# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 01/Book 5/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV.
THE CATHOLIC PARTY.
The Catholic Church is the oldest, and in numbers still the most powerful of all Christian organizations. It grew as the Christian spirit extended among the ruins of the old world, by the might of the truth borne in its bosom overpowering the old worship, the artifice of priests, the selfishness of the affluent, the might of the strong, the cherished forms of a thousand years, the impotent armies of purple kings. It rose from small beginnings. No one knows who first brought Christianity to Rome; nor who planted the seed of that hierarchic power which soon became a tree, and at length a whole forest, stretching to the world's end, enfolding chapels for the pious, and dens for robbers. The practical spirit of old Rome came into the Church. Its power grew as Christian freedom declined. The mantle of that giant genius, which made the seven-hilled city conqueror of the world; the belt of power which girt the loins of her mighty men, Fabius, Regulus, ​Cicero, Cæsar, passed to the Christian bishops, as that genius fled from the earth, howling over his crumbled work. The spirit of those ancient heroes came into the Church; their practical skill; their obstinate endurance; their power of speech with words like battles; their lust of power; their resolution which nothing could overturn, or satisfy. The Greek Christians were philosophic, literary; they could sling stones at a hair's-breadth. In the early times they had all the advantage of position; “the chairs of the apostles;” the Christian Scriptures written in their tongue. Theirs were the great names of the first centuries, Polycarp, Justin, the Clements, Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius, Basil, the Gregories, Chrysostom. But the Latin Church had the practical skill, the soul to dare, and the arm to execute: its power therefore advanced step by step. Its chiefs were dexterous men, with the coolness of Cæsar, and the zeal of Hannibal. Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, would have been powerful men anywhere—in the court of Sardanapalus, or a college of Jesuits. They brought the world into the Church. ’Twas the world's gain, but the Church's loss. The Emperor soon learned to stoop his conquering eagles to the spiritual power, which shook the capital. The Church held divided sway with him. The spiritual sceptre was wrested from his hands. Constantine fled to Byzantium as much to escape the Latin clergy as to defend himself from the warriors of the North.
Now the Catholic Church held to the first truths of Religion and of Christianity, as before shown. Its peculiar and distinctive doctrine was this, that God still acts upon and inspires mankind, being in some measure immanent therein. This doctrine is broad enough to cover the world, powerful enough to annihilate the arrogance of any Church. But the Roman party limited this doctrine by adding, that God did not act by a natural law, directly on the mind and conscience, heart and soul, of each man, who sought faithfully to approach Him, but acted miracu​lously, through the organization of the Church on its members and no others; and on them, not because they were men, but instruments of the Church; not in proportion to a man's gifts, or the use of his gifts, but as he stood high or low in the Church. The humblest priest had a little inspiration, enough to work the greatest of miracles; the bishop had more; the Pope, as head of the Church, must be infallibly inspired, so that he could neither act wrong, think wrong, nor feel wrong.
The Absolute Religion and Morality necessarily sets out from the absolute source, the spirit of God in the soul revealing truth. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, starts from a finite source, the limited work of inspired men, namely, the Traditional Word preserved in Scripture and the unscriptural tradition, both written and not written. But then, laying down this indisputable truth, that a book must be interpreted by the same spirit in which it is written, and therefore that a book written by miraculous and superhuman inspiration can be understood only by men inspired in a similar way, and limiting the requisite inspiration to itself, it assumed the office of sole interpreter of the Scriptures; refused the Bible to the laymen, because they, as uninspired, could not understand it, and gave them only its own interpretation. Thus it attempted to mediate between mankind and the Bible.
Then again, relying on the unscriptural tradition preserved in the Fathers, the Councils, the organization and memory of the Church, it makes this of the same authority as the Scriptures themselves, and so claims divine sanction for doctrines which are neither countenanced by “human Reason,” as true, nor “divine Revelation,” as contained in the Bible. This is a point of great importance, as it will presently appear.
