The life of St. Francis de Sales—1567-1622, still within the afterglow (or the penumbra) of the Renaissance—covered a very remarkable period in the Church’s history. Luther had been dead twenty-one years and the Counter-Reformation had gathered great strength in the interval, to which St. Francis himself later contributed in no small measure by his amazingly successful missionary excursions into the Savoyan province of Le Chablais. The Council of Trent, which embodied the true principles of reform within the Church, had held its final session four years before he was born, and these principles had been, and were still being, practically exhibited and illustrated by the astonishing galaxy of saints that adorned this new era of her history. The lifetime of St. Francis de Sales was contemporaneous with, or at least overlapped at one end or the other, that of nearly a score of the most illustrious figures in the annals of sanctity. St. Pius V, the Dominican Pope, from whose white habit the now established dress of the Supreme Pontiff derives, reigned over the Church for the first five years of St. Francis’s life. St. Charles Borromeo, St. Philip Neri, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis Borgia were still living during his early youth, as also were the boy saints, Stanislas, Aloysius, and (a little later) John Berchman. Other contemporaries were St. Vincent de Paul, the three Saints Peter (aptly symbolic name for the day!), Canisius, Claver, and Fourier, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, St. John Francis Regis, and St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi.