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ment to the Decretals, their gross superstitions. How should I have acted? Where should I have been found? Thanks to God, I lived not then.

5. THREE CLASSES INVOLVED.

Here comes in room for humility, charity, and large consideration. I see three classes of characters: (1) honest, faithful men, no wiser than their age, doing their best in the gross darkness, and feeling after light; (2) men, apparently bad, and working for worldly ends to make night darker and bad worse; and (3) elect spirits, called of God to be witnesses for Him, according to their ability, and to work out deliverance for his people. Here, then, I must "judge righteous judgment," or "judge nothing before the time." I must hesitate to condemn my brother man; but I must not restrain my sympathy with all that has contributed to my precious inheritance of light and freedom, and all spiritual riches in Christ and His Gospel. I hate lies; I hate power based upon imposture; I hate the corrosions and corruptions which divested the Latin churches of their Nicene character and their ancient liberties. This is the spirit which inspires me to speak, and in sympathy with which I ask you to trace the Anglican Restoration to its sources, and to follow me thence till it is crowned, by the marked providence of God, not merely with success, but with such developments of strength and of fruitfulness as have made our restored estate a blessing to mankind.

6. INNOCENT III.

After the Lion-hearted Richard comes the great crisis of the West. Lothaire had just mounted the papal throne as Innocent III. By him what Nicholas created and Hildebrand's credulity developed with logical force into Titanic proportions was rendered yet more practical, and was augmented by theological decrees more corrosive than had yet been imagined. Provincial canons were elevated into dogmas of the faith; subtleties of Aristotle, coloured by Averroes, were made the base of his new theology. Even Gregory VII. had not accepted transubstantiation, but now it was to be identified with worship and enforced as doctrine. Worse than all as an instrument of papal despotism came the torture of confession, no longer voluntary, but bound upon conscience by penalties of excommunication and the refusal of Christian burial. The "ear of Dionysius" was appropriated by a Christian pontiff, and he proclaimed it to be the ear of Him "to whom all hearts are open, and from whom no secrets are hid." Kings and queens, princes and peasants, must obey. Every soul in Western Christendom was now brought into personal relations with the power to which the Decretals had led them to believe all power was given. The keys of life and death, of heaven and hell, were in his hand; he could dispense the divine rewards and chastisements with arbitrary sovereignty. Western Europe was thus reduced to one great parish, in which he alone was rector; all bishops and priests were but his curates; he was universal

bishop and lord paramount over the souls and bodies of men. To fulminate cruel excommunications and to lay national churches under interdict was his pastime. He assumed all the responsibility for devastating whole races when he turned the crusades against Christians, and devoured by fire and sword the unhappy Vaudois and Albigenses.1 Under an imbecile and unprincipled king, England was now to share in the blessings of such "another gospel."

7. THE EBB OF THE NORMANS.

But one happy event gave things a better cast for the future. Normandy fell to the French kings; troops of Normans went to look after their estates and this foreign influence began to wane. I remember well when Hanover, by the operation of the Salic law, fell away from the English sovereign by the death of William the Fourth. The crown of Hanover was borne in pomp at his funeral, and then the wicked Duke of Cumberland carried it with him to his petty dominion. It was the symbol of departing Hanoverianism, that nightmare of our Church. When Charles I. packed off "his Mounseers," the French priests who had tormented his life by meddling with everything in his house, from the scullery to his queen's bed-chamber, -he closed his despatch with the words, " And so the Devil go with them." I cannot adopt such language in the imperative mood; but indicatively, I think much evil went with the Normans, though, as they left

1 See Note V".

King John, there was sure to be no particular need of any other personal attention to mischief-making. By strong reaction, the Anglican spirit revived; and what Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the King to illustrate his lucid intervals, began to be indeed the rising spirit of the Church and people. To the papal legate, he is made to say:

"Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name

So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous

To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.

Tell him this tale; and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more, that no Italian priest

Shall tithe or toll in our dominions. . . .
Though you and all the kings of Christendom
Are led so grossly by this meddling priest,
Dreading the curse that money may buy out,
And by the merit of vile gold, dross, dust,
Purchase corrupted pardon of a man,
Who in that sale sells pardon from himself,
Yet I alone, alone do me oppose

Against the Pope, and count his friends my foes."

Shakespeare makes no mistake in putting this ambiguously into the mouth of "England," at the crisis which, in spite of the Pope and the King together, gave us the Magna Charta.

8. ARCHBISHOP LANGTON.

The best thing Innocent ever did was done by mistake; for he made Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury. To do this he set aside all laws, human and divine, annulling the King's appointment and the election at Canterbury; so that this best gift to the Church of England came by one of his worst acts of iniquity. He had known Lang

ton in Paris, where they were youths together, and hoped his old friend would prove the tool of his further aggressions. In this, happily, he was mistaken. However, for a time the mischief makes head. John would not accept Langton, and the whole kingdom wakes up to a sense of its enslavement, when it finds itself subjected to a papal interdict. "As for sermons," says the witty Fuller, "laziness and ignorance had long before interdicted them; but now no prayers, no mass, no singing of service." Millions of simple souls were thus made to suffer loss of all the means of grace; no church bells rung, church doors were shut: no sacraments could be ministered save in special cases to the dying; none could be married; none could have Christian burial. Corpses were thrown into ditches without prayers, nor could Langton's intercession for his people prevail with the pontiff to have service once a week in parish churches. Even "the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel," but here was the sole shepherd of Christ's sheep on earth far more cruel than they. The King had offended him: he takes from a whole unoffending people the means of salvation. For a whole year this reign of terror went on. The English nation, panic-stricken, began to feel where they were, and "from what height fallen." But Innocent had lately excommunicated the Roman Emperor, and now he absolved all subjects from allegiance to King John, excommunicated him by name, and gave to any invader, with absolution from all his sins, a license to conquer England and make it a dependency of some foreign crown. Five years

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