The intellectual fatality of the Reformation was that it set up against the principle of papal authority not that of private judgment but that of revelation, and thus still made ancient ignorance the arbiter in the deepest problems. It is indeed vain to say, with Erasmus and with Goethe, that Luther did ill to force a crisis, and that the reform of the Church should have been left to time and the process of culture. No culture could have reformed the papacy as an economic system: the struggle there was finally not between knowledge and ignorance but between vested interests and outsiders' rights. In the Rome of Leo X, as Ranke has calculated, there were twenty-five hundred venal offices, half of them created by Leo to raise funds for the building of St. Peter's; and probably most were held by cultured men. What they fought for was not dogma but revenue: Luther when among them had been scandalized by their irreligion, not by their superstition. Looking back, we may still say that a violent rupture was inevitable. Two generations later, we find Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) raising money as did Leo X by the sale of places, and putting the prices so high as to promote official corruption in an extreme degree. Rome, as a city, lived on its ecclesiastical revenue, and the total vested interest was irreversible. During the long papal schism in which the main wealth of the Church went to the Popes of Avignon, Rome sank visibly to the level of "a town of cowherds," and the old church of St. Peter's was in danger of falling to pieces. From the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, the popes laboured successively to make their city the most splendid in Europe; and only a great revenue, extorted by corrupt or corrupting methods, could maintain it. The great Council of Trent, begun in 1545 to reform and reorganize the Church, had accomplished at its close in 1563 only a few doctrinal, disciplinary, and hierarchical modifications; and its own history proved the impossibility of a vital reform from within. Twice suspended for long periods, on the pretext of the disturbed state of Europe, it revealed in its closing session the inability of the nations as such to agree on any curative policy. The emperor, Ferdinand I, called for many reforms in a Protestant direction, such as marriage of priests, schools for the poor, "the cup for the laity," and the reform of convents; and the French prelates supported him; but those of Spain violently resisted, though they agreed in wishing to restrict the pope's power; while the Italians, the most numerous party, stood by the pope in all things, denouncing all gainsayers. In the end, the diplomatic cardinal Morone arranged matters with the different courts; the bishops had for the most part to give way; and the powers of the pope, which in 1545 the movers of the Council had been bent on curtailing, were established in nearly every particular, without any important change being made