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 family and friends in an atmosphere of quiet and educated piety. These men had common characteristics: they were lovers of peace, they were men of learning, they strove to form their lives by the practice of orderly devotion, they loved the Church, and strove to make its meaning clear by scrupulous care for everything which could make its services intelligible and attractive. Cultured devotion and spiritual sweetness have perhaps never been set forth more cogently and persuasively than in their lives, their characters, and their writings. They indicated splendid possibilities of a religious future, which had been the dream of thinking minds during the weary century of debate through which Europe had disconsolately passed.

For it is well to abandon all illusions about the sixteenth century. There were strong men; there were powerful minds; but there was a dearth of beautiful characters. A time of revolt and upheaval is a time of one-sided energy, of moral uncertainty, of hardness, of unsound argument, of imperfect self-control, of vacillation, of self-seeking. It is difficult in such a time to find heroes, to discover a man whom we can unreservedly admire. The Church of Rome had fortified itself against attack by the Inquisition, and by the passionate zeal of the Society of Jesus, which soon degenerated into unprincipled intrigue. Calvin raised against it a massive system, which bound together the members of his community by an overpowering sense of their direct dependence on God through His particular election of each individual soul. Beside these two great systems all else