But while this mighty work was proceeding in the north of Europe,
a revolution of a very different kind had taken place in the
south. The temper of Italy and Spain was widely different from
that of Germany and England. As the national feeling of the
Teutonic nations impelled them to throw off the Italian
supremacy, so the national feeling of the Italians impelled them
to resist any change which might deprive their country of the
honours and advantages which she enjoyed as the seat of the
government of the Universal Church. It was in Italy that the
tributes were spent of which foreign nations so bitterly
complained. It was to adorn Italy that the traffic in Indulgences
had been carried to that scandalous excess which had roused the
indignation of Luther. There was among the Italians both much
piety and much impiety; but, with very few exceptions, neither
the piety nor the impiety took the turn of Protestantism. The
religious Italians desired a reform of morals and discipline, but
not a reform of doctrine, and least of all a schism. The
irreligious Italians simply disbelieved Christianity, without
hating it. They looked at it as artists or as statesmen; and, so
looking at it, they liked it better in the established form than
in any other. It was to them what the old Pagan worship was to
Trajan and Pliny. Neither the spirit of Savonarola nor the spirit
of Machiavelli had anything in common with the spirit of the
religious or political Protestants of the North.

Spain again was, with respect to the Catholic Church, in a
situation very different from that of the Teutonic nations. Italy
was, in truth, a part of the empire of Charles the Fifth; and the
Court of Rome was, on many important occasions, his tool. He had
not, therefore, like the distant princes of the North, a strong