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

380
HISTORY OF THE POPES.
submission. Baius had to declare that he accepted the bull
with all reverence, that he considered it to have been suffi-
ciently promulgated, that he submitted to it unreservedly,
and that if the Pope wished for anything further he would
do it.^ The Louvain controversy then remained quiescent
until the death of Pius V.
With the exception of his bull against Baius, Pius V. onty
issued one other decree in direct defence of doctrine ; on
October ist, 1568, he renewed the constitution of Paul IV.
against that form of Protestantism which denied the Trinity
and the Divinity of Jesus Christ, His miraculous conception
and the satisfactory value of His death, and the virginity of
His Mother,^ thus almost completely depriving Christianity
of its supernatural character. By this decree Pius V. dealt
his final blow in the struggle against Italian Protestantism,
since it was Italians, the Sienese Lelio and Fausto Socinus, who
maintained these opinions in their fullest form, and it was the
Italian form of Protestantism from which Socinianism sprang.
From the first Protestantism in Italy was strongly infected
by infidelity,^ and it was at the hands of Italians that the
transformation of believing Protestantism into complete
infidelity received its first impulse and its subsequent develop-
ment.
But how disappointed had been the hopes of the Italian
^ Le Bachelet, II., 52.
- Bull. Rom., VII., 722.
^ Ochino " in his later writings shows himself involved in a
volte-face from the positive rigorist view . . . towards those ideas
of which Seb. Castellio and Leho Socinus are the representatives.
. . . The Geneva theologians themselves complained of the
ItaUan exiles as ' academic sceptics '
. . . but how little the
course taken by the Italian reformation had followed these developments
... a broader examination of the question can hardly be
said to give the lie to the above mentioned theologians of Geneva,
when they recognized in these men a specifically Italian form of
scepticism." This is the view of K. Benrath " : tJber die
Quellen der itahenischen Reformationsgeschichte, Bonn, 1S76,
II seq.