ABSTRACT
D uring the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Roman Catholic Church suffered some extraordinary changes of fortune. These changes involved the loss of practically the whole of the territory over which she ruled as a temporal power and the loss of quite the whole of her political influence. They were losses against which she struggled with all her force, and the consequences of which she is unwilling even now to acknowledge; but they were accompanied by a great increase in her spiritual influence, and gave her a wider range of purely religious activity than she had enjoyed at any moment since the close of the Reformation.
