countries of Europe is to be mainly ascribed to the great
Catholic revival.

About a hundred years after the final settlement of the boundary
line between Protestantism and Catholicism, began to appear the
signs of the fourth great peril of the Church of Rome. The storm
which was now rising against her was of a very different kind
from those which had preceded it. Those who had formerly attacked
her had questioned only a part of her doctrines. A school was now
growing up which rejected the whole. The Albigenses, the
Lollards, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, had a positive religious
system, and were strongly attached to it. The creed of the new
sectaries was altogether negative. They took one of their
premises from the Protestants, and one from the Catholics. From
the latter they borrowed the principle, that Catholicism was the
only pure and genuine Christianity. With the former, they held
that some parts of the Catholic system were contrary to reason.
The conclusion was obvious. Two propositions, each of which
separately is compatible with the most exalted piety, formed,
when held in conjunction, the ground-work of a system of
irreligion. The doctrine of Bossuet, that transubstantiation is
affirmed in the Gospel, and the doctrine of Tillotson, that
transubstantiation is an absurdity, when put together, produced
by logical necessity, the inferences of Voltaire.

Had the sect which was rising at Paris been a sect of mere
scoffers, it is very improbable that it would have left deep
traces of its existence in the institutions and manners of
Europe. Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon
most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world.