Now the Catholic Church was logically consistent with itself in both these pretensions. Each individual Church, at first, received what Scripture it saw fit, and interpreted the Word as well as it could. Next the synods decreed for the mass of Churches both the canon of Scripture and the doctrine it contained. The Catholic Church continued to exercise these privileges. Then again, taking the common notion, the Church had a logical and speculative basis for its claim to inspiration, though certainly none in ​point of fact. If God miraculously inspired Jesus to create a new religion, Peter, Paul, and John to preach it, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke to record the words and works of Christ and of the Christians, when did the miraculous inspiration cease? With the Apostles, or their successors; the direct, or the remote? Did it cease at all? It did not appear. Besides, how could the inspired works be interpreted except by men continually inspired; how could the Church, founded and built by miraculous action, be preserved by the ordinary use of man's powers? Were Jude and James inspired and Clement and Ambrose left with no open vision? Such a conclusion could not come from a comparison of their works. Did not Jesus promise to be with his Church to the end of the world? Here was the warrant for the assumptions of the Catholic party. So, with logical consistency, it claimed a perpetual, miraculous, and exclusive inspiration, on just as good ground as it allowed the claim of earlier men to the same inspiration; it made Tradition the master over the soul, on just the same pretension that the Bible is made the only certain rule of faith and practice. As the only interpreter of Scripture, the exclusive keeper of tradition, as the vicar of God, and alone inspired by Him, it stood between man on the one side, and the Bible, Antiquity, and God, on the other side. The Church was sacred, for God was immanent therein; the world profane, deserted of Deity.
The Church admits three sources of moral and religious truth, namely:—
1. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament and Apocrypha. It declares these are good and wise, but ambiguous and obscure, and by themselves alone incomplete, not containing the whole of the doctrine, and requiring an inspired expositor to set forth their contents.
2. The unscriptural Tradition, oral and written. This is needed to supply what is left wanting through the imperfection of Scripture, and to teach the more recondite doctrines of Christianity, such as the Trinity, Redemption, the Authority of the Church, Purgatory, Intercession, the use of Confession, Penance, and the like, and also to explain the Scriptures themselves. But Tradition also is imperfect, ambiguous, full of apparent contradictions, and ​impossible for the laity to understand, except through the inspired class, who alone could reconcile its several parts.
3. The direct Inspiration of God acting on the official members of the Church; that is, on its councils, priests, and above all on its infallible head.
The Church restricted direct inspiration to itself, and even within its walls the action of God was limited, for if an individual of the clerical order taught what was hostile to the doctrine of the Church, or not contained therein, his inspiration was referred to the Devil, not God, and the man burned, not canonized. Thus inspiration was subjected to a very severe process of verification even within the Church itself. It forbids mankind to trust Reason, Conscience, and the religious Element; to approach God through these, and get truth at first hand, as Moses, Jesus, and the other great men of antiquity had done. For this the layman must depend on the clergy, and the clergyman must depend on the whole Church, represented by the Fathers or Councils, and idealized in its head. Thus the Church was the judge of the doctrine and the practice; invested with the Keys of Heaven and Hell; with power to bind and loose, remit sins, or retain them, and authority to demand absolute submission from the world, or punish with fagots and hell men who would not believe as the Church commanded. In this way it would control private inspiration. But not to leave the heretics hopeless, or drive them to violence, it assumes the right to restore them, and pardon their sins, on condition of submission and penance. The Saviour, the Martyrs, the Saints, had not only expiated their own sins, but performed works of supererogation, and so established a sinking fund to liquidate the sins of the world. This deposit was at the disposal of the Church, who could therewith, aided by the intercession of the beatified spirits, purchase the salvation of a penitent heretic, though his sins were as crimson.
The Church assumed mastery over all souls. The individual was nothing; the Church was all. Its power stood on a miraculous basis; its authority was derived from God. The humblest priests, in celebrating the mass, performed a miracle greater than all the wonders of Jesus, for he only changed water into wine, and fed five thousand men with live loaves; but the priest, by a single ​word, changed bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Almighty God. It styles itself God's viceregent on earth, and as Jesus was a temporary and partial incarnation of the deity, so itself is a perfect and eternal incarnation thereof. Thus the Christian Church became a Theocracy. It was far more consistent than the Jewish Theocracy, for that allowed private inspiration, and therefore was perpetually troubled by the race of prophets, who never allowed the priests their own way, but cried out with most rousing indignation against the Levites and their followers, and refused to be put down. Besides, the Jewish Theocracy limited infallibility to God and the Law, which was to be made known to all, and though inspired could be easily understood by the simple son of Israel: it never claimed that for the Priesthood.
