in the administrative system. The Council had indeed repudiated the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines of predestination to sin and salvation; and on this head the Lutherans gradually came round to the Catholic view; but on the side of Church government the Reformation remained practically justified. Still, it is the historic fact that its first general result was intellectual retrogression. Save in England, where Elizabeth's irreligious regimen gave scope for a literary and scientific renascence while it correlatively humiliated religion and the Church, leaving the fanatical growth of Protestantism to come later, the Protestant atmosphere was everywhere one of theological passion and superstition, in which art and science and fine letters were for a time blighted. And even in England, the result of plunging an ignorant population into the turmoil of theological strife was markedly evil, whatever countervailing force there was in the freer play of mental life on other lines. Were it only in respect of the new ecclesiastical quarrels, the fierce and scurrilous wrangles between prelatists and anti-prelatists, the intensities of malice set up by questions of vestments, the insoluble disputes over the meaning of the eucharist--all heading towards the great Civil War of the seventeenth century--the Reformation was a letting out of the waters of enmity. But all intellectual life was bound to suffer from the erection of a historic delusion into a popular code of moral and social law. Men assured that the ethical and ceremonial law of the ancient Hebrews was the beginning and end of all civic wisdom and righteousness could not lead a sane civic life. The sermons of the Reformers were vain asseverations of a non-existent moral order. All social evil, all individual misfortune, was declared, in the Hebraic manner, to be God's vengeance for sin; when all the while the infliction of evil by persecutors was denounced as in itself sin against God. The most popular preachers made the wildest promises of material welfare to the faithful as the due reward of faith; and every failure of fulfilment was as confidently explained in terms alternately of divine benevolence and divine chastening. The most repellent teachings of the Hebrew books were erected into infallible canons and commands; and every contemporary problem was put on the rack of Hebrew precedent. On all sides, the human soul was bewildered by unreason.