days of the Renaissance, there was now the closest concentration of efforts, strict discipline and regularity of life, a better though narrower education, and the most strenuous and effective oratory. Therefore it was by honest conviction as well as by calculated but not illegal coercion that the Reformation was driven back, and Protestants who had been almost the nation became no more than a bare majority. The original spring ran dry, and the expansive force had departed from Lutheranism.
In Austria conditions were of another kind. The country was largely Protestant, and the Emperor, Maximilian II., was not only a friend to toleration, but to Lutheran ideas. Under his auspices a conciliatory, neutral, and unconventional Catholicism came into existence, accepting the doctrinal compromise which had been tendered more than once, discouraging pilgrimages, relics, indulgences, celibacy, and much that had been the occasion of scoffing, an approach to Erasmus, if not to Luther. The outward sign was the restoration of the cup. When his restraining hand was removed, the process of reaction which had done well on the Rhine was extended to the Danube and the Illyrian Alps, with like success. And it was the steady pursuit of this policy in Austria that provoked the Thirty Years' War. In Poland, too, where toleration had been conceded in the avowed expectation that the sects would devour each other, it was exchanged for acts like those I have described. The result of the struggle was that the boundary receded, that a time came of recovery for the Catholics and of decline for the Lutherans in central Europe, and that the distribution has remained practically unchanged. The only example of a country becoming Protestant since then occurred when the principles of the Counter-Reformation, applied by Alva, drove the Netherlands into revolt, and changed the Reformation into revolution. The great and rapid victories of the sixteenth century were gained over the unreformed and disorganised Catholicism of the Renaissance, not over the Church which had been renovated at Trent. Rome, with a contested authority and a contracted sphere, developed greater
