were not. All writers allow that he left the Roman see something essentially different from what he found it. All acknowledge that he effected a revolution in the churches of the West, and carried his conduct to such a pitch towards the East that they cried out against him for arrogating to himself and his see what was never heard of before. For the first time the Roman Bishop made himself the sine qua non of all thought and action in Christendom; the centre and criterion not only of unity, but of communion with Christ himself. As such he excommunicated the Easterns; they returned the compliment, and excommunicated him. These relations were not absolutely final, but they were never repaired by any permanent restorations. There was now a new power in the Church of Christ. The Easterns never accepted it for an hour. But it was fastened on Western Christendom, not as a theory, but as a fact. It was no more a dignity, but a despotism; not a titular papacy, but the Paparchy. There was a Pope in the West, and his power was thenceforth a reality, developing into a supremacy like God's. The "Pope" now existed in one who swept away antiquity, and all councils and canons which he did not fancy. The instrument by which this prodigious revolution was effected was "the forged Decretals." All men now acknowledge that they are forgeries, but, by whomsoever made, Nicholas brought them forth, appealed to them as authentic, and proved by them that all the Bishops of Rome, from St. Peter down to him, had ruled the Church absolutely by their decrees. The age was unlearned: the Decretals were not subjected to the tests by which learning even in its elements might have refuted them. They vanished like smoke when the art of printing showed what they really were. But all through the Middle Ages they overawed the West, kings, bishops, monks, saints and sinners alike, and this fact is the apology for St. Bernard and others, who at heart were reformers, but could not refute such testimony. For they passed into history as genuine; they became parts of the canon law; they practically abrogated all the œcumenical canons, they created the pseudo cecumenical canons and the pseudo councils that enacted them; they enabled successive pontiffs to raise their pretensions higher and higher, "deceivers" no doubt, but yet "being deceived"; they made an honest fanatic of Hildebrand, who never doubted his right to speak for God and as God, and who in the eleventh century made the name of "Pope" peculiar to himself, forbidding its application to the patriarchs of the East; and after him they made Innocent III., who turned the fanaticism of the Crusades against Christian men. In a word, they are responsible for all that has made havoc of the churches, East and West, and that perpetuates their schisms at this hour. Every one of these positions rests on irrefragable evidence; on facts not denied, but, alas! not kept before men's minds.1 1 See Note Y'. 30. AN ILLUSTRATION. And if you ask how it comes that, after such frauds are once exposed to the scorn of the universe, the Papacy still survives and even enlarges its pretensions in our own enlightened day, the answer is sufficiently plain. Did you ever see stone-masons turn an arch? They make a framework out of refuse wood, of laths and scantlings, anything that comes to hand; a few nails suffice to hold them together; they set it in place on abutments well prepared, and then they begin to work in stone. They soon erect the arch and set the key-stone and build upon it, a bridge, or a castle, or a tower that reaches to heaven. Then no longer any need of the framework; a beggar may kick it out and turn it into fuel to boil his soup; but the arch remains for ages. So the Decretals have disappeared, but that arch of pride, the Papacy, stands the firmer because of all that has been built upon it. The laws and usages of Europe, the manners of nations, the superstitions of the ignorant, the piety of the devout, the diplomacy of monarchs, the thrones of empires, and empire itself, all must fall together, if the arch be suddenly destroyed. And then the arch itself is old and interesting; it is ivy-clad and green, with associations of poesy and romance. A thousand motives conspire to make men sustain it; and stand it will and must, till nations discover that truth and right are the only supports for what humanity requires, for what law and equity and order must find indispensable. So long as those old abutments of imperial despotism and popular ignorance remain, the old arch will hold. But thank God, His Providence is contriving reforms, and providing resources, against changes that must come. They are working gradually, but surely, to their glorious result; let us be faithful to duty and love truth in our generation, and leave the rest to Him who has promised, and who is Faithful and True.1 1 Rev. xix. II. LECTURE V. THE MIDDLE AGES. I. DARK AGES. HE Middle Ages, as I reminded you, extend THE from that memorable Christmas, A. D. 800, to the year 1500, when Charles-Quint was born. This period was not all dark, by any means; but what we may fairly call the Dark Ages are here included, and may justly be considered as extending from A. D. 900 to A. D. 1400; from the pontificate of Benedict IV. to that of Benedict XIII., Antipope at Avignon. You observe these convenient "dates of anchorage," and the economy of using the names of two Benedicts as terminal figures. And these names stand for facts that may well stigmatize the included period as dark. For the first Benedict marks an epoch when the crime of Nicholas, with his decretals, was bearing its natural fruit, and the see of Rome was given over to the sway of impiety the most frightful, while the other Benedict denotes the schism consequent upon the removal of the Popes to Avignon, and all the scandals involved in one series of popes at Rome and another in France, mutually excommunicating and anathematizing one another, and, what is worse, damning the unhappy people who respectively ΙΟ |