dominions. He did not sleep upon his promise. In 1598 edicts were issued ordering all Protestant ministers to leave the country within fourteen days. In the following year commissions were sent through the country to enforce the edicts. The Protestant churches were thrown down, the pastors ejected, and the inhabitants compelled to conform to Catholicism. [Sidenote: =In Austria and Moravia.=] The Emperor, seeing his cousin’s success, followed in his footsteps, and from 1599 to 1603 similar commissions were issued for Upper and Lower Austria, and the Protestant ministers were driven out. Not content with this, Rudolf proceeded to follow a similar policy in his other dominions. In 1602 he suppressed the meetings of the Moravian brethren in Bohemia and Moravia, and gave armed assistance to the efforts of the Hungarian bishops to convert their Protestant flocks. [Sidenote: =In Bavaria.=] Meanwhile by the exertions of William, duke of Bavaria, and his son Maximilian, who came to the throne on the abdication of his father in 1696, powerfully assisted by the great Jesuit college at Ingolstadt, Catholicism had completely won the upper hand in Bavaria. The beginning of the seventeenth century therefore saw the reaction in favour of the Church in full flood tide of prosperity. At its head stood a pope, Paul V. (Borghese), who, if somewhat deficient in the grandeur of mind of Sixtus V., and the fervour of piety which distinguished Pius V., yielded to none of his predecessors, not even to Hildebrand himself, in the lofty conception he had formed of the nature and prerogatives of his office, and in the determination to make them respected. In Philip III. of Spain, Maximilian of Bavaria, Ferdinand of Styria, and Sigismund of Poland, he had lieutenants who had made the restoration and increase of Catholicism the first object of their policy. Already their efforts had been crowned with success in Poland and in south Germany, and the influence of the movement had made itself felt all over the debatable land subject to the Empire, which was not as yet definitely attached to one side or the other. Even the imperial institutions themselves were affected by its progress, and men noticed that the decisions of the imperial courts of appeal were biassed by the religious opinions of the judges and of the Emperor. [Sidenote: =Questions regarding the peace of Augsburg.=] This was all the more important as it happened that these particular courts were at that time being called upon to decide a most interesting political question. The peace of Augsburg, concluded in 1555, which attempted to establish peace between the Church and the Lutherans in Germany, had left three problems unsolved, which were certain sooner or later to be decided by the sword, if no peaceful compromise could be arrived at in the meantime. [Sidenote: =1. Position of the Calvinists.=] In the first place it only applied to the Lutherans, for at the time of its conclusion the