Now there are but two scales in the balance of power: the Individual who is ruled, and the Institution that governs, here represented by the Church. Just as the one scale rises, the other falls. The spiritual freedom of the individual in the Church is contained in an angle too small to be measurable. Did men revolt from this iron rule? There was the alternative of eternal damnation, for all men were born depraved, exposed to the wrath of God; their only chance of avoiding hell was to escape through the doors of the Church. Thus men were morally compelled to submit for the sake of its “redemption.” Did they throw themselves on the mercy of the Holy Ghost, penitent for their disobedience of the Church? They were told that mercy was at the Church's disposal. Did they make the appeal to Scripture, and say, as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive; that he had expiated all their sins? The Church told them their exegesis of the passage was wrong, for Christ only expiated their inherited sin, not the actual sins they had committed, and for which they must smart in hell, atone for in purgatory, or get pardoned by submitting to the vicar of God, and going through the rites, forms, fasts, and penances he should prescribe, and thus purchase a share of the redemption which Christ and the saints by their works of supererogation had provided to meet the case. This doctrine was taught in good faith, and in good faith received.
I. The Merits of the Catholic Church.
As we look back upon the history of the Church and see the striking unity of that institution, we naturally suppose its chiefs had a regular plan; but such was not the fact. The peculiar merit of the Catholic Church consists in its assertion of the truth, that God still inspires mankind as much as ever; that He has not exhausted himself in the creation of a Moses, or a Jesus, the Law, or the Gospel, but is present and active in spirit as in space: admitting this truth, so deep, so vital to the race—a truth preserved in the religions of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and above all in the Jewish faith—clothing itself with all the authority of ancient days; the word of God in its hands, both tradition and Scripture; believing it had God's infallible and exclusive inspiration at its heart, for such no doubt was the real belief, and actually, through its Christian character, combining in itself the best interests of mankind, no wonder it prevailed. Its countenance became as lightning. It stood and measured the earth. It drove asunder the nations. It went forth in the mingling tides of civilized corruption and barbarian ferocity, for the salvation of the people,—conquering and to conquer; its brightness as the light.
It separated the spiritual from the temporal power, which had been more or less united in the theocracies of India, Egypt, and Judea, and which can only be united to the lasting detriment of mankind. This was a great merit in the Church; one that cannot be appreciated in our days, for we have not felt the evil it aimed to cure. The Church, in theory, stood on a basis purely moral; it rose in spite of the State; in the midst of its persecutions. At first it shunned all temporal affairs, and never allowed a temporal power to be superior to itself. The department of political action belonged to the State; that of intellectual and religious action, the stablest and strongest of power,—to the ​Church. Hence its care of education; hence the influence it exerted on literature. We read the letters of Ambrose and Augustine and find a spirit all unknown to former times. Tertullian could oppose the whole might of the State with his pen. That fierce African did not hesitate to exhibit the crimes of the nation. The Apologetists assume a tone of spiritual authority surprising in that age.
The Church set apart a speculative class, distinct from all others, including the most cultivated men of their times. It provided a special education for this class, one most admirably adapted, in many points, for the work they were to do. Piety and genius found here an asylum, a school, and a broad arena. Thus it had a troop of superior minds, educated and pious men, who could not absorb the political power, as the sacerdotal class of India, Egypt, and Judea had done; who could not be indifferent to the social and moral condition of mankind, as the priesthood had been in Greece and Rome. Theoretically, they were free from the despotism of one, and the indifference of the other. The public virtue was their peculiar charge.
Ancient Rome was the city of organizations, and practical rules. Nowhere was the Individual so thoroughly subordinated to the State. War, Science, and Lust, of old time, had here incarnated themselves. The same practical spirit organized the Church, with its Dictator, its Senate, and its Legions. The discipline of the clerical class, their union, zeal, and commanding skill, gave them the solidity of the Phalanx, and the celerity of the Legion. The Church prevailed as much by its organization as its doctrine. What could a band of loose-girt apostles, each warring on his own account, avail against the refuge of Lies, where Strength and Sin had intrenched themselves, and sworn never to yield? An organized Church was demanded by the necessities of the time; an association of soldiers called for an army of saints. A sensual people required forms, the Church gave them; superstitious rites, divination, processions, images, the Church-obdurate as steel when occasion demands, but pliant as molten metal ​when yielding is required—the Church allowed all this. Its form grew out of the wants of the time and place.
