The emperor never officially recognized the work of the council at all.

Nor were the governments the only recalcitrants.

According to Sarpi the body of German Catholics paid no attention to the prescribed reforms and the council was openly mocked in France as claiming an authority superior to that of the apostles.
To Father Paul Sarpi, indeed, the most intelligent observer of the next generation, the council seemed to have been a failure if not a fraud.
Its history he calls an Iliad of woes.

The professed objects of the council, healing the schism and asserting the episcopal power he thinks frustrated, for the schism was made irreconciliable and the church reduced to servitude.
But the judgment of posterity has reversed that of {396} the great historian, [Sidenote: Constructive work] at least as far as the value of the work done at Trent to the cause of Catholicism is concerned.

If the church shut out the Protestants and recognized her limited domain, she at least took appropriate measures to establish her rule over what was left.