Of her extensions beyond Europe there thus remained substantially to the Church of Rome at the end of the eighteenth century only the Catholic populations of Central and South America and Canada; and at the outbreak of the French Revolution, marked as it was by the wholesale abjurations of Catholic priests and populace, it might have seemed as if the reign of Rome in Europe were coming to an end. The political movement, however, had outrun the educational; and as we have seen, there was even a literary reaction at the Restoration. In Italy, where the revolutionary movement had been hostile to the Church, the reaction after 1815 was very marked. All criticism of Catholicism was made a penal offence, and in the Kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825, there were twenty-seven thousand priests, eight thousand nuns, as many monks, twenty archbishops, and seventy-three bishops. In Spain and France, too, the clergy worked hard to recover authority over the people; and in Catholic Ireland they had never lost it, despite all the efforts of Protestantism. Everywhere, however, save in America, the struggle for existence has gone against Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Catholic Ireland has been in large measure depopulated through the failure of Protestant England to solve its economic problems; and though this means a gain to Romanism in the United States, there is no great likelihood that that is permanent, or that Catholicism there will ever be very docile to the papacy. France has become gradually more rationalistic, so much so that the municipal government of Paris is usually in the hands of freethinkers; and the recent expulsion of the recalcitrant religious orders has proved the determination of the republican majority to put down clerical influence. The movement of anti-theological Positivism, founded by the teaching of Auguste Comte (d. 1857) on bases laid by Saint-Simon, has never been numerically strong, but has affected all French thought; and to-day there is scarcely one eminent French writer who professes religious opinions. Even in Spain, so long the stronghold of the faith, and still more generally in Italy, educated men are as a rule either indifferent or hostile to the Church; and the common people, especially the Socialists in the towns, have gone the same way. Both in Spain and Portugal there are journals zealously devoted to a propaganda of freethought; and the judicial murder of Ferrer has but intensified hostility to the Church. National union in Italy, accomplished in the middle of the century, has been fatal to ecclesiastical supremacy. The papacy is unable to recover its temporal power at Rome. In Catholic Belgium, the action of the clergy is constantly fought by a ubiquitous freethought propaganda; and Dutch Catholicism does not gain ground.