"The present volume, as its title imports, relates a complicated series of conflicts of which the origin or the pretext has for the most part to be sought in the great religious schism with which the preceding volume was concerned. But the cause of the restoration of Catholic unity in the West was, in the minds of both the supporters and the opponents of that cause, inextricably interwoven with the purposes of dynastic ambition, and powerfully affected by the influences traceable to the rapid advance of the monarchical principle and to the gradual growth of the conception of the modern national State."