The Council of Basel, opened in 1431, was in appearance a continuation
of the Council of Constance. But its method of procedure ran counter to
the new direction which had been communicated to European federacy by
the action of the Constance congress. There the votes had been taken by
nations. At Basel they were taken by men, after the questions to be
decided had been previously discussed by special congregations and
committees deputed for preliminary deliberations. It soon appeared that
the fathers of the Basel Council aimed at opposing a lawfully-elected
Pope, and sought to assume the, administration of the Church into their
own hands.

[Footnote 18: See above, p. 2, for the special sense in which I apply
the word federation to Italy before 1530, and to Europe at large in the
modern period.]

Their struggle with Eugenius IV., their election of an antipope, Felix
V., and their manifest tendency to substitute oligarchical for Papal
tyranny in the