The history of the popes, from the close of the middle ages : drawn ...

HERESY IN THE LOW COUNTRIES. 367
against the Turks, may really to a great extent afford an
explanation of the fact of the cooling of his zeal for the punishment
of the new believers. Peter Canisius, too, when he was
in Rome, had successfully urged him to show moderation
towards those prelates in the north whose faith was so feeble.^
While Protestantism had undoubtedly received a mortal
blow in Italy, it was every day becoming clearer that a new
form of heresy was springing up in the north under a Catholic
disguise. The news of this was received with all the more
anxiety in Rome because the Low Countries, already so much
endangered on the score of religion, threatened to become
the centre of the new movement, and especially the long
celebrated University of Louvain, which had hitherto been
the staunch opponent of Luther.
For a long time past Protestant doctrines had been an
incentive for Catholic theologians to maintain the opposing
doctrines of the Catholic Church, to go into them more deeply
and to develop them scientifically. The untiring zeal with
which the followers of the new religion sought to spread their
ideas by means of books and writings, broadsheets and ballads,
explains the way in vv^hich Protestant ideas had obtained a hold
upon public opinion, and had acquired a greater influence even
with many Catholics than they themselves suspected. The
fact that Luther's fundamental and principal doctrine had
found a reflection in the theory of justification held by Con-
tarini, Pole and Gropper had been of far less importance.
On the other hand, a fatal influence which was to last for many
centuries had been introduced into Catholic thought and life
by the Protestant teaching as to grace and free-will as the outcome
of the system which was founded at Louvain after the
middle of the XVIth century by Baius, and which was carried
to completion in the following century by the Jansenists.
Baius (Michael du Bay)^ who had occupied the ro57al chair
1 Canisii Epist., VI ., 583.
- X. Le Bachelet, Dictioniiaire do theologie catholique, 11.,
Paris, 1905, 38-11 1. M. Scheeben in Kirchenlex. of Freiburg,
P., 1852-1862. F. X. LixsENMANN, IVIichael Bajus und die
Grundlegung cles Jansenismus, Tubingen, 1S67 ; also Scheeben