' > >> > » j. > » 12> > »!> > > > > ■ > > ZJia> 1> 2> I> -» 2» j> I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. J { ^y, BX...L.745 5 I . jm*tf...h.%. I I UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. { > *5>ySH ■^r> -> ^ > ) >>> > • > > > 3 » T ^ :> ^^> '■3 >d>\> 1 ^_i> yyiz yyy% :y» > 4. ) > * yy-L • PI) ^\ "\ >0 O THE HIERARCHICAL DESPOTISM. LECTURES ON THE MIXTURE OF CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL POWER IN THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. IN ILLUSTRATION OF THE NATURE AND PROGRESS OF DESPOTISM EN THE ROMISH CHURCH. REV. GEOKGE BfCHEEVER. **, NEW YORK : A PUBLISHED BY SAXTON & MILES, 205 Broadway. BOSTON : SAXTON, PEIRCE uld be adverse to their republican spirit. In truth, the reason why the Episcopal form was not there esta- blished was because it was nowhere established, and has been nowhere revealed from heaven. The Corin- thian Church was not different in its form of govern- ment from any other Churches. The Churches thus constituted with their ministers, were independent of each other, and elected their own bishops, presbyters, or pastors. It was the simplest form of Church government, and the most coincident with the commands and warnings of our blessed Lord : Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise do- minion over them, and they who are great exercise au- thority upon them; but it shall not be so among ~ 2* ~~ 14 FIRST LECTURE. you. All ye are brethren. Call no man Master on earth, for one is your Master even Christ. " In this century and the next" (says a historian who has always from all parties received the praise of ac- curacy and impartiality, Dr. Mosheim), " a bishop had charge of a single Church, which might ordinarily be contained in a private house ; nor w r as he its lord, but was in reality its minister or servant ; he instructed the people, conducted all parts of public worship, and at- tended on the sick and necessitous in person; and what he was unable thus to perform, he committed to the care of the presbyters ; but without power to or- dain or determine anything, except with the concur- rence of the presbyters and the brotherhood. The emoluments of this singularly laborious and perilous office were very small. For the Churches had no re- venues, except the voluntary contributions of the peo- ple, or the oblations ; which, moderate as they doubt- less were, were divided among the bishop, the presby- ters, the deacons, and the poor of the church." Such was the primitive arrangement, so simple, so utterly removed from all pride and domination, a kingdom in- deed not of this world. The church w T as an assembly of believers under Christ their head, choosing their own ministers. RISE OF DIOCESAN EPISCOPACY. But this did not last. In process of time, the bishops in the cities, by their own labors and those of the presbyters, gathered other churches in the neighbor- ing regions, and the pastors of those churches came to be considered in a measure inferior to the city bishops, RISE OF DIOCESAN EPISCOPACY. 15 who took the superintendence of them, and so, gradu- ally became overseers of provinces, which were deno- minated dioceses. From being pastors of single churches, they became superintendents of many pas- tors. There was also a distinction made between country bishops and city bishops ; and by-and-by, when ambition grew, and the desire to have a great diocese, and to advance and increase the dignity of bishop, it was proposed to suppress the order of coun- try bishops, and to ordain no more bishops in villages and little towns, lest the episcopal name and authority should be brought into contempt. Thus grew a dis- parity in the clergy, the first step of evil in the Chris- tian Church ; thus was the door opened to the entrance of pride, ambition, worldliness, the amassing of wealth, the accumulation of grandeur. Thus grew up diocesan episcopacy, which, by the end of the third century was preparing to become a great hierarchy of many grada- tions and titles each rising above the other, and each the object of ambition in proportion to its wealth and dignity. In the councils of the churches by represen- tatives, which began to be held about the middle of the second century, there being a necessity for a presi- dent among the confederated bishops, the title and pre- rogatives of metropolitan grew up. The metropolis of the province would naturally be the place of meet- ing, and the bishop of the metropolis came naturally to be appointed as president, and at length to be regarded as such of course, and to be denominated the metropo- litan. The claims first set up by bishops above presbyters were then made by metropolitans over bishops, and then by patriarchs over metropolitans, and 16 FIRST LECTURE. then by the Pope over the whole world. A corrupt state of the clergy followed upon the institution of all this hierarchical grandeur, and kept pace with it in arrogance, voluptuousness, and contentions for pre- eminence of rank and glory. Bishops adopted the state and grandeur of princes, particularly the bishops who had under them the more numerous and wealthy congregations; they sat on thrones surrounded by their ministers, and were clad in dazzling garments. The presbyters imitated the bishops, and the deacons imitated the presbyters, and then came a host of minor officers, sub-deacons, acolythes, readers, door-keepers, exorcists, and others. The people were at length ex- cluded from all voice in ecclesiastical affairs, and the bishops appropriated the ecclesiastical property to themselves, or distributed it as they pleased. From the time of Const antine, the wealth, honors, and privileges of the clergy in this vast hierarchy, first more accurately modelled and by law incorporated by him, received an immense increase. The bishops maintained disgraceful contests respecting the bounda- ries of their sees, and the extent of their jurisdiction ; they trampled on the rights of the people and the infe- rior clergy, and vied with the civil governors of pro- vinces in luxury, arrogance, and voluptuousness. Thus was reared an enormous fabric of Church gran- deur and dominion; and soon the very idea of the church as Christ instituted it, came to be forgotten. The church signified merely the church dignitaries ; people were not considered as a part of it, except as so much material to be used and governed. Power was considered inherent in particular offices, and the THE ECCLESIASTICAL JUDICATORY. 17 custom of election, with its privileges, was entirely taken away from the people. ^^J. ^ THE ECCLESIASTICAL JUDICATORY. The episcopal authority became absolute. It is a deeply interesting matter to trace it from its beginnings. I might refer you to many authors, as the learned Peter Jurieu, Geiseler, Mosheim and others, but on this point I shall more directly take the assistance of Camp- bell, as beyond all question the most vigorous and accurate ecclesiastical anatomist. Among the early Christian societies there had grown up very naturally, from an unwillingness to go to law before unbelievers, the custom of nominating their pastors as judges or arbitrators in their questions of civil right and wrong. At length this trust of arbitration came to be con- sidered by the pastors as their right. Especially was it so asserted when the churches grew in wealth, and the bishops in a worldly sense did so magnify their offices. Then, when the Roman emperors became Christian, they were ready to confirm by law what- ever prerogatives were supposed to belong to Christ's ministers. So the bishop's power of judging was, un- der Constantine, ratified by the law; the magistrate was bound to execute his decision ; and in any cause before a secular power, if an appeal were made by either party to the court of the bishop, it was to be carried thither, and from that tribunal there could be no appeal. This was in effect "'throwing the whole judiciary power of the state into the hands of the 18 FIRST LECTURE. clergy. All the ordinary judicatories were now re- duced to act solely in subordination to the spiritual courts, which could overrule the proceedings of the secular, whilst their own was not liable to be over- ruled by any." The effect of such power was inju- rious in the highest degree to the interests of religion. The dignitaries of the Church, having such vast author- ity, were flattered, caressed, bribed, courted by inferiors and dependents. The prelates, being armed with the terror of the magistrate, religion ceased to be the power of love, and men's consciences were trampled on. The prelates' had their appendages judicatorial, their chancellors, commissaries, officials, advocates, proc- tors, registrars, apparitors, etc. ; and bailiffs, tipstaves, fines, imprisonments, distraining of goods, coercive power in every shape, as Campbell with vigorous satire has remarked, came to be the order of the day instead of that beautiful simplicity of Paul, Now, I Paul, myself, beseech you by the meekness and gentle- ness of Christ. The jurisdiction of the bishops was greatly enlarged by successive emperors ; the principal bishops were chosen by the prince for his councillors, a distinction which added immense authority to the Episcopal tribunal. At length they assumed the abso- lute and exclusive right to all criminal and civil juris- diction over the clergy, and in various cases jeven over the laity, in ecclesiastical causes. In mixed causes they insisted that the bishop should be judge as well as the magistrate. They had a rule also that every cause should devolve on the ecclesiastical tribunal, if the magistrate either refused or neglected to do justice. And finally, they asserted that this power of judgment THE ECCLESIASTICAL JUDICATORY. 19 in the bishop was a divine right, annexed by Christ to the essence of prelatical dominion, as one of its pre- rogatives. " Thus, in the course of ages, upon the spirit- ual power given by Christ to the Church of binding and loosing, that is, of excluding from, and receiving back into their communion, and upon the institution of Paul for terminating amicably their differences in mat- ters of property by reference (to believers), without recurring to the tribunal of infidels, there had been erected, by several degrees, a spiritual-temporal tribu- nal, the most wonderful the world ever saw." After- wards, in the more complete development of the Rom- ish hierarchy, the Popes claimed to be of divine right the fountain and depositaries of all secular as well as spiritual jurisdiction ; and one argument on which they founded this claim was this passage : They said, Lord, here are two swords. And he said, It is enough ; denoting that there were two sorts of power deposited by the Saviour with the Church, the temporal and the spiritual, and that these two were sufficient for all her occasions, and that these two were entrusted to the Pope because they were entrusted to Peter, and that they were entrusted to Peter because he cut off the right ear of Malchus with one of them, and he must have had both ! How dark must have been the state of the world when such an argument could dare to be palmed upon it ! But what can be said when I tell you that not to ignorance and superstition was this argument confined, but that St. Bernard himself, an angel of light, in com- parison with the darkness of the Papacy, and yet, with all his learning, the most unflinching of the Papal 20 FIRST LECTURE. champions, condescended to employ the same argu- ment ! The spiritual and material swords, said he, belong to the Church ; and if it did not belong to the Pope to use them, or to his nod to have them drawn, the Lord, when two swords were offered to him, would not have said it is enough, but, it is too much ! Aston- ishing mixture of piety and pride, of religion and learn- ing, with the demon of spiritual aggrandizement ! THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. In the progress of the Hierarchy to its perfection, the principal cities of the Roman Empire, Rome, Con- stantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, came to be dignified with the title of Patriarch. The jealousy be- tween these cities came at length to a contest of rivalry between the Patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople. But in the year 533 the Emperor Justinian declared the Bishop of Rome to be chief of the whole Ecclesiasti- cal body of the Empire. In the letter of the Empe- ror to the Romish Bishop thus constituted Pope, he speaks of his desire to preserve the unity of the Apos- tolic Chair, and says, " For we cannot suffer that any- thing which relates to the state of the Church, how- ever manifest and unquestionable, should be moved, without the knowledge of your Holiness, who are the Head of the Holy Churches, for in all things, as we have already declared, we are anxious to increase the honor and authority of your Apostolic Chair." The plea of supreme authority derived directly from Peter had meanwhile been gaining ground. It seems to THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 21 have been first advanced about the beginning of the fifth century by Innocent, and in the course of a cen- tury it grew to be the grand argument for the Pope's supremacy, so that in the time of Pope Gelasius it was solemnly asserted in a pontifical council, and the claim rapidly grew on by degrees, assisted by Imperial edicts, of a divine title, primacy, superintendence, supremacy, universal and divine power. In the reign of the Em- peror Mauritius, the Patriarch of Constantinople as- sumed the title of Universal Bishop. This assumption incensed beyond all measure the reigning Patriarch of Rome, Gregory I. It is one of the most remarkable things in all history that this Pontiff declared and strenuously maintained that " whosoever assumed that heretical, blasphemous, and infernal title, was the fol- lower of Lucifer, the forerunner and herald of Anti- Christ, in that it neither did nor could belong to any bishop whatever." The Emperor Mauritius could not be persuaded by all Gregory's arguments to enter into his views. Just at this time Mauritius was murdered and dethroned by an execrably vicious centurion named Phocas, who reigned in his stead. To this horrible villain Pope Gregory wrote with great applause and flattery, in a tumult of joy because Mauritius, whom he regarded as his enemy, had been put to death. He applauded Phocas and his dreadful crime, in order that he might gain his favor against the Patriarch of Constantino- ple. Gregory soon died ; but Boniface III., who suc- ceeded him, obtained of this Emperor Phocas the revocation of the title of Universal Bishop, and the perpetual annexation of it to himself and to the Ro- 22 FIRST LECTURE. man See, the Pontiff being vested with the primacy of all the bishops of the empire. The Church of Rome, in accepting this new dignity and title, fulfilled the prophecy of Gregory, who had denounced it, and stamped upon herself, according to his opinion, the characteristics of vain-glorious, proud, profane, impi- ous, execrable, blasphemous, anti-Christian, heretical, diabolical, for with all these epithets did Gregory brand the pontiff who should assume the title of Uni- versal Bishop. Universal Bishop and Vicar of Jesus Christ ! This, with its concomitants, was the climax and consummation of anti-Christian pride in the Ro- mish Hierarchy, and from this event commences the rapid growth of the Papacy as the Man of Sin and Son of Perdition. This was at the very commence- ment of the seventh century, in the year 606. Here, then, we pause for the present. CORRESPONDING CORRUPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. Now I wish you to remember that in our sketch thus far I have confined myself to the progress of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy raised gradually from the primitive Church, and at length, by the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff, consummated as the Romish Hie- rarchy, and destined to rule, as an ecclesiastical despot- ism, for many long dark centuries over the world. It is not to be supposed that such a fabric could be reared in the government of the Church, without correspond- ing enormity of corruption in the doctrines, ceremo- nies, and practices of the Church. Accordingly, in these first six centuries of Christianity, the greatest CORRUPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 23 abuses, so prevalent in after ages, had appeared, and the seeds of others were sown, the seeds of almost all possible evils indeed, in the utter corruption of the clergy. Leo the Great became the Roman Pontiff in the year\440. Under his authority and influence the Confessional was established, and in it the conscience of the people was delivered over to the power of the Priest, and an enormous addition was made to the power and influence of the clergy. In his time and in that of Gregory, that is, in the period between 400 and 600, the veneration for martyrs and relics had in- creased almost to an established worship, and images were introduced into the churches. The institutions of Monachism, that great centre and support of the wickedness of the Romish court, and power of the Pcomish Church for ages, had struck deep. The prac- tices of Polytheism itself had been adopted by the Church in order to allure the Pagans and barbarians in greater crowds into her bosom. The feast days of Paganism became the saints' days of Christianity; the images of the martyrs supplied the absence of the statues of the gods ; the gorgeous dresses and ceremo- nies of the priests, the frankincense and the altars, the pictures and shrines of this new mythology, it was rightly concluded by the Romish clergy, would prove to the barbarians and idolaters a rich compensation for the renunciation of that grosser and less gorgeous polytheism to which their senses had been accustomed. Moreover, the sacrament of baptism was supposed to contain a full and absolute expiation of sin, and the assurance of eternal salvation ; hence there were many proselytes,w T ho, though they renounced their idolatry, de- 24 FIRST LECTURE. f erred their baptism, to continue the indulgence of their sins, which, by the application of that rite at any time before death, they could so easily wash away. There can be little doubt that this was one great rea- son with Constantine himself for deferring his own baptism. a The salvation of the people was purchased at an easy rate," says Gibbon, and the sneer is just, " if it be true that in one year 12,000 men were bap- tized in Rome, besides women and children ; and that a white garment, with twenty pieces of gold, had been promised by the emperor to every convert." It was this religion that the celebrated Pope Grego- ry, in the sixth century, sent to Britain, ordering that for the accommodation and allurement of the Pagans, and to make Christianity sit easy upon them, the days on which they had been accustomed to sacrifice to the gods should be appointed as festivals of the Saints, and so the populace be allowed to bring and kill their victims, and perform their sacrifices as usual. The re- solute pontiff was determined that thus Satan should be cheated, and the souls of the multitude saved ! It was this religion of which a Pagan writer remarked (Eunapius, quoted in Gibbon), with a sarcasm and un- belief not at all to be wondered at, that " instead of deities, the heads salted and pickled, of infamous male- factors, are the gods which the earth produces in our days ; the martyrs, the supreme arbitrators of our prayers and petitions to the deity, whose tombs are now consecrated as the objects of the veneration of the people." I have spoken of the ambition of the clergy, as a necessary result growing out of the aggrandizement CORRUPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 25 and variety of their offices and titles. We will take two instances of this for illustration, both of them oc- curring in the See of Rome, but both before that See had received the title and supremacy of universal Bishop. The first, not long after the conversion of Constantine, and the alliance of religion with the State, was the horrible conflict between two of the clergy, Damasus and Ursinus, nominated and elected by opposite partisans to fill the Episcopal chair of Rome, about the year 366. The most dreadful violence, fightings, burning of buildings and blood- shed, took place ; a hundred and thirty-seven persons were massacred in the church of Liberius, and the pre- fect of the city was compelled to take refuge in the suburbs. A pagan and contemporary writer has left on record his feelings and thoughts in the observance of this w r arfare. The second instance is in the year 498, a still more terrible and continued conflict between Symmachus, a deacon, and Laurentius, an arch presbyter, with their respective multitudes of partisans, for the succession to the same dignity of the Pontiff of the See of Rome. The city was kept in an uproar for months ; there were uncontrollable mobs, battles and bloodshed, in the streets and public places ; both the pontiffs were ac- cused of the most dreadful crimes, and three separate councils assembled at Rome w T ere unable to terminate the fierce contest. Now w r e beg you to look at the picture w T hich such scenes give, the revelation which they lay open, of the nature of the prevalent Chris- tianity of the times. Suppose for a moment that such a conflict should take place in the city of New York 26 FIRST LECTUR E. between two of the clergy chosen to fill a vacant bishoprick ; what conclusion would you be justified in drawing as to the degree of piety in the Church and community 1 DIVISIONS OF THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT. During the period which we have now swept w T ith our historical perspective, several great sources of cor- ruption and wickedness, several great elements of ty- ranny and cruelty, several great engines of ambition and misery to the world, were developed and set in motion, to be perfected afterwards, and to sweep the earth as with an infernal whirlwind, for at least ten centuries. They constitute such links in the chain of despotism engirding the world, that they must be dwelt upon consecutively in our argument, and we shall bring all these trains of investigation to bear upon our argument as to the nature and consequence of the mingling of civil and ecclesiastical power, and as to the nature of the Romish despotism as the con- summation of such a mixture. First, the idea was fixed in men's minds of the earthly visible unity and aggrandizement of the Church as a kingdom of this world. Second, the maxim was established that to lie and deceive be- comes a virtue, if religion or the Church can be pro- fited by it. Third, the alliance followed between the civil and ecclesiastical hierarchies, the union of Church and State. Fourth, there followed upon this the em- ployment of civil penalties for the compulsion of the HISTORICAL ARCUMENT. 27 conscience in religious things. Fifth, there was com- menced the opposition of the Church to the diffusion of knowledge and learning. Sixth, the ministry of the Church became a sacrificial priesthood, and the idea was established to the utter annihilation of the great principle of Justification by Faith, that pardon of sin could be purchased by money, penance, human merit, through the medium of the priest. Seventh, the foundations of the Canon law w r ere laid, the body, power, and authority of which continued to increase as a main support of the Papacy, even up to the six- teenth century. It will be found of essential impor- tance to trace every one of these abuses, in disclosing fully the nature of the mixture of civil and ecclesias- tical power in the governments of the middle ages, and the means by which the system, formed of such a mixture, was supported. We bring up these great facts from the past gulf of history, not, be it remem- bered, for the facts' sake, or for the sake of dwelling upon them, or of elucidating the corruptions of any particular Church, but solely for the sake of great prin- ciples to be established out of such a survey. We can get at such principles only by such a survey, only by going thoroughly into past events, in order to under- stand the lessons, for the sake of which God permitted the events to be developed. In this survey, as w r e pass along, the false positions contained in Bishop Hughes's lecture will be made manifest. 2S FIRST LECTURE, IDEA OF THE VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT OF THE CHURCH. I. Our first point, then, is this, namely : the idea settled and fixed in the minds of men, of the earthly, visible unity and aggrandizement of the Church as a kingdom of this world. We must trace this idea and its conse- quences somewhat at large. As early as the second century w T e find the germ of the idea, fully developed in the third century, of a visi- ble Catholic Church, beyond the pale of which there could be no salvation. In the apostolic times it was not said, Except you join the Church you cannot enter heaven, but, Except ye repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you cannot enter heaven. But so soon as men began to attach importance to the idea of a visible Church, within which alone there was salvation, then an entrance into the Church came to be consi- dered as the cause, instead of the consequence, of a personal union to Christ. " He cannot have God for his father, who has not the Church for his mother," said Cyprian ; an absolute falsehood, when grounded on the idea of a visible Church, as alone containing salvation. Upon this idea of the visible Catholic Church was next grafted the idea of a perfect uniform- ity in the creed and observances of that Church. As early as the second century the Bishop of Rome con- demned the Asiatic Bishops, because they refused to conform to the western Churches in the celebration of Easter. By and by, when the Church was established by law, conformity came to be considered essential to VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT. 29 its unity, and non-conformity was branded as a crime. This was natural. If there be one visible Church, and no possibility of salvation out of it, the visibility of that Church must consist in its uniformity; every species of dissent from its rules or confessions is regarded as a schism, to be punished as a crime. Hence, with the idea of the visible unity of the Church, comes, of course, the restraint and punishment of heresy, the bondage of freedom, the fettering of individual opinion. The authority of the Church becomes supreme, in matters both of faith and practice; and these matters being- settled by councils, w T hich councils were councils of the Bishops, the way was gradually prepared for re- stricting the idea of the Church to the idea of the hie- rarchy, the assembly of its officers. " It was not until the habit of acting in bodies," says an Episcopal histo- rian, before quoted, a made them sensible of their com- mon interest and real power, that they ventured to as- sert such claims, and assumed a loftier manner in the government of their dioceses ; so that, though these synods w T ere doubtless indispensable to the well-being of Christianity, they seem to have been the means of corrupting the original humility of its ministers ; and the method which was intended to promote only the eternal interests of the Church, promoted in some de- gree the worldly consideration of the order which gov- erned it This change began to show itself toward the end of the second century, and it is certain that at this period we find the first complaints of the incipient cor- ruptions of the clergy." Those corruptions grew pre- cisely with the growth of the idea and the power of the Church as a hierarchy. It is impossible to say precisely what time the idea 3 30 FIRST LECTUaE, of the Church was first restricted to the clergy. When it was, then ambition became the ruling passion of the Church. This restriction you may find in modern times, and in the minds of some great writers. Gui- zot's idea of the Church and his manner of using the word may be learned from one almost casual sentence, In speaking of the retirement of religious orders into monasteries, he says, these institutions became, during this barbarous period, an asylum for the Church, as the Church was for the laity. It would seem thus that his idea of the Church is confined to the priest- hood ; the people form no part of it. But what i9 the Church of Christ ? Is it not the assembly of the souls of his flock 1 Where two or three are met in my name, there am I; there is Christ, the Great Shepherd and Bishop of his flock. There is the Church of Christ, where Christ and his people are, not where the clergy alone are. The truth is, the Church is es- sential to the being of the clergy, and not the clergy to the being of the Clvurch. The clergy come out of the Church, and not the Church out of the clergy ; and so they are a divine order ; the Church being from God, by a new creation of his Spirit, they, as a part of the Church, are, according to God's will, through the Church and for the Church, a divine order. But if they boast themselves against the Church, be it re- membered, it is the Church that bears them, and not they who bear the Church. They are gifts granted of God for the edification of the body of Christ, for his body's sake, which is the Church ; but they are not the body of Christ, God forbid, but simple members of that body, appointed by the Holy Ghost as over- seers and teachers. VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT. 31 A visible body must have a visible head ; and hence the progress of this idea of a visible unity to the cli- max of the Ecclesiastical hierarchy in a Universal Pon- tiff was natural and consistent. When this hierarchy was thus completed, it became the greatest enshrine- ment of the genius of universal ambition that the world ever saw. Ambition was the infecting spirit and sin of the Church so organized. Hence in almost all the councils of the Church you meet bodies of men intriguing, managing, striving, contending, for the aggrandizement of their own order, for the consolida- tion of Ecclesiastical Empire, not for the good of man- kind, not for the spread of the gospel, not for the instruction of the multitude. The despotic unity of the Church, not the glory of Christ, was the object. Even the doctrines of the Church were put into pre- cise dogmas, not to edify the Church, or to instruct mankind, or to render the knowledge of the gospel more accessible, but to render the dominion of the Church more absolute, its unity more despotic. To repress and punish heretics, and not to teach, win, and convert unbelievers, or to build up believers, was the work of Ecclesiastical councils for ages. Men may say, philosophers may say, that such councils, such bodies of men existing through the dark ages, and such a Hierarchy called the Christian Church, w r ere necessary to keep alive Christianity in the world, and that they did keep it alive. We should rather say, they kept it dying than living. Instead of being as the candlestick, they were as the bushel. The light was put under the bed, and the bed, the Church, with the light under it, was made a bed of the embraces of luxury and power. 12 FIRST LECTURE. The true unity of the Church of Christ is oneness of spirit, not of form ; it is union to him, to Christ, and the unity which is the consequence of that, not union to a hierarchy or form of Church government, and the unity which is the consequence of that. The Church is put first in the estimation of hierarchists ; belong to the Church, they say, and you are united to Christ ; the voice of the gospel is very different ; belong to Christ, it says, and you are in him united to the true Church. Christ himself says, I am the Vine, not, the Church is the Vine \ abide in me, not, abide in the Church, and let my words abide in you, not, let the Church's word abide in you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, not, if ye abide under one form of government, but, if ye love one another. Unity is a very different thing Trom uniformity. Uni- formity, generally speaking, is compulsion and dead- ness ; unity is life and love. There may be perfect uniformity where there is no unity, as, on the other hand, there may be perfect unity, where there is very little uniform'ty. The unity of uniformity is not what our blessed Lord ever commanded, but, the unity of the spirit, in the bond of peace. Any other unity than this, any unity without it, is a unity of evil, that leads inevitably to ambition, aggrandizement, despotic pow- er, persecution, cruelty. It is a remorseless unity, with the conscience seared as with a hot iron, de- structive of all liberty and love. It is a frowning, overawing, overshadowing, overwhelming unity, that, to sustain and carry out its purposes, confounds the eternal distinctions between right and wrong, sanctifies guilt and falsehood, does evil that good may come, and makes its members the fanatics of superstition and VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT. 33 arbitrary power. Anything' becomes lawful for the sake of the Church ; and its members, when proscribed by this demon of Church pride and despotism, are willing in all things to aggrandize the Church, though it be at the, utter sacrifice of all personal independence. Nay, the greater this aggrandizement, at whatever cost of this nature, the greater the pride of the indi- vidual, as a member, though trampled on, of the ag- grandized, glorious, worshipped order. Now I say, it is this false terrific unity of form and establishment, compressing and binding men together under it as slaves, instead of Christ's freemen, that is at the bottom of all the evil inflicted by the Church upon the world. This, I hesitate not to say, is the great corruption of Christianity, which for ages made the Church not an incarnation and enshrinement of goodness, but of -evil; not an instrument of deliverance and mercy, but of deeper bondage and pain. It is a corruption, the taint whereof exists still ; and still men are making baptism the door of regeneration, and the Church the door of heaven. It is a corruption, in which the simplest rites of Christ's institution for his people are made the means of bondage and error to the soul. Give to the priest only those two rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and let him hold them as the keys that unlock the brazen gates of this vast visibility of power and glory, as the only means of admission within the bosom of this tremendous unity, through which only the trembling proselyte can enter heaven, and you have at once corrupted religion, and perverted its very idea in the soul of the worshipper ; a perversion absolutely fatal in placing the symbol for the thing signified ; and also you have corrupted the 34 FIRST LECTURE. Church from the temple of piety and love, into an engine of oppressive, vast, sweeping, resistless am- bition and despotism. In such a state of things, in such a unity, Christian- ity and the Church become distinct and separate. Christianity, if it exists, exists apart from the Church, as entirely a foreign essence, nay, even as a heresy. In the greatest perfection of this unity in the Romish Church, when Christianity appeared, then the Church crushed it ; when her sweet, mild, holy voice was heard, it sounded 'like a lunatic's; it was strange, wild, heretical, dangerous ; it must be imprisoned. But reli- gion had gone out of this hierarchy from a very early period, and the consequence was the repressing and preventing the world's mercy, and the continuance of the world in darkness for successive ages, in spite of the historical existence of the so-called Christian Church. The salt having lost its savor, consequently, although it was thrown upon the world in this vast and splendid unity, yet the world continued to be, what it always must be without piety, a dunghill ; and a corrupted Christianity did but add to its festering, polluted, pestilential ingredients. CIVILISATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES. THE ROMISH HIER- ARCHY AN OBSTACLE. We may judge from this in some measure how scan- dalous to true piety it is to attribute to Christianity the poor and barbarous civilisation that reigned in the world during a large portion of the dark and middle ages. The civilisation which would have been pro- OBSTACLE TO CIVILISATION. 35 duced by true Christianity, had been a very different and a far more glorious and beneficial advancement of the world. But the Romish Church repressed that advancement, so that it may be considered doubtful if the world would not have made just as great progress in mere civilisation, without any Christian Church at all. What Guizot calls the history of civilisation in modern Europe, is, in point of fact, in many respects the history of ambition in modern Europe. It would not be difficult to show this ; it would not be difficult to show that ambition in its march, both personal and corporational, carries with it inevitably a train of civi- lisation, and that the civilisation of modern Europe before the Reformation was not owing so much to the impressible tendency in man towards civilisation, or to the benefieial working of benevolent principles, either in the Church or out of it, as to the working of self- ishness. The most despotic monarch tends towards a certain degree of civilisation ; for he will strive to make himself, his court, all his own circumstances, as glorious and grand as possible. Hence he will draw from all sources the elements of luxury, of comfort, of splendor, of display, and even of refinement, though it may be barbaric refinement ; and in all this there is progress towards general civilisation. Perhaps he will build cities, like Cain the murderer, and name them after the name of his first born son. Perhaps he will build pyramids and rear temples out of the super- stition and slavery of the people, which shall be re- garded in after ages as the material types of a won- derful period of civilisation. So a despotic church, in seeking the establishment of its own despotic unity^ and the aggrandizement of its vast hierarchy, though 36 F r R S T LEG.T V R E . the aim in every member of the order may be purely selfish, and neither general civilisation nor general happiness be ever thought of as an end, will yet, in this very selfishness, tend to the civilisation of man- kind- You might take Napoleon as an illustration of this principle* There were many good things and grand principles that grew out of his whirlwind course, noble institutions, and enterprises, and sometimes na- tions set at liberty; but no man would dream of say- ing that Napoleon's object was the world's happi- ness, or the world's civilisation, but on the whole re- morseless conquest, of which the good ends that he ac- complished were rather heavenly accidents than hu- man purposes, God's arrangements and not his own. In the prosecution of his great end, the road across the Simplon was a vast and noble work, a magnifi- cent enterprise, shot through eternal Alps, driven where the world might have waited for centuries be- fore benevolence or mere civilisation would have driven it, through rock galleries sheeted with ice and snow, down which avalanches might innocently thunder into unfathomable depths below; but still the genius of the enterprise was Remorseless Conquest. And just so with the dominion of the Popes, the march of the Romish hierarchy ; there w r ere many good things grew out of it, through God's preventing mercy, to the world ; but on the whole its genius was Remorseless Conquest. The good things were heaven's accidents ; the evil was its character and its essence. Nor can there be anything more certain than that, during the dark and middle ages, on the whole, the happiness of the many, the elevation of society, the Christianisation of the common people, nay the rights OBSTACLE TO CIVILISATION. 37 of the common people, were scarcely thought of; these things entered not into the views of men ; and how should they, as long as what was called the Christian Church set the example, and taught the les- son to all mankind, of supreme selfishness; the idea of laboring for the amelioration or the good of man- kind was merged and lost in the ideas either of per- sonal or hierarchical aggrandizement. This was what the Church pursued with very few individual excep- tions. You may bring forward great and good names in the darkest period ; Bernard, Bruno, Anselm, Tho- mas A'Kempis; but they no more constituted the Ro- man Church, or any part of its spirit, or any part of its fruits, than Simeon and Anna L die Jewish Temple constituted the spirit or the fruits of the proud, corrupt- ed, persecuting Jewish hierarchy, abandoned of God and given over to destruction. In point of fact, the light of such benevolent minds was like lamps in sepulchres, shining upon dead men's bones and all un- cleanness, but powerless to give them existence, or to clear away the pollution, or to make the abodes of death and cruelty the habitations of life and mercy. Such minds were no more the results or the character- istics of the Romish hierarchy, than the magnificent cathedrals of the Gothic architecture were the results or the proofs of general piety and intelligence. God, it is true, counteracts our selfishness. Our world would be an open, undisguised hell of wicked- ness, if he did not. Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves. Heaven makes even a purely ambitious mind, and a 3* 38 FIRST LECTURE. purely ambitious hierarchy, in spite of itself, minister in many ways to good ; but it is Heaven's idea, not ours. So in those ages the idea of Christianity was lost sight of in the idea of a vast Ecclesiastical Hierar- chy. The Great Invisible Head of the Church was displaced first by the Church, and then for many ages by its self-constituted earthly Head, the Supreme Pon- tiff usurping the place of the Heavenly. The object before all men's minds was Power. With the Priests, it was power on earth and in heaven ; power on earth by means of power in heaven ; power over men's minds, bodies, possessions, by power of their con- sciences. Gain the conscience, and you gain the world ; power supre'liife on earth followed men's belief in a power to shut out from Heaven. Well did the Priests know this. For, give you but a foot of conscience there, And you, like Archimedes, toss the globe. With kings, emperors, and barons, it was pow T er on earth, dominion, authority, the great lust of th v e fallen archangel, and of fallen man — Power, uncontrolled, un- shackled Power. Alfred the Great, our Alfred, was a wonderful exception, but almost solitary. Charle- magne was somewhat an exception ; but the character of Charlemagne was far more that of personal ambi- tion than Alfred's ; and in the measures of that great mind you see but a larger and more liberal sweep, than smaller minds could accomplish, of the ideas of conquest and consolidated empire. This must draw civilisation with it, but mark you, civilisation in spite of it, civilisation as an accident and not an object. OBSTACLE TO CIVILISATION. 39 Just so with the crusades, enlarged upon in some quarters, almost as if it were a benefit conferred upon the world by the Papacy ! Singular delusion ! Civili- sation did indeed grow out of the crusades, but again I say, in spite of the purpose of them ; as an accident of Heaven's mercy, and not an object of man's inten- tion ; as a result thrown in by that glorious preroga- tive of God, by which he brings good out of evil, and is ever making the wrath of man to praise Him. So man and hierarchies go on, taking their great strides of ambition, and God in spite of them makes great general good to grow even out of their evil movements. So men mingle the cup of misery for the multitude in the accomplishment of their purposes, but God throws even into the very dregs of the cup the elements of some after result for his own glory and man's good. The generalizing sophistry of scholars may wear the appearance, and gain the reputation, of originality, in rinding out and illustrating the uses of abuses ; but they should be careful to distinguish between the essence and aim of an abuse, and the good result which in God's providence may spring out of it. Some men allow themselves to talk of the blessings of the Papacy in such and such directions ; how, for example, it restrained the power of kings, and preserved the records of Christianity. But mark you, if it had not risen to that enormous despotism in itself which could restrain the power of kings, the pure influences of the gospel would have restrained that power, and regulated it for the people's good, long before ; the pure influences of the gospel would have prevented the need of the inter- position of the vast machinery of an Ecclesiastical Despotism. And if, instead of keeping the records of 40 FIRST LECTUKE. Christianity hidden during the period of the world's ignorance and darkness, and thus preserving them in monastic cobwebs, the papacy, and the monasteries, and the monks had spread them before the people as humble teachers, that ignorance and darkness would have been dissipated. Preserving the truths and records of Christianity in a dark age by hiding them ! Tt is just as if you should say, having only one solitary lamp lighted in the world, we will, instead of lighting other lamps by it, put it in a vault, and keep it till the night is passed, lest the darkness destroy it. And we w T ill make the world believe that all the light in the world is in our power ; and that on penalty of eternal death men must go nowhere else for light but to our dun- geons, and thus we will keep the world in subjection. So the Papacy preserved Christianity not for the world but from the world. The Church was a vast Hierarchy, a form of power, an incarnation, not of Christianity, but of conquest. But your generalizes will say that civilisation was progressing, and the Church was a means of this pro- gression. Again I will tell you how. Christianity was as a germ, a germ both of civilisation and piety, thrown into the world, deposited in the earth to grow there. As it was growing, the Hierarchical Church was thrown upon it as a mountain, a hierarchy, a great rock of worldly ambition. What becomes of the germ ? It cannot die ; it lives, it struggles, it shoots this way and that way, it heaves the mountain ; at length, through Heaven's mercy, it meets a cleft, and up it rises, forcing itself through the fissure, up to the topmost surface, to the open air ; and then and there, with unabated vigor and freshness of life, it spreads HIERARCHY NOT CHRISTIANITY. 