The society gained honour and favour; it understood well how to make itself beloved, or indispensable wherever it came; but it never found a home in Germany. Its fearful principle of mystery and secrecy was felt, not only by the Protestants, who endeavoured to break its power by their paper weapons, the flying-sheets, and made it answerable for every political misdeed, whether far or near, but also in the Roman Catholic countries. Even there it was only a guest, influential certainly, and much prized, but from time to time ecclesiastics and laity felt that it was a thing apart from them. All the other spiritual societies had become national,--the Jesuits never. It is not unnatural that this feeling was strongest among the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics, for their worldly prospects were often injured by the Jesuits. Thus from the middle of the sixteenth century two opposite methods of mental cultivation, two different sources of morals and working power have struggled against one another. Devotion and unconditional subjection, against feelings of duty and thoughtful self-assertion; rapid and unhesitating decision, against conscientious doubts; a spirit of energy, working laboriously with much deliberation and scheming after distant aims, against defective discipline; and an urging to unity, against a striving for separation. These opposing powers appeared everywhere, especially in politics and at the courts of princes. Protestantism in its unfinished shape, though it had elevated the people, was no help to the formation of the character of the German princes; it had raised higher their external power, but it had lessened their inward stability; their youthful training became in general too theological to be practical. However immoral many of them were, they all suffered from conscientious doubts; and there was no ready answer for these doubts, such as the Roman Catholic confessor had always in store for them. The Protestant princes stood isolated; there was no firm bond of union between the Churches of the different states, but much trivial quarrelling and bitter hatred, not only between Lutherans and Reformers, but even amongst the followers of the Augsburg confession; and this diminished the strength of the princes. Whilst the priests of the Roman Catholic Church did their best to unite their rulers, the Protestant ecclesiastics helped to increase the disunion of theirs. So it is not surprising, that the Protestants for a long time stood at a disadvantage in their political struggle with the old faith. The Germans had not yet found, and did not for centuries attain to, the new constitution of State, which transfers the mainspring of government from the accidental will of the ruler, to the conscience of the nation, and which places in a regulated path, citizens of talent and integrity as advisers to the crown; public opinion was still weak, the daily press not yet in existence, and the relation between the political rights of