the Church, yet parted company with it with regard to the reform of doctrine. The supremacy of St Thomas and of the great scholastics must be preserved, and the whole body of dogma which the Middle Ages had evolved must be retained. Concession of any kind was not to be heard of; and this party believed that a further increase of the powers of the Papacy and of the centralisation of authority was the surest safeguard of the Church. The former party wished for a real Catholic reformation; the latter succeeded in reducing a movement which started with so great a promise to little more than a counter-reformation. It will be our purpose in this chapter to sketch the steps by which this was brought about, and all real reform, such as might have conciliated nascent Protestantism and preserved the unity of the Western Church, was made impossible.
The aspirations of scattered individuals for reform first found a nucleus and an organisation in the "Oratory of Divine Love," founded at Rome towards the end of the Pontificate of Leo X. This famous society numbered among its members some of the most learned prelates and upright laymen who were connected with the Court of Rome in that day. They met for prayer and meditation in the little church of Santi Silvestro e Dorotea in Trastevere and discussed means for the purification of the Church. Almost every tendency of thought and temperament among the Catholic reformers was to be found there. Caraffa and Sadoleto, Gaetano da Thiene and Giberti were alike members. The ascetic and the humanist, the practical and the doctrinal reformer met together and worked in harmony. Their numbers were some fifty or sixty in all. In the last years of the Pagan Renaissance, when its weaker elements were coming to the surface, and when decadence rather than a new interest in life was becoming its keynote, there was thus growing in numbers and influence a party full of promise for the future history of the Church. A stern and almost Puritan moral ideal was combined with a belief that there was no essential antagonism between faith and culture, between profane learning and Christian knowledge. As the great medieval theologians and scholastics had interpreted Christianity to their age, and had harmonised the divergent elements in the knowledge of their time, so now in the Oratory of Divine Love the feeling found expression that the work had to be done afresh, and that the new revelation given to men by the Renaissance must be incorporated into the system of Christian thought.
Nor was it only the desire for a closer alliance between Christianity and humanism which bound many of these men together. Augustine had always been a force in the medieval Church, and the Augustinian elements In its theology were ever again asserting themselves and claiming supremacy. The attraction of Augustine felt so strongly by Luther was not felt only by him. The end of the fifteenth and the beginning of
