eful superstitions?

It is obviously difficult to answer these questions with either
completeness or accuracy. In the first place, we have no right to expect
that the religious revival, signalized by the Tridentine Council, should
have made itself immediately felt in the sphere of national conduct. In
the second place, it was not, like the German Reformation, a renewal of
Christianity at its sources, but a resuscitation of mediaeval
Catholicity, in direct antagonism to the intellectual tendencies of the
age. The new learning among northern races disintegrated that system of
ideas upon which mediaeval society rested; but it also introduced
religious and moral conceptions more vital than those ideas in their
decadence. In Italy the disintegrating process had been no less
thorough, nay far more subtle and pervasive. Yet the new learning had
not led the nation to attempt a reconstruction of primitive
Christianity. The Catholic Revival gave nothing vital or enthusiastic to
the conscience of the race. It brought the old creeds, old cult, old
superstitions, old abuses back, with stricter discipline and under a
_regime_ of terror. Meanwhile, it resolutely ranged its forces in
opposition to what had been salutary and life-giving in the mental
movement of the Renaissance. It compelled people who had watched the
dawning of a new light, to shut their eyes upon that dayspring. It
extinguished the studies of the Classical Revival; bade philosophers
return to Thomas of Aquino; threatened thinkers with the dungeon or the
stake who should presume to pass the Pillars of Hercules, when a whole
Atlantic of knowledge had been opened to their curiosity. Under these
circumstances it was impossible that a revolution, so retrograde in its
nature, checking the tide of national energy in full flow, should have
exercised a healthy influence over the Italian temperament at large. We
have a right to expect, what in fact we find, the advent of hypocrisy
and ceremonial observances, but little actual amendment in manners. In
the third place, the question is still further complicated by the
Catholic Revival having been effected concurrently with the
establishment of the Spanish Hegemony. At the end of the first chapter
of this volume I pointed out the evils brought on Italy by her servitude
to a foreign and unsympathetic despot: the decline of commercial
activity, the multiplication of slothful lordlings, the depression of
industry, the diminution of we