Account for the strange history as you will, it betokens the abominations of the period of which she is a landmark: it coincides with the apocalyptic prophecy, "I saw a woman sit upon a scarletcoloured beast."

5. HOW IT LOOKED IN ENGLISH EYES.

All this was imported into England, where Dunstan, alas! was introducing many things unknown to Bede and Alcuin. Even King Edgar, who, though not a severe moralist, was a saint if compared with the pontiffs of his time, has recorded his testimony against them.1 "We see in Rome," he says, "only debauchery, licentiousness, and drunkenness; the houses of priests are the shameful abodes of harlots, and of worse than these. In the dwelling of the Pope, they gamble by day and by night. Instead of fastings and prayers, they give place to bacchanalian songs, lascivious dances, and the debauchery of Messalina." God knows how I hate even to name these things afresh; but when, in our own times, a pontiff has decreed, and made it dogma, that Popes like these were all infallible in setting forth the oracles of Divine truth, I ask, with sorrow of heart, "Is there not a cause?"

6. THE LATIN CHURCHES.

But amid all these horrors, the Latin churches, in spite of the despotism that dominated them, were yet, as such, a portion of the one Holy Catholic Church, and God's Spirit lived in thousands of

1 See Note D".

saints, who, as best they could, still walked with God and kept His way. Remember, there was no "Roman Catholic Church" at this period, substituting itself for the Church of the Creed and of the old Councils. Hence, these Latin churches. were Catholic churches, and the Paparchy including "the Court of Rome," a mere worldly machine, was an artificial system, superimposed by the Decretals, defiling them as by a leprosy, but not destroying organic life, nor yet healthful functions of grace, which were fruitful of good works. Let me for a moment illustrate this by a reference to "Gallicanism."

7. GALLICANISM.

As I have hinted, the spirit of Irenæus ruled at Frankfort, and manifested itself as the spirit of the Anglican Church, in Alcuin. The Decretal system was introduced too soon afterwards, not to awaken the strong impression that it must be spurious. Clearly, Frankfort would have been impossible had Charlemagne known such a code, or had Adrian, who only ventured to hint at its existence, presumed to maintain it. To the honour of Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims,1 he resisted Nicholas and his Decretals as soon as they were imposed upon the bishops of Gaul. His conduct and protestations perpetuated the influence of Frankfort, and created the "Gallicanism" which has preserved the semblance of nationality to the Church of France down to our own times. Under Louis IX. (St. 1 See Note E".

Louis) its essence became formulated and known as the "Pragmatic Sanction" of A. D. 1268. By this instrument, St. Louis asserted (1) his own position as (Evêque au dehors) the temporal head of the Gallican Church; (2) defended the rights of the metropolitans and other bishops; (3) secured the national Church against many pretended powers and privileges of the Popes; (4) re-vindicated the canon law and ancient usages as to elections to bishoprics and the like; (5) reserved the imperial rights of his crown; and (6) forbade the papal emissaries to tax the Gallican Church without its own consent or the royal permission. Such was elemental "Gallicanism," which, in bolder forms, was not less the spirit of the Anglican Church, under the Decretalist usurpation. Ultramontane writers recognize the Church of England as only acting logically under Elizabeth, while the French Church shrank back from the inexorable conclusions.1 So late as 1688 the Gallicans endeavoured to save themselves from the inconsistencies in which they had become entangled by submitting to absorption in "the Roman Catholic Church," created at the Council of Trent on purpose to supersede national churches. Poor Bossuet! terribly did he feel his chains, when he struggled to save what he could of "Gallican liberties." Feeble, but most significant and instructive to us, was his exclamation, "Let us preserve the massive maxims of our forefathers, - the precious words of St. Louis, which the Gallican Church has derived from the traditions of

-

1 See Note F".

the Church Universal." Poor Bossuet, indeed! He felt the grip of pontifical imposture when he thus pleaded for limitations: "The ocean itself has bounds to its plenitude; let it overpass them, it becomes a deluge which would make havoc of the universe." Again I sigh, Poor Bossuet! In vain, having let Trent in, does he try to keep this deluge out. What would he have said had he lived, like Dupanloup, to see Pius IX. call him

self "infallible," and spurn the venerable bishops of France from the foot of his throne in a nominal council which reduced them all to "sacristans." 1

8. ST. BERNARD.

Marking the futile heroism of Hincmar, let us come now to the age of St. Bernard. It was the period of the Crusades, and he, alas! was carried. away by them. His agency in stimulating the second Crusade is a blot on his memory. He could not be wiser than his times; he lived (A. D. 1090-1153) at a period when the system of the Decretals had culminated under Gregory VII. (Hildebrand), but while as yet it had not exhibited all the fury and flame of its arrogance under Innocent III.2 Just at the epoch of the first Christian chiliad, when the impression prevailed that Christ was about to make his second advent, and bring the crimes of popes and princes to an end, stands the noble figure of Gerbert, who strove to reform, and so strengthened, the Papacy. The name he assumed, as Sylvester II., goes back to 2 A. D. 1198-1216.

1 See Note G".

the Nicene epoch, and indicates his desire to restore the piety of the first Bishop of Rome, who bore it. Remember, that with all the Latins down to the epoch of Trent we Anglicans are in full communion; and just so far as theirs was the spirit of Vincent, they were witnesses with us against the iniquity of the Paparchy. Even St. Bernard was, in spirit, one of us; he was a reformer, so far as he knew how to be. It was not his fault that he imagined the decretals to be genuine monuments of the primitive ages. If the Pope favoured a crusade, he inferred "God wills it." Yet, like Hincmar, he did his best to resist the evils that were bred of Decretalism. He loved Eugenius III. as his pupil, yet he remonstrates with him like a prophet, and denounces the profligacy of his court. "Who will give me, before I die," he exclaims, " to see the Church as it was in the ancient days." ."1 He was nurtured in the extravagant Mariolatry of his age, but he shrank from any increase of it. In his terrible assault upon innovators who had just begun to talk about "the immaculate conception" of St. Mary, he shows where he must have stood in a more enlightened day.2 He denounces the nascent fable as an idea "of which the Church's rite knows nothing, which right reason sustains not, which primitive tradition does not favour." He calls it "a novelty rashly admitted against the religious use of the Church; born of levity, the sister of superstition, the mother of temerity, . . . the invention of a few inexperienced simpletons." After nearly eight hundred

1 See Note H".

2 See Note I".