Was there no danger that the priesthood, thus able and thus organized, should become ambitious of wealth and power? The greatest danger that fathers should seek to perpetuate authority for their children. But this class of men, cut off from posterity by the prohibition of marriage, lived in the midst of ancient and feudal institutions, where all depended on birth; where descent from a successful pirate, or some desperate freebooter, hard-handed and hard-hearted, who harried village after village, secured a man elevation, political power, and wealth; the clergy were cut off from the most powerful of all inducements to accumulate authority. In that long period from Alaric to Columbus, when the Church had ample revenues; the most able and cultivated men in her ranks, so thoroughly disciplined; the awful power over the souls of men, far more formidable than bayonets skilfully plied; with an acknowledged claim to miraculous inspiration and divine authority, were it not for the celibacy of the Christian priesthood—damnable institution, and pregnant with mischief as it was—we should have had a sacerdotal caste, the Levites of Christianity, whose little finger would have been thicker than the loins of all former Levites; who would have flayed men with scorpions, where the priestly despots of Egypt and India only touched them with a feather, and the dawn of a better day must have been deferred for thousands of years. The world is managed wiser than some men fancy. “Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee, and the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain,” said an old writer. The remedy of inveterate evils is attended with sore pangs. These wretched priests of the middle ages bore a burden, and did a service for us, which we are slow to confess.
The Church, reacting against the sensuality and excessive publicity of the heathen world, in its establishment of convents and monasteries, opened asylums for delicate spirits that could not bear the rage of savage life; afforded a hospital for men sick of the fever of the world, worn-out and shattered in the storms of State, who craved a little rest for charity's sweet sake, before they went where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. ​Among the sensual the Saint is always an Anchorite; Religion gets as far as possible from the world. Rude men require obvious forms and sensible shocks to their roughness. The very place where the Monks prayed and the Nuns sang, was sacred from the ruthless robber. As he drew near it, the tiger was tame within him; the mailed warrior kissed the ground, and Religion awoke for the moment in his heart. The fear of hell, and reverence for the consecrated spot, chained up the devil for the time.
Then the Church had a most diffusive spirit; it would Christianize as fast as the State would conquer; its missionaries were found in the courts of barbarian monarchs, in the caves and dens of the savage, diffusing their doctrine and singing their hymns. Creating an organization the most perfect the world ever saw; with a policy wiser than any monarch had dreamed of, and which grew more perfect with the silent accretions of time; with address to allure the ambitious to its high places, and so turn all their energy into its deep wide channel; with mysteries to charm the philosophic, and fill the fancy of the rude; with practical doctrines for earnest workers, and subtle questions, always skilfully left open for men of acute discernment; with rites and ceremonies that addressed every sense, rousing the mind like a Grecian drama, and promising a participation with God through the sacrament; with wisdom enough to bring men really filled with Religion into its ranks; with good sense and good taste to employ all the talent of the times in the music, the statues, the paintings, the architecture of the temple, thus consecrating all the powers of man to man's noblest work; with so much of Christian truth as the world in its wickedness could not forget,—no wonder the Church spread wide her influence; sat like a queen among the nations, saying to one GO, and it went, to another COME, and it came.
Then, again, its character, in theory, was kindly and humane. It softened the asperity of secular wars; forbid them in its sacred seasons; established its Truce of God, and gave a chance for rage to abate. Against the King, it espoused the cause of the People. Coming in the name “despised and rejected of men,” “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;” of a man born in an ox's crib, ​at his best estate not having where to lay his head; who died at the hangman's hand, but who was at last seated at the right hand of God, and in his low estate was deemed God in humiliation come down into the flesh, to take its humblest form, and show He was no respecter of persons,—the Church did not fail to espouse the cause of the people, with whom Christianity found its first adherents, its apostles, and defenders. With somewhat in its worst days of the spirit of him who gave his life a ransom for many, with much of it really active in its best days, and its theory at all times, the Church stood up, for long ages, the only bulwark of freedom; the last hope of man struggling but sinking as the whelming waters of barbarism whirled him round and round. It came to the Baron, haughty of soul, and bloody of hand, who sat in his clifftower, a hungry giant; who broke the poor into fragments, ground them to powder, and spurned them like dust from his foot; it came between him and the captive, the serf, the slave, the defenceless maiden, and stayed the insatiate hand. Its curse blasted as lightning. Even in feudal times, it knew no distinction of birth; all were “conceived in sin,” “shapen in iniquity,” alike the peasant and the peer. The distinction of birth, station, was apparent, not real. Yet were all alike children of God, who judged the heart, and knew no man's person; all heirs of Heaven, for whom prophets and apostles had uplifted their voice; yes, for whom God had worn this weary, wasting weed of flesh, and died a culprit's death. Then while nothing but the accident of distinguished birth, or the possession of animal fierceness, could save a man from the collar of the thrall, the Church took to her bosom all who gave signs of talent and piety; sheltered them in her monasteries; ordained them as her priests; welcomed them to the chair of St Peter; and men who from birth would have been companions of the Galilean fisherman, sat on the spiritual throne of the world, and governed with a majesty which Cæsar might envy, but could not equal. Priests came up from no Levitical stock, but the children of captives and bondmen as well as prince and peer. When northern barbarism swept over the ancient world; when temple and tower went to the ground, and the culture of old time, its letters, science, arts, were borne ​off before the flood,—the Church stood up against the tide; shed oil on its wildest waves; cast the seed of truth on its waters, and as they gradually fell, saw the germ send up its shoot, which growing while men watch and while they sleep, after many days, bears its hundred-fold, a civilization better than the past, and institutions more beneficent and beautiful.
