Towards the end of the century the pastors had been humbled and the questions of the day were far less the dogmatic niceties they loved than ethical ones such as the right to take usury, the proper penalty for adultery, the right to make war, and the best form of government.
[1] "Decretum Dei aeternum horribile." [2] See below.

Chapter X, section 3.
{182} CHAPTER IV FRANCE SECTION 1.

RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION [Sidenote: France] Though, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the French may have attained to no greater degree of national self-consciousness than had the Germans, they had gone much farther in the construction of a national state.

The significance of this evolution, one of the strongest tendencies of modern history, is that it squares the outward political condition of the people with their inward desires.

When once a nation has come to feel itself such, it cannot be happy until its polity is united in a homogeneous state, though the reverse is also true,--that national feeling is sometimes the result as well as the cause of political union.