So matters stood until the great sixteenth century break with tradition. When the convulsions of the religious wars had ceased, Scandinavia, the Northern Germanies including Holland, and especially England, were seen in definite opposition to what was left of the moral unity of Europe. The break was different in degree, for England preserved the essential catholicity of her national Church, although well-nigh smothered under a mass of Protestant innovations, whereas the Northern Germanies lapsed altogether. Nevertheless at the time the break seemed final in England as well. There had been no such sharp change of direction, no such conscious rejection of the immediate past, since Constantine accepted the Faith. It might even be said that the sixteenth century break was the greater of the two, for the sixteenth century innovators despised their ancestors as the early Christians had never despised the pagans. With the theological debates which determined this capital change we are not here concerned for their own sake, but only for the effect which the acceptance of the Protestant dogmas produced upon the morals and therefore, in the end, upon the social structure of Christendom. The Catholic possessed and, of course, still possesses an inclusive, reasoned, scheme of ethical teaching. This ethical scheme had been taken over by the Church from the ancient Greeks, and especially from Aristotle. To the Aristotelian ethic had been added (like a superstructure which enlarges rather than disturbs the original design of a building) the Christian theological virtues and their attendant vices. Under this broad scheme, serious moral offences were classified under one or another of the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lust.