The influence of the Church is perhaps greater than even its friends maintain. It laid its hand on the poor and down-trodden; they were raised, fed, and comforted. It rejected, with loathing, from its coffers, wealth got by extortion and crime. It touched the shackles of the slave, and the serf arose disenthralled, the brother of the peer. It annihilated slavery, which Protestant cupidity would keep for ever. It touched the diadem of a wicked king, and it became a crown of thorns; the monarch's sceptre was a broken reed before the crosier of the Church. Its rod, like the wand of Moses, swallowed up all hostile rods. Like God himself, the Church gave, and took away, rendering no reason to man for its gifts or extortions. It sent missionaries to the east and the west, and carried the waters of baptism from the fountains of Nubia to the roaring Geysers of a Northern isle. It limited the power of kings; gave religious education to the people, which no ancient institution ever aimed to impart; kept on its sacred hearth the smouldering embers of Greek or Roman thought; cherished the last faint sparkles of that fire Prometheus brought from Gods more ancient far than Jove. It had ceremonies for the sensual; confessionals for the ​pious—needed and beautiful in their time—labours of love for the true-hearted; pictures and images to rouse devotion in the man of taste; temples whose aspiring turrets and sombre vaults filled the kneeling crowd with awe; it had doctrines for the wise; rebukes for the wicked; prayers for the reverent; hope for the holy, and blessings for the true. It sanctified the babe, newly-born and welcome; watched over marriage with a jealous eye; fostered good morals; helped men, even by its symbols, to partake the divine nature; smoothed the pillow of disease and death, giving the Soul wings, as it were, to welcome the death-angel, and gently, calmly, pass away. It assured masculine piety of its reward in Heaven; told the weak and wavering, that divine beings would help him, if faithful. In the honours of canonization, it promised the most lasting fame on earth; generations to come should call the good man a blessed saint, and his name never perish while the Christian year went round. Heroism of the Soul took the place of boldness in the Flesh. It did not, like Polytheism, deify warriors and statesmen—Attila, Theodosius, Clovis, their kingdom was of this world; but it canonized martyrs and saints, Polycarp, Justin, Ambrose, Paulinus, Bernard of Clairvaux.
Such were some of the excellences, theoretical or practical, of the Church. This hasty sketch does not allow more particular notice of them.
II. The Defects and Vices of the Catholic Party.
But the Church had vices, vast and awful to the thought. As its distinctive excellence was to proclaim the continuance of inspiration, so its sacramental sin was in limiting this inspiration to itself, thus setting bounds to the Spirit of God and the Soul of Man. Who shall say to the Infinite God, Hitherto shalt Thou come, but no further; Thou hast inspired Moses and Jesus, the Apostles, and the Church; well done! now rest from thy work, and speak no more, except as we prescribe? The Church did say it.
The wondrous mechanism of the Church and much of ​its power came from this false assumption, that it alone had the Word of God. So its organization was based on a lie, and required new lies to uphold, and prophets of lies to defend it. Its servants, the priests, became proud of spirit. The only keepers of Scripture and Tradition; the only recipients of inspiration, they forbid free inquiry as of no use; stifled Conscience as only leading men into trouble; and excommunicated Common Sense, who asked “terrible questions,” calling for the title-deeds of the Church. They went further, and forbid the bands between Reason and Religion; and when the parties insisted on the union, turned them both out of doors with a curse. The laity must not approach God, as the clergy; must only commune with Him “in one kind.” The Church forgot God grants inspiration to no one except on condition he conforms to the divine law, living pure and true, and grants it only in proportion to his gifts and his use thereof: so, relying on the office and “apostolical succession” for inspiration, the priests lived shameless and wicked lives, rivalling Sardanapalus and Domitian in their cruelty and sin. They forgot that God withholds inspiration from none that is faithful; so they stoned the prophets who rebuked their lies and published their sin; they shamefully entreated men whom God sent of his errands to these unworthy husbandmen. They became spiritual tyrants, forcing all men to utter the same creed, submit to the same rite, reverence the same symbol, and be holy in the same way.
