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 papal attempts at reform being regarded in Germany as seriously intended. A beginning was indeed made at Rome. The offices of the Datary, the Chancery, and the Penitentiary were overhauled; and a report signed by Contarini, Caraffa, Aleander, and Badia-the " Consilium quattuor delectorum a Paulo III super Reformatione sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae"-was in the autumn of 1537 presented to the Pope.

But in reality little seems to have been done. The General Council never met at Mantua. The Duke did not desire its presence in his territory; and the war between Charles and Francis made it practically impossible. The Council was then summoned to meet at Vicenza on May 1, 1538, but it again had to be postponed. It soon became clear that the Pope's zeal for reform was rapidly waning. Contarini did his best to stir him up to action. In his "Epistola de potestate Pontifias in usu clavium" and in his "De potestate Pontificis in compositionibus" he emphasised the propositions that the Papacy was a sacred charge, and that its powers were to be used for the good of the Church and not to its destruction. In all Contarini's writings the conception of the Papacy as a monarchy and not a tyranny appears. It is a monarchy over freemen, and its powers are to be used according to the light of reason. Though the Catholic reformers held strongly to the divine mission of the Papacy in the Church, they distinguished carefully between the legitimate and the illegitimate exercise of its authority. Freely the Papacy had received, freely it should give. The whole official system of the Curia with its fees and extortions had become a scandal. An iniquitous traffic in sacred things had grown up. Contarini appealed to the Pope to root out effectively this canker, which was destroying the spiritual life of the Church. In November, 1538, Contarini travelled with Paul III to Ostia, and they discussed his writings. "Our good old man," as Contarini calls him in a letter to Pole, made him sit by his side, and talked with him about the reform of the compositiones. The Pope informed him that he had read his treatise, and spoke to him with such Christian feeling that his hopes were thus awakened anew at the moment when he was about to give way to despair.

Sarpi doubts the sincerity of Paul III with regard to reform. He believes that the Pope took up various projects of reform merely as an excuse to prove that a Council was unnecessary. But Sarpi's prejudice always blinds him to any good action on the part of a Pope; and there is little doubt that Paul was in earnest in wishing to remove the graver abuses of the papal Court. But he was an old man when he ascended the papal throne, and his energy did not increase with years; moreover, he was not a zealot, possessed with one overmastering idea. The interests of his family, his own personal comfort, and the dignity of the Holy See, were to him things that were not to be lightly risked in the carrying out of any scheme of reform.