The discovery of printing came to help the revival of learning. The old world reappeared in its entirety at the same time that Christopher Columbus discovered a new one. More than three thousand writings were published from the year 1450 to the year 1520. There was a prodigious activity, which knew neither fatigue nor fear; and what could the Church oppose to this first expansion of the human mind, so happy and so proud of entering again upon the possession of itself? The martyrdom of Savonarola did not intimidate it; at the most it took a by-turn in the treatises of Pomponatius, to arrive at the same end. The Vatican, which had sometimes been so skilful, was not so in the face of this vast movement. Several popes succeeded each other, feeble, or covetous of money, or stained with the foulest crimes: Paul II., Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II. The last, Leo X., having the voluptuous tastes of the race of the Medici, to which he belonged, without sharing their grandeur or their courage,—a priest without theological learning, a pontiff without gravity, setting his buffoons to dispute about the immortality of the soul, and amusing himself with the frivolous diversions of the theatre, when Germany was on fire,—seems to have been chosen from on high to level the path of the Reformation. Thus everything was ready. Scarcely do we place our foot upon the threshold of the sixteenth century, before we hear those hollow sounds which, in the moral world, as in the physical, announce the approach of the storm. The heart is oppressed, the mind is disturbed: something extraordinary, we know not what, is about to happen. Kings upon their thrones, the learned in their closets, professors in their chairs, pious men in their oratories, even warriors upon the field of battle, tremble and reveal, by brief words or acts of violence, the presentiments which pursue them. In 1511, the emperor Maximilian and the king Louis XII. convoke a council at Pisa, in order to recall Julius II. to his duty, and to remedy the evils of the Church. Several cardinals attend, in spite of the prohibitions of the Vatican; and on the 21st of April, 1512, the pope Julius is suspended, as notoriously incorrigible and contumacious. “Arise, Cæsar,” write with one accord the members of this assembly to the emperor Maximilian: “Arise, be firm and watchful; the Church falls; the good are oppressed; and the wicked triumph.”