the false prophet, Rome was boldly and victoriously striking westward, and winning the barbarian tribes of Europe to the religion of the cross. § 58. The Latin Patriarch. These advantages of the patriarch of Rome over the patri- arch of Constantinople are at the same time the leading causes of the rise of the papacy, which we nnist now more closely pursue. The papacy is undeniably the result of a long process of history. Centuries were employed in building it, and centu- ries have already been engaged upon its partial destruction. Lust of honor and of power, and even open fraud,' have con- tributed to its development ; for human nature lies hidden under episcopal robes, with its steadfast inclination to abuse the powder intrusted to it ; and the greater the power, the ' Recall the interjiolations of papistic passages in the works of Cyprian ; the Ro- man enlargement of the sixth canon of Nice ; the citation of the Sardican canon ^nder the name and the authority of the Nicene council ; and the later notorious pseudo-Isidorian decretals. The popes, to be sure, were not the original authors of these falsifications, but they used them freely and repeatedly for their purposes. § 58. THE LATIN PATKIAECH. 289 stronger is the temptation, and the worse the abuse. But be- hind and above these human impulses hiy the needs of the church and the plans of Providence, and these are the proper basis for explaining the rise, as well as the subsequent decay, of the papal dominion over the countries and nations of Europe. That Providence which moves the helm of the history of Avorld and church according to an eternal plan, not only pre- pares in silence and in a secrecy unknown even to themselves the suitable persons for a given work, but also lays in the depths of the past the foundations of mighty institutions, that they may appear thoroughly furnished as soon as the time may de- mand them. Tlius the origin and gradual growth of the Latin patriarchate at Rome looked forward to the middle age, and formed part of the necessary external outfit of the church for her disciplinary mission among the heathen barbarians. The vigorous hordes who destroyed the West-Roman empire were to be themselves built upon the ruins of the old civilization, and trained by an awe-inspiring ecclesiastical authority and a firm hierarchical organization, to Christianity and freedom, till, having come of age, they should need the legal school- master no longer, and should cast away his cords from them. The Catholic hierarchy, with its pyramid-like culmination in the papacy, served among the Romanic and Germanic peoples, until the time of the Reformation, a purpose similar to that of the Jewish theocracy and the old Roman empire respectively in the inward and outward preparation for Christianity. The full exhibition of this pedagogic purpose belongs to the history of the middle age ; but the foundation for it we find already being laid