The popes who initiated the work of the Council of Trent and those whose rule followed immediately the years of the council, showed a very different standard of life and of official and personal action than had characterised such popes as Julius II and Leo X, who had been responsible for Church policy at the time of the Reformation. Paul IV, Pius IV, Pius V, Gregory XIII, and Sixtus V led austere lives and insisted that their courtiers should accept the same standard of life. They were all earnest workers for the reform of the Church, realising that its domination could be justified only by its purity, its severity towards the rebellious, and its charity for the faithful. The successful results of the work of the council had brought to Catholicism confidence in itself; when the adherents of the Church realised that the council had escaped the various perils that had been prophesied, and that without any limitation to the ideal of domination, without any abandonment of essentials to the demands of heretics, the Church had made an emphatic condemnation of crying abuses, they were able, with lessened anxieties and with large hopes for the future, to look forward to the accomplishment of the promises made to Christianity. The popes now commence seriously with the reform of abuses in the Church, not only among its members, but with its rulers. Nepotism is prohibited; the cardinals are brought back to a modest and consistent way of living; the bishops are sent back to their dioceses; the monks return to their convents. A beginning is made in good faith with the correction of ecclesiastical manners and methods. As one result of the reforms, Rome itself was awakened and, so to speak, rehabilitated. The court of the popes, which, from the time of Petrarch to that of Luther, had been denounced by so many eloquent voices as the home of scandals and as the source of corruptions, had thrown off its pernicious habits of life. Virtue and science were once again held in honour, and Christian scholarship was placed in a position to maintain, without too serious an inferiority, a continuity with the profane erudition of the Renaissance. From this time, the Catholics found themselves less embarrassed when confronted with the names of their old-time critics, Erasmus and Melanchthon, and were no longer under the necessity of blushing for the intellectual and moral condition of their religious capital.[138] It would appear from the general testimony of historians of literature that, in spite of certain noteworthy exceptions, the reforms initiated after the Council of Trent exercised a largely wholesome effect on the character of Italian literature. The Italian historian Canello[139] contends that the work of the ecclesiastical reformers not only restored and preserved the Church, but purified and rehabilitated society.