It may seem strange at first thought that a form which embodied the deepest and sincerest religious feeling that has ever been projected in tones should have been perfected in an age when all other art had become to a large degree sensuous and worldly, and when the Catholic Church was under condemnation, not only by its enemies, but also by many of its grieving friends, for its political ambition, avarice, and corruption. The papacy was at that moment reaping the inevitable harvest of spiritual indifference and moral decline, and had fallen upon days of struggle, confusion, and humiliation. The Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican revolt had rent from the Holy See some of the fairest of its dominions, and those that remained were in a condition of political and intellectual turmoil. That a reform “in head and members” was indeed needed is established not by the accusations of hostile witnesses alone, but by the demands of many of the staunchest prelates of the time and the admissions of unimpeachable Catholic historians. But, as the sequel proved, it was the head far more than the members that required surgery. The lust for sensual enjoyments, personal and family aggrandizement, and the pomp and luxury of worldly power, which had made the papacy of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries a byword in Europe, the decline of faith in the early ideals of the Church, the excesses of physical and emotional indulgence which came in with the Renaissance as a natural reaction against mediaeval repression,—all this had produced a moral degeneracy in Rome and its dependencies which can hardly be exaggerated. But the assertion that the Catholic Church at large, or even in Rome, was wholly given over to corruption and formalism is sufficiently refuted by the sublime manifestation of moral force which issued in the Catholic Reaction and the Counter-Reformation, the decrees of the Council of Trent, and the deeds of such moral heroes as Carlo Borromeo, Phillip Neri, Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Theresa of Jesus, Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, and the founders and leaders of the Capuchins, Theatines, Ursulines, and other beneficent religious orders, whose lives and achievements are the glory not only of Catholicism, but of the human race.