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 indefeasible authority wielding irresistible force; and in the person of Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti, afterwards Archbishop of Naples, cardinal, and Pope, under the name of Paul IV., they now came to the front. It was reported from Ratisbon that the Catholic negotiation, with the Legate Contarini at their head, had accepted the Lutheran doctrine of justification. Pole wrote, in his enthusiasm, that it was a truth long suppressed by the Church, now at length brought to light by his friend. Another friend of Pole, Flaminio, helped to write a book in its defence, which appeared in 1542, and of which 60,000 copies were sold immediately—indicating a popularity which no work of Luther or Erasmus had ever attained. This was the famous volume on the Benefit of the Death of Christ, which was supposed to have perished, said Macaulay, as hopelessly as the Second Decade of Livy, until it was discovered in a Cambridge library, and republished in my recollection.

Now it was these men, Pole, Contarini, and their friends Cortese and Sadolet, who dominated in the Sacred College, occupied high places, and helped to govern the policy of Rome. There were nests of Lutherans at Modena, Naples, and elsewhere; but nobody in those days knew the force of multitudes; a few cardinals caused greater alarm than all the readers of the Benefizio, and it soon appeared that the general of the Capuchins, the Bishop of Capo d'Istria, the Bishop of Modena and Nuncio in Germany, inclined the same way as the suspected cardinals. The most eminent men of the Italian clergy were steering for Wittenberg, and taking Rome with them. An uncle of the Duke of Alva, the cardinal of Sant Iago, thereupon suggested to Caraffa that the best way to save the Church was to introduce the Spanish Inquisition; and he was seconded by another Spaniard, a Basque of great note in history, of whom there will be more to tell. Caraffa, who had been Nuncio in Spain, took up the idea, urged it upon the Pope, and succeeded. What he obtained was nothing new; it belonged to the thirteenth century, and it had been the result of two forces,