He had lived through troubled times, and for some years had felt the whole weight of Catholic concerns upon his shoulders.  At the last, he was conscious of having opened a new era for the Church, and of being able to transmit a scepter of undisputed authority to his successors.  His death-bed was troubled with no remorse, with no ingratitude of relatives, with no political complications produced by family ambition or by the sacrifice of his official duties to personal aggrandizement.

[Footnote 34:  Soranzo, op. cit. p. 74.]

[Footnote 35:  Soranzo, op. cit. p. 71, says:  ’II marchese suo fratello con la moglie gli diede il cappello, e con la morte il papato.’]

[Footnote 36:  Mocenigo, op. cit. p. 52.  Soranzo, op. cit. p. 93.]

[Footnote 37:  Margherita Medici, sister of the Pope, had married Gilberto Borromeo.]

[Footnote 38:  See Mocenigo, op. cit. p. 53.  Soranzo, op. cit. p. 91.]

[Footnote 39:  Gia.  Soranzo (op. cit. p. 133) says of Carlo Borromeo, ’ch’egli solo faccia piu profitto nella Corte di Roma che tutti i decreti del Concilio insieme.’]

Soon after the election of Pope Pius IV. the state of Europe made the calling of a General Council indispensable.  Paul’s impolitic pretensions had finally alienated England from the Roman Church.  Scotland was upon the point of declaring herself Protestant.  The Huguenots were growing stronger every year in France, the Queen Mother, Catherine de’Medici, being at that time inclined to favor them.  The Confession of Augsburg had long been recognized in Germany.  The whole of Scandinavia, with Denmark, was lost to Catholicism.  The Low Countries, in spite of Philip, Alva, and the Inquisition, remained intractable.  Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland were alienated, ripe for open schism.  The tenets of Zwingli had taken root in German Switzerland.  Calvin was gaining ground in the French cantons.  Geneva had become a stationary fortress, the stronghold of belligerent reformers, whence heresy sent forth its missionaries and promulgated subversive doctrines through the medium of an ever-active press.  Transformed by Calvin from its earlier condition of a pleasure-loving and commercial city, it was now what Deceleia under Spartan discipline had been to Athens in the Peloponnesian war—­a permanent epiteichismos, perpetually garrisoned and on guard to harry the flanks of Catholics.  Faithful to the Roman See in a strict sense of the term, there remained only Spain, Portugal, and Italy.  As the events of the next century proved, the disaffected nations still offered rallying-points for the Catholic cause, from which the tide of conquest was rolled back upon the Reformation.  But in 1559 the outlook for the Church was very gloomy; no one could predict whether a General Council might not increase her difficulties by weakening the Papal power and sowing further seeds of discord among her few faithful adherents.  Yet