Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/49

 laid down their property and renounced their rank to enter its fields of work. It was not long before the education of Catholic Christendom was largely, if not chiefly, in their hands. Their first college in the German Empire was transferred to them six years before the religious peace of Augsburg, and within a few miles of that city, at Ingolstadt, on the Danube. Here the two leaders on the Catholic side in the Thirty Years’ War, Maximilian, of Bavaria, and Ferdinand, of Austria, were educated. There is little doubt that they had in their constitution a provision for affiliated members, and that the Emperors Ferdinand II. and III. and other princes were such members. In a word, they had the consciences of the Roman Catholic sovereigns and their ministers in their hands as educators, and in their keeping as confessors. They led them in the direction of this war, so that it was at the time and has since been called the Jesuits’ War. They had already made such progress toward the restoration of Christendom to the Pope that they thought this might be ventured. Not to cite other examples, Ferdinand, under their lead, had already made his inherited dominions of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, which had become chiefly Protestant, all Catholic, and, from the ease with which this was effected, doubtless inferred the easy restoration of the Empire and then of all Christendom to the Pope.

II. The provisions of the Diet of 1555 were defective, especially as viewed in relation to the divisions of the Protestant powers. This has been shown in connection with the single enactment known as the Eccle-