In its zeal to separate the spiritual power from temporal hands it took what was not its own—power over men's bodies; and made laws for the State. In its haste to give preëminence to spiritual things, it made its offices a bribe, greater than the State could give. The honour of sainthood—what was the fame of king and conqueror to that? It promised the rewards of high clerical office, and even of canonization, to the most mercenary and cruel of men, whose touch was pollution. Its list of saints is full of knaves and despots. The State was taken into the Church,—a refractory member. The Flesh and the Devil were baptized; “took holy orders;” governed the Church in some cases, but were still the Flesh and the Devil, though ​called by a Christian name. That divine man, whose name is ploughed into the world, said, If a man smite the one cheek, turn the other; but if a man lifted his hand or his voice against the Church,—it blasted him with damnation and hell. Christ said his kingdom was not of this world; so said the Church at first, and Christians refused to war, to testify in the courts, to appear in the theatres, and foul their hands with the world's sin. But soon as there was an organized priesthood, to defend themselves from the tyranny of the State, to exercise authority over the souls of men, power on the earth became needed. One lie leads to many. What the Church first took in self-defence it afterwards clung to and increased, and was so taken up with its earthly kingdom, it quite forgot its patrimony in Heaven; so it played a double game, attempting to serve God, and keep on good terms with the Devil. But it was once said, “no man can serve two masters.” Unnatural, spiritual power could not be held without temporal authority to sustain it; so the Church took fleshly weapons for its carnal ends. Monks raised armies; Bishops led them; God was blasphemed by prayers to aid bloodshed. The Church sold her garment to buy a sword.
The Church was the exclusive vicar of God; she must have “the tonnage and poundage of all freespoken truth.” To accomplish this end and establish her dogmas, she slew men, beginning with Priscillian and “the six Gnostics,” in the fourth century, at Triers, and ending no one knows where, or when, or with whom. It had such zeal for the “unity of the faith,” that it put prophets in chains; asked the sons of God if they were “greater than Jacob.” It made Belief take the place of Life. It absolved men of their sins, past, present, and future. Emancipated the clergy from the secular law, thus giving them license to sin. It sold heaven to extortioners for a little gold, and built St Peter's with the spoil. It wrung ill-gotten gains out of tyrants on their death-bed; devoured the houses of widows and the weak; built its cathedrals out of the spoil ​of orphans, thus literally giving a stone when bread was asked for, as St Bernard honestly called it. It was greedy of gold and power, and at one time had well-nigh half the lands of England held in mortmain. It absolved men from oaths; broke marriages; told lies; forged charters and decretals; burned the philosophers; corrupted the classics; altered the words of the Fathers; changed the decisions of the Councils, and filled Europe with its falsehood. It has fought the most hideous of wars; evangelized nations with the sword; laid kingdoms under interdict to gratify its pride.
The Church boasts of its uniform doctrine, but it changes every age; of its peaceful spirit, but who fought the crusades, the wars of extermination in Switzerland, France, the Low Countries? To whom must we set down the ecclesiastical butchery that filled Europe with funeral piles? It quarrelled with the temporal power, and built up institutions of tyranny to suppress truth; kept the Bible to itself; made the Greek Testament a prohibited book; brought dead men's bones into the temples, for the living to worship, and worked lying wonders to confirm false doctrine. It loved the night of the Dark Ages, and clung to its old dogmas.
The Church came at length to be a colossus of crime, with a thin veil of hypocrisy drawn over its face, and that only. The vow of purity its children took, became a license for sin. The corruptest of courts was the court of the Pope. What reverence had the Archbishops for the doctrine of the Church? Cardinal Bembo bid Sadolet not read St Paul, it would spoil his taste. In early ages the Apostles were the devoutest of men; in later days their “successors” were steeped to the lips in crime. ​For centuries, the Church, like the Berserkers of northern romance, seemed to possess the soul and strength of each antagonist it slew. But its hour struck. The work it required ten centuries to mature, stood in its glory not one. Each transient institution has a truth, or it would not be; an error, or it would stand for ever. The truth opens men's eyes; they see the error and would reject it. Then comes the perpetual quarrel between the Old and the New. “Every battle of the warrior,” says an ancient prophet, “is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood;” but the battle of the Church was a devouring flame.
