THE REFORMATION IN EUROPE 341

As Mr, Wells has pointed out in his Outline of History,
" It was the Order of the Jesuits which carried Christianity
to China again after the downfall of the Ming dynasty, and
Jesuits were the chief Christian missionaries in India and
North America. To their civilizing work among the Indians
in South America we shall presently allude. But their main
achievement lay in raising the standard of Catholic educa-
tion. Their schools became and remained for a long time
the best schools in Christendom. Says Lord Verulam (Sir
Francis Bacon): 'As for the pedagogic part.... consult
the schools of the Jesuits, for nothing better has been put in
practice/ They raised the level of intelligence, they quick-
ened the conscience of all Catholic Europe, they stimulated
Protestant Europe to competitive educational effort."

The other great agency in the uplift of the Catholic cause
was the Council of Trent which worked from 1545 to 1563.
Its efforts were directed towards (1) defining the doctrines
of the Roman Catholic Church and defending the same
against the objections raised by the Protestants; (2) suc-
cinctly and explicitly declaring accursed the various here-
tical beliefs; and (3) abolishing the various abuses that
had crept into the Church, and enforcing a more rigid dis-
cipline among the clergy and monks.

The Index and the Inquisition represented two other as-
pects of the Counter-Reformation. By the former the Popes'
soiught to ban heretical literature and by the latter heretical
lives. The two proscriptions together showed how far
Europe was from religious, toleration despite the enlighten-
ment of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.