of the East, the seventeenth for the healing of schisms and for questions of public law, the eighteenth against the great Lutheran heresy, and for the correction of moral evils.
The mediæval Councils had to deal not so much with heresies as with mixed matters of secular power and abuse; and that because, from the time of S. Gregory the Great, a Christian world, with all its complex relations to the unity of the faith and the Church, had been growing and ripening to maturity. The contest for investitures and immunities belongs to a later period of the work and warfare of the Church. Every age, therefore, has its needs and dangers; and these constitute the reasons for new laws, and, if so judged expedient, for a Council. What, then, are the causes requiring a General Council at this time?
The first and most obvious cause for the convening of a General Council is the internal state of the Church itself. Of the last General Council, the greater part had relation to the discipline and administration of the Church in the states and kingdoms of the Catholic world. Of the twenty-five Sessions of Trent, many are headed 'De Reformatione;' that is, for the correction of evils, usurpations, and abuses, and for the readjustment of the practices and institutions of the various Catholic countries to the immutable laws and principles of the Catholic Church. In the discipline of the Church there are, therefore, two elements: one which is fixed and changeless, namely, the Divine law, both moral and positive, of which the Church is
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