Was the Council of Constance a failure? We are apt to think so. True it deposed three popes, and burnt two heresiarchs and mildly condemned some unusually idiotic pamphleteering. It did restore unity to the Church desolated by half a century of schism. But it seemed as though the passion for unity had absorbed all the energies of men who had before talked not merely of unity, but of reformation—both in the head and members of the Church. For enduring reform men had to wait a full century, and when it came it came in other and rougher guides than that contemplated by Parisian doctors. But this was as nothing to the ruin that befel the constitutional schemes of the fathers. They were fond of asserting the superiority of councils to popes. They desired to take security for the future by clipping the wings of the Canonists, and (shall we say?) interpreting the ‘plenitudo potestatis.’ The Pope was still to be head, for Jesus Christ had founded a kingdom; but he was to rule with a Bill of Rights to restrain him to do what he ought, not what he liked. The decree ‘Frequens’ was to serve as a triennial act for the ecclesiastical revolution, and a council which was virtually the Church—at any rate as much so as the eighteenth century House of Commons was in Whig phrase ‘virtually’ the representative of the people of England—was to meet at short intervals to effect reforms and to teach the Pope his place.