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 twenty-five, in 1493, invested with the purple by Alexander VI, he had taken part in all phases of the humanistic movement, and shared its glories and its sins. Now the sky had become overcast, but a clear sunny gleam from the best time of the Renaissance still lay over him, though his pontificate was to witness the inroad of Lutheranism on Italy, the appearance of the doctrine of justification by faith, and on the other hand the foundation of the Society of Jesus (September 3, 1539), the convocation of the long wished-for Ecumenical Council of Trent (1542), and also the reorganisation of the Inquisition (1541).

The last Pope of the Renaissance, as we must call Farnese, left as the brightest memory of his reign the record of an effort, which proved fruitless, to unite the last and noblest supporters of the Renaissance who still survived in the service of the Church, for an attempt at reformation. This is celebrated as the Consultum delectorum Cardinalium et aliorum prelatorum de emendanda Ecclesia, and bears the signatures of Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Reginald Pole, Federigo Fregoso, Giberti, and Cortese. Contarini must be acknowledged to have been the real soul of the movement, which aimed at an inward reconciliation with the German party of reform. All these ideas had root in the conception represented by the scheme of Julius II. The greater number of those who worked at the Consultum of 1538 must be regarded as the last direct heirs of this great inheritance. The Religious Conference of Ratisbon in 1541 forms the crisis in the history of this movement: it was wrecked, not, as Reumont states, by the incompatibility of the principle of subjective opinion with that of authority, but quite as much, if not more so, by the private aims of Bavaria and France. So ended the movement towards reconciliation, and another came into force and obtained sole dominion. This regarded the most marked opposition to Protestantism as the salvation of the Church, and to combat it summoned not only the counter-reformation of the Tridentinum, but every means in its power, even the extremest measures of material force, to its assistance. The representatives of the conciliatory reform movement, Contarini, Sadoleto, Pole, Morone, became suspect and, despite their dignity of Cardinal, were subject to persecution. Even noble ladies like Vittoria Colonna and Giulia Gonzaga were not secure from this suspicion and persecution.

Paul IV (1555-9) and Pius V (1566-72) carried out the Counter-Reformation in Italy. While the pagan elements of humanism merged in the Antitrinitarian and Socinian sects, the Inquisition was stamping out the sola fides belief, but its terrorism at the same time crushed culture and intellectual life out of Italy. The city of Rome recovered from the Sack of 1527; but from the ruin wrought by Caraffa, the nation, or at any rate Papal Rome, never recovered. Whatever intellectual life still remained was forced in the days of Paul III to shrink more and