Five popes [Footnote 16] occupied the See of St. Peter during the holding of that memorable council. Some among them may, perhaps, be justly blameworthy for this or that fault, in their administration; but to have been able to convoke and reunite that immortal assembly; to have caused it to resume its labors when they had been interrupted; to have conducted them through so many obstacles and difficulties, coming from men or things, to their close; to have, at last, as was done by Pius IV., perpetuated, so to say, the authority and reformatory action of that oecumenical assembly by the institution of that Congregation of the council, whose mission, for three hundred years past, has been to explain and put into practical execution the decrees passed at Trent—this is evidently one of the most important pages of the history of the Reformation within the fold of Christianity, and is, perhaps, one where the divine power and the supernatural constitution of the church shine forth most visibly. For neither the popes who presided over the council nor the bishops who composed it were, taken individually, men of genius; and it is permitted to us to say that in great matters where the personal consideration of man appears the least, there the wisdom and power of God shine forth all the more strikingly.
[Footnote 16: Paul III., Julius III., Marcellus II., Paul IV., and Pius IV.]
And then, again, around those two centres which mingle themselves in one—the Papacy and the general council—and which represent so forcibly, in the face of the precocious divisions of Protestantism, the grand and living unity of the church of Jesus Christ, what astonishing fecundity for good, what varied resources, what fruitful germination of men and deeds! What souls, those great saints of the sixteenth century, recruited from among all ranks of society, and to whom Providence seems to have confided the mission of replying by some beneficent institution to all the attacks and all the negations of Protestantism!
Would that, then, be a picture wanting in grandeur, where a competent artist—wishing to glorify in the sixteenth century not the warlike Reformation which rent asunder without remorse the ancient and majestic unity of Christendom, but the peaceful and fruitful reform which multiplied, according to the needs of a much troubled and suffering age, grand inspirations and magnanimous self-sacrifices—should group around the living centre of the church Ignatius Loyola and his brave companions, the pastor Pascal Baylon and the grand nobleman Francis Borgia, St. Philip Neri and St. Camillus of Lelli, St. Charles Borromeo in the midst of the plague at Milan and St. Francis of Sales evangelizing the populations of Chablais? And yet this enumeration must be limited to the names of the more illustrious only, and to works the most considerable.
Now, in these names are found truly personified the inspirations which constitute, in its plenitude, the veritable spirit of Christianity.
First, the spirit of zeal and apostleship. Those who have seen the frescoes of the church of St. Ignatius at Rome remember with what just pride a Jesuit painter has represented the triumphs of the first fathers of his company over heresy and infidelity. And unless blinded by incurable prejudices, what a striking comparison can one make between Melanchthon, the disciple of Luther, and that student of the Paris University, the friend of St. Ignatius—that St. Francis Xavier who, setting out for the Indies in 1541 and dying in 1552, had converted, by himself alone, more heathen in a dozen years than all the Protestant missionaries united have been able to convert in a century; that man whose life would seem but a legend of olden times, were it not authenticated by most unexceptionable documents, and had it not appeared in the sixteenth century, which is far less the age of enthusiasm than that of criticism—that man, in fine, to whom a Protestant, Baldeus, has had the impartiality to render a splendid eulogy, closing with that apostrophe so naïve and nearly as honorable to the writer as to the hero, "Would to God that, having been what you were, you might be of us!"
If the Company of Jesus represents in so high a degree the spirit of zeal, behold St. Theresa and St. Peter of Alcantara, who represent none the less worthily the spirit of penitence—that essential part of the Christian life, so entirely foreign to the heroes and the works which spring forth from Protestantism.
In contrast with the rehabilitation of the flesh, openly preached and practised by Luther, by Henry VIII., by the Landgrave of Hesse and the principal corypheuses of the Reformation, see how, in the train of these two Spaniards—that reformer of Carmel and that son of St. Francis—whole generations follow. They embrace with enthusiasm that hidden life of the cloister, where the superficial glance of the man of the world sees only an arbitrary captivity and aimless mortifications; but where the eyes of faith discover the secret of those acts and movements of reparation which preserve from ignominy and ruin the ages dragged along the dangerous declivity of scepticism and immorality, by teaching men that, if unbelief and luxury destroy individuals and societies, it is the force of prayer, united to that of sacrifice, which alone can raise them up again.
Finally, after the spirit of zeal and the spirit of penitence, the spirit of charity completes the fulness of the Christian life.
Now, can Protestantism take any offence, if, in looking over with it the list of its founders and apostles, we demand of it where there is to be found, among those ardent adversaries of Roman superstitions, a single man to whom one can conscientiously give the title of benefactor and consoler of men?