In the time of Boniface VIII., or about the end of the fourteenth century, an eye that read the signs of the times, and saw the cloud and the star below the horizon, could have foretold the downfal of the Church. Its brightest hour was in the day of Innocent III. A wise Providence governs the affairs of men, and never suffers the leaf to fall till the swelling bud crowds it off. Out of the ashes of the old institution there springs up a new being, soon as the world can give it place. No institution is normal and ultimate. It has but its day, and never lasts too long nor dies too soon. Judaism and Heathenism nursed and swaddled mankind for Christianity, which came in the fulness of time. The Catholic Church rocked the cradle of mankind. In due season, like a jealous nurse, assiduous and meddlesome, but grown ill-tempered with age and disgust of new things, she yields up with reluctance her rebellious charge, whose vagaries her frowns and stripes will not restrain; whose struggling weight, her withered arms are impotent to bear; whose aspiring soul her anicular and maudlin wit cannot understand. Her promise will not coax; nor her baubles bribe; nor her curses affright him more. The stripling child will walk alone.
The Protestant “Reformation” came from the action of Ideas which had not justice done them in the Catholic Church, just as the Christian Reformation from Ideas not sufficiently represented in Judaism and Heathenism. It did not, more than the other, come all at once. There was “Lutheranism” before Luther, as Christianity before ​Christ. Slowly the ages prepared for both, for each was a point in the development of man. The Church educated men to see her faults; gave them weapons to attack her. The Reformation was long a gathering in the bosom of the Church itself. Athanasius had his Arius to contend with. There was always some Paul of Samosata, some Theodore of Mopsuestia, some Peter of Bruis, or Henry of Lausanne, to trouble the church. In the twelfth century it took all the miracles of Clairvaux and the leanness of its Abbot, to put down the heretics, who would come up again. Was there not Waldo in France, Arnold of Brescia in the papal state, John Huss at Constance, and Wicliff in England, and all of them at no great distance of time? Faustus and Gutenberg did more for the Reformation than the Diet at Worms. Luther, and Zwingle, and Calvin, and the host of great men who grew in their shadow, were only the heralds that blew the trumpet of the Reformation; its prize-fighters, not directors of the movement. It was the God of nations that moved the world's heart. The Spirit only culminated in Luther and his friends. It burned in holy souls in Bohemia and Languedoc, and the valleys of the Pyrenees, and the mountains of Tyrol; it breathed in lofty minds at Paris, Saxony, Padua, London, Rome itself. Every learned Greek the Turks frighted from Constantinople, or Italian wealth lured to the queen of cities; every manuscript of the Classics, the Fathers, the Councils, the Scriptures which found deliverance from the moles and the bats; every improvement in law, science, and art; every discovery in Alchemy or Astrology; every invention from the mariner's compass to monk Schwartz's gunpowder, was an agent of the Reformation. We find Reformers, from the time of Marcion to John Wessel. Some tried, as in the time of Jesus, to put new wine in old bottles, but losing both, looked round for new things. That long train of Mystics, from Dionysius the Areopagite to Meister Eckart of Strasburg, prepared for the work which Luther built up with manly shouting.
To sum up the claim of this party; the Catholic Church ​is based on the assumption that God inspires that Church, miraculously and exclusively. This assumption is false. Though the oldest organization in the world, it has no right over the soul of man.
* ↑ See the external causes of the superiority of the Roman Church, in Rehm, Geschichte des Mittelalters, Vol. I. p. 516, et seq. Constantine established public worship on Fridays and Sundays in his army, appointing Priests and Deacons, and providing a Tent for religious purposes in every Numerus. Sozomen, H. E. I. C. 8.
* ↑ See, who will, Rehm, ubi sup. Vol. II. p. 541, et seq., and Vol. III. p. 1, et seq., for the political aspect of the Roman Church; Guizot, Histoire de la Civilization, &c., Leçon II.-VI. X.-XII.; Hallam, State of Europe during the Middle Ages, ch. vii., and the admirably candid remarks thereon in his Supplementary notes. Gibbon, ubi sup. ch. xv. xvi. xviii. xxi. Comte, ubi sup. Vol. V., Leçon LIV. LV., who in some respects surpasses all his predecessors.
