Five popes [Footnote 16] occupied the See of St. Peter during the holding of that memorable council. Some among them may, perhaps, be justly blameworthy for this or that fault, in their administration; but to have been able to convoke and reunite that immortal assembly; to have caused it to resume its labors when they had been interrupted; to have conducted them through so many obstacles and difficulties, coming from men or things, to their close; to have, at last, as was done by Pius IV., perpetuated, so to say, the authority and reformatory action of that oecumenical assembly by the institution of that _Congregation_ of the council, whose mission, for three hundred years past, has been to explain and put into practical execution the decrees passed at Trent--this is evidently one of the most important pages of the history of the Reformation within the fold of Christianity, and is, perhaps, one where the divine power and the supernatural constitution of the church shine forth most visibly. For neither the popes who presided over the council nor the bishops who composed it were, taken individually, men of genius; and it is permitted to us to say that in great matters where the personal consideration of man appears the least, there the wisdom and power of God shine forth all the more strikingly.
[Footnote 16: Paul III., Julius III., Marcellus II., Paul IV., and Pius IV.]
And then, again, around those two centres which mingle themselves in one--the Papacy and the general council--and which represent so forcibly, in the face of the precocious divisions of Protestantism, the grand and living unity of the church of Jesus Christ, what astonishing fecundity for good, what varied resources, what fruitful germination of men and deeds! What souls, those great saints of the sixteenth century, recruited from among all ranks of society, and to whom Providence seems to have confided the mission of replying by some beneficent institution to all the attacks and all the negations of Protestantism!
Would that, then, be a picture wanting in grandeur, where a competent artist--wishing to glorify in the sixteenth century not the warlike Reformation which rent asunder without remorse the ancient and majestic unity of Christendom, but the peaceful and fruitful reform which multiplied, according to the needs of a much troubled and suffering age, grand inspirations and magnanimous self-sacrifices--should group around the living centre of the church Ignatius Loyola and his brave companions, the pastor Pascal Baylon and the grand nobleman Francis Borgia, St. Philip Neri and St. Camillus of Lelli, St. Charles Borromeo in the midst of the plague at Milan and St. Francis of Sales evangelizing the populations of Chablais? And yet this enumeration must be limited to the names of the more illustrious only, and to works the most considerable.