Such was the great work of the Council of Trent. But a tree is best judged by its fruits, and this test will give us even a better idea of its importance and magnitude. Perhaps the best encomium of the council is that the Catholic of to-day reads with astonishment of abuses and measures of reform in the sixteenth century. The prophecy of Ragazzoni, in his often-quoted oration, has been literally fulfilled--the names of many of the evils of that period have been forgotten. Thank God! to understand the work of Trent, we have to study the internal troubles of the church of those days in the pages of history, for we do not find them in our own time. They have utterly disappeared. We have already quoted Hallam on the revival of faith and piety in the church that was the immediate effect of the council. All historians agree that the triumphs of Protestantism closed with the first fifty years of its existence. After that it gradually declined. "We see," says Macaulay in his famous _Edinburgh Review_ article on the papacy, "that during two hundred and fifty years Protestantism has made no conquests worth speaking of. Nay, we believe that as far as there has been a change, that change has been in favor of the Church of Rome." Hallam has noticed the same fact, and assigned its real causes; we shall give his words, as, with a few obvious exceptions, they might have been written by a Catholic: "The prodigious increase of the Protestant party in Europe, after the middle of the (sixteenth) century, did not continue more than a few years. It was checked and fell back, not quite so rapidly or completely as it came on, but so as to leave the antagonist church in perfect security." He goes on to give the causes of the reaction. The influence of the Council of Trent in its reform of the clergy, both secular and regular, (we have already given his words,) is mentioned as the principal cause; and, "far above all the rest," he says, "the Jesuits were the instruments of regaining France and Germany to the church they served." "They conquered us," says Ranke, "on our own ground, in our own homes, and stripped us of a part of our country." The following passages will give some idea of the extent and causes of the change: