to the historical Calvin so much that does not belong to him, and, in spite of so much that repels, is yet induced to credit him with such great qualities?  The reason is to be found in the intense antipathy with which Mr. Pattison regarded what he calls “the Catholic reaction” over Europe, and in the fact that undoubtedly Calvin’s system and influence was the great force which resisted both what was bad and false in it, and also what was good, true, generous, humane.  Calvinism opposed the “Catholic reaction” point-blank, and that was enough to win sympathy for it, even from Mr. Pattison.

The truth is that what Popery is to the average Protestant, and what Protestant heresy is to the average Roman Catholic, the “Catholic reaction,” the “Catholic revival” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in our own, is to Mr. Pattison’s final judgment.  It was not only a conspiracy against human liberty, but it brought with it the degradation and ruin of genuine learning.  It is the all-sufficing cause and explanation of the mischief and evil doings which he has to set before us.  Yet after the violence, the ignorance, the injustice, the inconsistencies of that great ecclesiastical revolution which we call by the vague name of Reformation, a “Catholic reaction” was inevitable.  It was not conceivable that common sense and certain knowledge would submit for ever to be overcrowed by the dogmas and assertions of the new teachers.  Like other powerful and wide and strongly marked movements, like the Reformation which it combated, it was a very mixed thing.  It produced some great evils and led to some great crimes.  It started that fatal religious militia, the Jesuit order, which, notwithstanding much heroic self-sacrifice, has formed a permanent bar to all possible reunion of Christendom, has fastened its yoke on the Papacy itself, and has taught the Church, as a systematic doctrine, to put its trust in the worst expedients of human policy.  The religious wars in France and Germany, the relentless massacres of the Low Countries and the St. Bartholomew, the consecration of treason and conspiracy, were, without doubt, closely connected with the “Catholic reaction.”  But if this great awakening and stimulating influence raised new temptations to human passion and wickedness, it was not only in the service of evil that this new zeal was displayed.  The Council of Trent, whatever its faults, and it had many, was itself a real reformation.  The “Catholic revival” meant the rekindling of earnest religion and care for a good life in thousands of souls.  If it produced the Jesuits, it as truly produced Port Royal and the Benedictines.  Europe would be indeed greatly the poorer if it wanted some of the most conspicuous products of the Catholic revival.