* ↑ See this point ably though briefly treated in Schlosser, ubi sup. Vol. III. Pt. iii. p. 102–151, and iv. p. 25-75. See also Pt. ii. p. 167, et seq.
* ↑ See Guizot and Comte.
* ↑ To illustrate this point see, instar omnium, the works of St Bernard.
* ↑ See, in Comte, ubi sup. Vol. V. p. 407, et seq., some Reflections on the milder Character of Slavery in Catholic America, compared with Slavery in Protestant America; and yet Comte is hardly a Theist. For the influence of Christianity on Slavery, see the accounts of Paulinus, Deogratias, Patiens, and Synesius, in Schlosser, Vol. III. Part III. p. 284, et seq. Gibbon, in his heartless way, passes over with scarce a notice, the beautiful Christianity brought into Rome, and its influence on the condition of slaves. Hallam makes but a one-sided appreciation of the Catholic church, and it seems to me has not done justice to its merits. But see what ample amends he makes in the supplementary notes. Bp England, Letters to Hon. John Forsyth, Balt. 1844, labours to show that the Catholic church has been the uncompromising Friend of Slavery. He certainly makes out a strong case, though not without a little suppression of the Truth, as it seems to me.
* ↑ See an early instance of the collision between the spiritual and temporal power in the case of Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, and the Queen Justina, in Fleury, ubi sup. Liv. XVIII. Chap. 32, et seq., and also in Gibbon, Chap. XXVII.
* ↑ Canonization among the Catholics seems to come from the same root with the Apotheosis of the Polytheists. Both, no doubt, exerted an influence on men who asked a recompense for being good and religious.
* ↑ See Hallam, ubi suprà, Chap. VII.
* ↑ See the story, in Sulpitius Severus, Hist. Sac. Lib. II. ch. 50, 51. Fleury, ubi suprà, Liv. XVII. ch. 56, 57, and XVIII. ch. 29, 30. The Pope, St Leo, commended the action, but Gregory of Tours and Ambrose of Milan condemned it. Idacius and Ithacius, the two bishops who caused the execution, were expelled from their office by the popular indignation. See Jerome, Illust. Virorum, C. 122, et seq.
* ↑ Dante touchingly complains of the evil which Constantine brought on the church by the gifts which the first wealthy Pope received of him! Inferno, XIX, 115, et seq.
* ↑ See instances of this forgery in Hallam, ubi sup. Ch. VII. p. 391, et seq. et al., ed. Paris; Daillé, on the right Use of the Fathers, &c., London, 1841, passim.; Middleton, ubi suprà. But see, on the side of the Church, Bossuet, Defense de la Tradition et des Saints Peres, and Manzoni, Osservazioni sulla Morale Cattolica, Firenze, 1835.
* ↑ See Hallam, ubi sup. Ch. VII. De Potter loves to dwell on the faults of the church, for which there is sufficient opportunity; Neander, as much too lenient, errs on the other side. Much information in a popular form may be found in M. Roux-Ferrand, Histoire des Progrès de la Civilization en Europe, 6 vols. 8vo, Paris, 1833–1841, Vol. I. II., Leçons X.-XII., Vol. III. ch. iv.-vi., Vol. IV. ch. v.-vii., et al., and Mrs Child's Religious Ideas, N. Y. 1855, Vols. II. and III.
* ↑ Ranke in his Die römischen Päbste, &c. im. 16, und 17 Jahrhundert, gives abundant proof of this reformatory movement in the church itself. See particularly Vol. I. B. II., but the tale of ecclesiastical crime is even more distinctly told.
* ↑ See, who will, the Roman doctrine thoroughly attacked in the ponderous folio of Joh. Gerhard, Confessio Catholica, &c; &c., Frankfort, 1679; and the superficial and somewhat one-sided Essay of M. Bouvet, Du Catholicisme, du Protestantisme, et de la Philosophie en France, Paris, 1840. But see the attack of Simmichius on Protestantism, Confessionistarum Goliathismus profligatus, &c. &c., Louvan, 1667. Many of the most important claims of the Catholic Church, that of Supremacy in temporal affairs, Infallibility in spiritual matters, and the Right to enforce doctrines, are abandoned by an able Catholic writer, J. H. Von Wessenberg, the late bishop of Constance. See his Die grossen Kirchenversammlungen des 15ten und 16ten Jahrhundert, Const. 1840, 4 vols. 8to.