Cypriote traditions, the Church of England was slow to succumb to this usurpation, and we shall learn hereafter how her liberties were subverted

gradually and for a time. But here I may recapitulate in conclusion, the steps by which we have thus far seen the Roman Bishop transformed into something like what is now understood by a Pope.

26. FORMATION OF THE PAPARCHY.

We have seen how faithfully the Great Councils maintained the doctrine of Christ when He rebuked the sin of his disciples, inquiring "who should be greatest." We have seen, also, how peevishly the Bishops of Rome showed their jealousy of the "New Rome," how they felt the indignity of being put on a level with the newest of the great sees, and how instinctively they began to assert their apostolic dignity, which so immensely outweighed all pretensions that Byzantium could set up merely as the first of Christian cities and the capital of the regenerated Empire. As generations passed by, the symptoms of a growing insubordination were increased. From time to time some bolder spirit came to the patriarchal throne of Southern Italy. Measures most daring were resorted to occasionally, and not a few inexcusable ones, for which we cannot account. Among such, those of Leo the Great are memorable as grossly inconsistent with his otherwise dignified character. The Council of Chalcedon sufficiently exposed and abased the

1 See Note V'.

subterfuges and pretensions of his envoys, and he himself succumbed; but in him the earliest Petrine hyperboles became audible, and the spirit of a nascent Papacy is discerned. We reach the age of Gregory the Great, however, without any practical or definite enlargement of such claims, and providentially we are enabled, by his own earnest and reiterated statements of fact and of doctrine, to prove that he himself knew nothing of what is now meant by a "Pope," even in the lowest Gallican ideas of such a dignitary. For when the Bishop of New Rome,-probably with no other than an assumption of importance based on the obsolete imperialism of Old Rome, called himself the "Ecumenical," that is, the Imperial Bishop, - we find Gregory remonstrating, on the grounds that such an assumption violated the equality of all bishops, was a profane and impious arrogance, and as such a "forerunner of Antichrist." Never does it occur to him to say, "I am the only Ecumenical Bishop; I am, by divine right, the superior of all bishops; such a claim affronts St. Peter in me, and the Lord himself, who established a world-wide sovereignty in that apostle." Not a word like this, but, on the contrary, he rejects the very thought as worthy of Lucifer; he abjures it for himself and his see.1 At the beginning of the seventh century, therefore, there was no Papacy; nor was there any foreshadowing of a papal predominance, unless it were in Constantinople, in the instance which Gregory stigmatized. Yet, before he had been two years in his grave, Phocas, one of

1 See Note W'.

the most flagitious wretches that ever reigned, gave the profane title to Boniface III., A. D. 606. It was a worldly court title, as we have seen, and the Church had no responsibility for it whatever. Keep this in view. It was a court distinction merely, but the bishop assumed it. So we must assign to Boniface the disgrace of doing what Gregory had anathematized, and in him a Papacy began to be visible.

27. CONDITIONS PRECEDENT.

A "Papacy," but not a Paparchy. It had no definite character; it invested the pretender with no real power; he was still obliged to respect the councils, and their canons; he pretended to be their defender and executive-in-chief. Nor, while the patriarchs of the East were watching him and forcing him to obey what councils had decreed, could he magnify himself in any dangerous degree. So long as the acumene included the more cultured and learned East, it was impossible for the Bishop of Rome to overshadow the older patriarchates, and to make himself autocratic. When a new œcumene had risen, whose master asserted all that Constantine had ever claimed, and who had reversed Constantine's work and policy, Old Rome became, for the first time, independent of the East. While Charlemagne lived, it is true, he was his own pontiff in so large a degree that the new conditions did not permit such advantages to appear in favour of the one "Apostolic See," which had now become all-important to the whole West. But when

the founder of "the Holy Roman Empire" came to his end, even a temporal umpire of the West was found only at Rome, and as the East was very soon forgotten, all the spiritual power of its great patriarchs was absorbed by him. It wanted only some man of genius, alike ambitious and unscrupulous, pushing his way to the throne of Leo and Gregory, to find all things prepared for an entire revolution in Western Christendom. He had but to put his foot on the canons, to ignore the East, and to assert himself the Bishop of Bishops, to find support in the necessities of the new Empire, in those of subordinate kings, and in those of the churches now cut off in all practical affairs from their Eastern brethren. Such a man was Nicholas (A. D. 858), and he made himself the first practical Pope.

28. MY POSITION.

The facts I maintain as to the formation of the Papacy are conceded by recent and by older historians of repute. But they fail to state the irresistible conclusion: there was no "pope," strictly speaking, before Nicholas. (1.) Leo the Great was not a pope when he was rebuked and overruled at Chalcedon. (2.) Agatho was not a pope when the last Ecumenical Council anathematized Honorius; when he, like his successors, accepted it. (3.) Gregory was not a pope when he called the asserter of an oecumenical bishopric a robber of the rights of all bishops, and a forerunner of Antichrist. (4.) Adrian was not a pope when Charle

magne called the Council of Frankfort, overruled his decisions, and, sustained by the entire West, convicted him of heresy in accepting a false dogma from a woman and her pseudo council. (5.) Nor, to come to the times of him who crowned Charlemagne, and made a new era for East and West on that memorable Christmas day, nor was Leo III. a pope when he pleaded before Charles as his subject and his judge; when he offered him personal "adoration"; when he lived and died his subject, and saw him, without remonstrance, exercising pontifical powers, compared with which the Regale, as afterwards understood by Henry VIII. or Louis XIV., shrinks to insignificance.1 (6.) Finally, there could be no pope while this mighty patriarchate was still nominally subject to the canons, and in full communion with the East, which knew him only as an equal.

29. NICHOLAS AND THE DECRETALS.

"Since the days of Gregory I. to our time," says one of his contemporaries, smitten with admiration for the truly imperial genius of Nicholas, "sat no high-priest on the throne of St. Peter to be compared to him. He tamed kings and tyrants, and ruled the world like a sovereign." We have seen that Gregory, noble and pre-eminent as he was, was not a "pope"; and here we have the fact, dropping from the pen of one who knew all about intermediate Bishops of Rome, including Hadrian and Leo, that Nicholas was something which they

1 See Note X'.