empire, a document appeared about this time called 'The Donation of Constantine;' the most stupendous of all mediæval forgeries; ' 'a portentous falsehood,' acknowledged by all educated Romanists in these days to be a falsehood, but which 'commanded for seven centuries the unquestioning belief of mankind.' It tells how Constantine the Great, cured of his leprosy by the prayers of Sylvester, resolved, on the fourth day from his baptism,' to remove to Constantinople, lest his presence should impede the free exercise of the spiritual power; to hand over to the Pope the Empire of the West, and to allow him to inhabit the Lateran Palace, to wear the diadem, the collar, the purple cloak, to carry the sceptre, and to be attended by a body of chamberlains.''

Thus the city of Rome became again-what she had been of old, but then for three hundred years had ceased to bethe head and centre of the Holy Roman Empire. By the extension of her citizenship to all her subjects, heathen Rome had become the common home, and, figuratively, even the local dwelling-place, of the civilised races of man. By the theology of the time Christian Rome had been made the mystical type of humanity, the one flock of the faithful scattered over the whole earth, the Holy City whither, as to the temple on Moriah, all the Israel of God should come up to worship. . . . She is, like Jerusalem of old, the mother of us all.' The famous simile of Gregory the Seventh is that which best describes the Empire and the Popedom. They were indeed the two lights in the firmament of the militant Church,' the lights which illumined and ruled the Middle Ages. And as moonlight is to sunlight, so was the Empire to the Papacy. The rays of the one were borrowed, feeble, often interrupted; the other shone with an unquenchable brilliance that was all her own.' 3

2

Such was the Roman Hierarchy during the Middle Ages. Like all human institutions it was a mixture of good and 3 Ibid. p. 376.

1 Bryce, p. 100.

2 Ibid. p. 298.

evil. Who shall say which predominated? It was a fearful corruption by the wickedness of man of a Divine institution, a spiritual kingdom, a society of men, 'in this world, but not of it,' founded by Christ and organised by His Apostles. Yet it stemmed many a torrent of evil, was the channel by which a thousand blessings were carried down to our own times, and was the messenger of pardon and peace to millions of sin-stricken hearts. By the Empire of the Middle Ages was preserved the feeling of a brotherhood of mankind, a commonwealth of the whole world, whose sublime unity transcended every minor distinction."1 It is in great

measure due to Rome and to the Roman Empire of the Middle Ages that the bonds of national union are on the whole stronger and nobler than they were ever before.' 2 And who has been able to describe the Papacy in the power it once wielded over the hearts and imaginations of men? Those persons, if such there still be, who see in it nothing but a gigantic upas tree of fraud and superstition, planted and reared by the enemy of mankind, are hardly farther from entering into the mystery of its being than the complacent political philosopher, who explains in neat phrases the process of its growth, analyses it as a clever piece of mechanism, enumerates and measures the interests it appeals to, and gives, in conclusion, a sort of tabular view of its results for good and for evil.' 3

It is better described in the language of Scripture as the 'faithful city become an harlot;' the holy city trodden under foot by the Gentiles;' the great drag-net of God gathering within its meshes the good and the bad alike in the stormy sea of this wicked world, and irresistibly drawing them all to the shores of the Eternal Judgment.

Before going on to another period we must remember that during the Middle Ages the power of the Christian Church was falling as rapidly in the East as it was rising 3 Ibid. p. 395.

Bryce, p. 391.

2 Ibid. p. 393.

in the West. In A.D. 1453 the fall of Constantinople, the capital and last stronghold of the Eastern Empire, filled Roman Christendom with terror and consternation. And indeed during the whole of our third period, and that which we next describe, there have been times when it has seemed an open question whether the Crescent or the Cross should finally prevail even in the Western Empire. We have lived not only to witness the fall of the Pope's temporal sovereignty; but also to see the Turkish power, which hung so long as a dark cloud over Roman Christendom, reduced to insignificance, and apparently on the eve of falling into the hands of one who may be said in a manner to represent the Byzantine Cæsars, the imperial head of Eastern Christendom. We have lived to see the Pope and the Sultan, once the two great powers of the world, the one powerless in his own Capital, the other trembling for its safety. And it is a remarkable sign of our times that the Pope has shown more sympathy with the falling Turkish than with the rising Christian power. He could not, indeed, have a more formidable rival than a Christian Patriarch at Constantinople under the protection of a Christian Emperor.

4. Our fourth period begins with the Reformation and reaches down to the era of the French Revolution of 1789.

It was impossible to avoid mentioning by anticipation many of the phenomena of this period in analysing the events. of its predecessor. The Reformation forms a strongly marked epoch in the history of Roman Christendom. And yet, as regards the connection of the Christian Church with the rulers of this world, it did not, at any rate at first, bring about any very radical change.

What were the causes of the Reformation ? Chiefly these two: the increase of knowledge; and the luxury, worldliness, immorality, avarice, and supineness of the Church. To a religious mind in these days there can scarcely be found a sadder page in the history of the world than that which

records the so-called Reformation of the Church. Never was there such a noble opportunity so ignobly thrown away by ambitious prelates and worldly-minded princes.

It is all very well to talk about the glorious Reformation. It ought to have been a glorious work. It might have been a glorious work, but for the blindness and obstinacy of Rome and the jealousy of princes. Had the matter been left in the hands of such men as Contarini and Pole on the Roman side, and Melanchthon and Bucer on the other, we might have had a Reformation of the Church without any disruption; a house strong and united, instead of one divided against itself, and therefore ready to fall, exposed to the attacks of the infidel on every side. For even after the great schism had begun, it might have been healed at Ratisbon A.D. 1541, but for the violence of Luther, the obstinacy of the Pope, and the jealous fears of France. But the schism was not healed, and the result has been a hopelessly divided Christendom.

The prominent historical phenomenon of this period, therefore, in connection with our subject, is the disintegration of the Hierarchy; the distribution and the slackening, but not yet the rupture, of the bands uniting Church and State in Roman Christendom. It cannot be called an irreligious period. On the contrary, as compared with the preceding centuries, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries may be called the ages of intense faith. Neither can we say that ecclesiastical authority was materially weakened, at any rate during the earlier part of this period. The struggle since the Reformation has been between one kind, or rather many kinds, of ecclesiastical authority on the one side, and the authority of Rome on the other. The idea of tolerance, and the substitution of argument and persuasion for anathema, involving temporal punishments or civil disabilities, had as yet entered few minds, either of Christian princes or of the rulers of the Reformed Church or of Protestant sects.

1 See Ranke's History of the Popes, vol. i. pp. 163–165.

For a considerable time after the Reformation any sect which got the upper hand was willing to use the civil power to put down all opponents. The Roman Church and many other Christian communities would doubtless do so to some extent even now if they had the opportunity.

The great battle indeed of this period was not fought out with spiritual weapons only, but with the carnal sword. It was a period of fierce wars, of which the defence of Protestantism or Romanism formed the pretext, if not the real motive cause.

Neither did the Reformation diminish the power of Rome or her hold over the minds of men and the counsels of princes, so much as seemed likely at the first. Her tenacity of life is powerfully described by Lord Macaulay in his wellknown essay on Ranke's History of the Popes :''How it was that Protestantism did so much, yet did no more; how it was that the Church of Rome, having lost a large part of Europe, not only ceased to lose, but actually regained, nearly half of what she had lost, is certainly a most curious and important question. . There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. . . . The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the old. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all the other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was

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