Nor, while he was so successful in his schemes of State centralisation, was Ferdinand wholly worsted in his struggle for ecclesiastical unity. One victory at least he gained; and by a curious irony of fortune, he won it by granting a concession which had once been most ardently desired by the Bohemian leaders, but which had now, by change of circumstances, become worse than useless. Just at the close of the Council of Trent, he succeeded in obtaining from the Pope a formal concession to the Bohemians of their right to grant the Cup to the laity. Thus the old watchword of the Hussite wars, separated from all that had given it life and force, now became a step towards the absorption of the Utraquists by the Catholics. When once this concession was granted, Ferdinand insisted that the Utraquists could no longer refuse to accept the authority of the Roman Catholic Archbishop. From this time forward, Utraquism ceases to be a force in Bohemian history. Their separate Consistory was indeed revived by Maximilian; and from time to time the members of it continued to assert themselves in the religious controversies of the day; but every such effort tended more and more plainly to show that the champions of the old faith were but the impotent and unworthy representatives of traditions of former greatness. With the death of Ferdinand, all these questions enter on a new phase. The strength and weakness of the late king’s ideals were to be put to new tests during the reign of his son. Maximilian is one of those men who seem to the careful student of history all the more pathetic, because their failures are not of that striking and dramatic kind which at once excite the sympathy of the observer; but are rather gathered from a careful comparison of the objects aimed at with those actually accomplished. Hampered by the continual distrust and the domineering influence of his father, half inclined to the extremer doctrines of Protestantism, and yet never able to shake off the recollection that he was the heir of a Catholic tradition; angry with the Jesuits for their intriguing interference with his affairs, and no less angry with the Protestants for those divisions which prevented a completely artistic settlement of the ecclesiastical question; anxious to recognise the local and other liberties of his Bohemian subjects, but conscious of the difficulties which those liberties placed in the way of the struggle against the Turk, Maximilian was continually drifting backwards and forwards in a way which tended to weaken the system of government which his father had tried to establish, without substituting anything freer or more national in its place.