It is obviously difficult to answer these questions with either completeness or accuracy.  In the first place, we have no right to expect that the religious revival, signalized by the Tridentine Council, should have made itself immediately felt in the sphere of national conduct.  In the second place, it was not, like the German Reformation, a renewal of Christianity at its sources, but a resuscitation of mediaeval Catholicity, in direct antagonism to the intellectual tendencies of the age.  The new learning among northern races disintegrated that system of ideas upon which mediaeval society rested; but it also introduced religious and moral conceptions more vital than those ideas in their decadence.  In Italy the disintegrating process had been no less thorough, nay far more subtle and pervasive.  Yet the new learning had not led the nation to attempt a reconstruction of primitive Christianity.  The Catholic Revival gave nothing vital or enthusiastic to the conscience of the race.  It brought the old creeds, old cult, old superstitions, old abuses back, with stricter discipline and under a regime of terror.  Meanwhile, it resolutely ranged its forces in opposition to what had been salutary and life-giving in the mental movement of the Renaissance.  It compelled people who had watched the dawning of a new light, to shut their eyes upon that dayspring.  It extinguished the studies of the Classical Revival; bade philosophers return to Thomas of Aquino; threatened thinkers with the dungeon or the stake who should presume to pass the Pillars of Hercules, when a whole Atlantic of knowledge had been opened to their curiosity.  Under these circumstances it was impossible that a revolution, so retrograde in its nature, checking the tide of national energy in full flow, should have exercised a healthy influence over the Italian temperament at large.  We have a right to expect, what in fact we find, the advent of hypocrisy and ceremonial observances, but little actual amendment in manners.  In the third place, the question is still further complicated by the Catholic Revival having been effected concurrently with the establishment of the Spanish Hegemony.  At the end of the first chapter of this volume I pointed out the evils brought on Italy by her servitude to a foreign and unsympathetic despot:  the decline of commercial activity, the multiplication of slothful lordlings, the depression of industry, the diminution of wealth, and the suffering of the lower classes from pirates, bandits and tax-gatherers.  These conditions were sufficient to demoralize a people.  And mediaeval Catholicism, restored by edict, enforced by the Inquisition, propagated by Jesuits, was not of the fine enthusiastic quality to counteract them.  Servile in its conception, it sufficed to bridle and benumb a race of serfs, but not to soften or to purify their brutal instincts.[179]