The
institution thus developed during the latter years of Clement VII, and
under Paul III, Paul IV, and their successors, in the face of the
defection of half Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which
avoided all the great and dangerous scandals of former times,
particularly nepotism, with its attempts at territorial aggrandizement,
and which, in alliance with the Catholic princes, and impelled by a
newborn spiritual force, found its chief work in the recovery of what
had been lost. It only existed and is only intelligible in opposition
to the seceders. In this sense it can be said with perfect truth that
the moral salvation of the Papacy is due to its mortal enemies. And now
its political position, too, though certainly under the permanent
tutelage of Spain, became impregnable; almost without effort it
inherited, on the extinction of its vassals, the legitimate line of
Este and the house of Della Rovere, the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino.
But without the Reformation--if, indeed, it is possible to think it
away--the whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into
secular hands.
Patriotism
In conclusion, let us briefly consider the effect of these political
circumstances on the spirit of the nation at large.
It is evident that the general political uncertainty in Italy, during
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was of a kind to excite in the
better spirits of the time a patriotic disgust and opposition.
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