41 and grows, till the whole surface is covered with rich mould and verdure, and the tree shoots up to heaven. Now a historian or a sophist, who comes and tells me that this mould, and this verdure, and this magnificent tree are the offspring of the Romish Church, may easily be confounded ; for with my spade I can show the hard rock, and the cleft through which Christianity, repressed for ages, did at length regain its liberty, and grew and spread, and covered the earth with verdure, in spite of the Romish Hierarchy. FALSEHOOD OF THE POSITION THAT THE HIERARCHY WAS NECESSARY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF CHRISTIANITY. But nevertheless, answers our original scholar, this Hierarchy, this Papacy, this mountain, as you call it, was very useful in shielding that germ of Christianity from the storms and fires that swept over the world during those ages. Just as a Bastile hides, and thus preserves its prisoner. This germ of Christianity was preserved from growth, not from destruction. It is one of the falsest of all positions to suppose, that had not the Christian Church existed as a hierarchy in the fourth and fifth centuries, religion would have been swept from the world. And yet this position is in some measure assumed, even by Guizot, and ecclesiastical historians have not disdained to follow it, and to assert, to the base betrayal of our faith, or rather, to the slan- der of its inherent divine energy, that under a less vi- gorous form of human government, religion would have perished from the world. This is, absolutely, making the corruptions of Christianity essential to its existence, " The overweening authority claimed and 42 FIRST LECTURE. exercised by the clergy/ 5 says Milman, " their exist- ence as a separate and exclusive caste, at this particu- lar period in the progress of civilisation, became of the highest utility. A religion without a powerful and separate sacerdotal order, even perhaps if that order had not in general been bound to celibacy, and so pre- vented from degenerating into an hereditary caste, would have been absorbed and lost in the conflict and confusion of the times. Religion, unless invested by general opinion in high authority, and that authority asserted by an active and incorporated class, would scarcely have struggled through this complete disor- ganisation of all the existing relations of society." Open the New Testament, and place yourself in the blaze of its light, and such speculations as these must be viewed with indignation and contempt. It is then the opinion of Mr. Milman that Christ is incompetent to keep his Church in existence, when barbarians in- vade the country, unless it be in the form of a hierar- chy, supported by human authority and power. I can trace such sentiments to nothing else but the habit of dependence and w r orldliness, produced in an Established Church by always looking to the State for protection ; such a mind is incapable of producing a free and noble Ecclesiastical History, because it never sees the true, independent glory of the Gospel. It supposes that the Church must sink to destruction the moment the State withdraws from its allegiance, and that Christianity must go to ruin, if the State on which it has been ac- customed to lean, be overturned. Just so, an historian of a better spirit of faith in the divine hand, nevertheless is not ashamed to say that Christianity itself would have been swept away from HIERARCHY NOT CHRISTIANITY. 43 the surface of the west, had it not been rescued by an established body of ministers with splendid ceremonies. " Thence resulted the gradual conversion of the inva- ders/' says Mr. Waddington, " by the agency of the visible Church. Without those means, had Christianity then existed as a mere individual belief, or even under a less vigorous form of human government, the reli- gious society would have possessed neither the energy nor the discipline necessary for resistance to the deluge which endangered it." A worldly mind, that has no faith in the divine origin and power of Christianity, might have broached such speculations ; and yet, such a mind might be asked how it was that Christianity without any hierarchy, or imposing ceremonial, or gov- ernment established by law — 'Christianity in its primitive loveliness and simplicity, was kept from being swept from the earth when the whole power of the Roman Empire was at work to exterminate and crush it ? But that a Christian mind should yield itself to such views is almost inconceivable. It is moreover to be remembered, that the so-called conversion of the invading tribes in the fifth century, was merely a nominal transfer from a Pagan to a Christian polytheism. When, therefore, it is said that it was the Church hierarchy which preserved religion in the world, we hesitate not to affirm that it was rather the superstition of the barbarians themselves which sustained and added power to that hierarchy. They had been accustomed to pay the most awful reverence to their own priests ; they simply transferred this reverence to the Romish hierarchy. They found in existence a spiritual authority so like in its pretensions to that to which they had been accustomed, that in 44 FIRST LECTURE. which, as in an iron mould, their childhood had been rocked ; and by which, as by an iron frame, the growth of intellect and soul had been shaped and imprisoned, that they bowed before it as before the vision of their native deities. An impulse came upon them like that under which the Indian idolators, when they stood be- fore those frowning rocky temples of Egypt, pros- trated themselves in adoration, exclaiming that they had found the gods of their own country. It was the awful genius of superstition that froze into subjection the souls of those northern conquerors, rather than any influences of civilisation and Christianity, that melted them. It was the spell of Druidism, which Christianity would have broken, and supplied its place with love, but with which, as an element of their own existence, they invested the new hierarchical order and ceremo- nial to which they were introduced — an order and cere- monial surrounded with so much more of imposing grandeur than they had ever known, and yet having so many features of the priestly dominion under which they had been educated, that it seemed as if they did but bow before their own native religion, in a new form of power and glory. Now when such writers become so forgetful of the nature and support of true Christianity as to say that those Northern masses of Barbarians, had it not been for the Romish Church, would have obliterated all vestiges of religion and of learning from the world, we must be permitted to say that if the Church as it then was, could have been annihilated, and a new begin- ning have been made in the planting of Christianity as it issued from the charge of the Apostles, religion and learning would have soon transformed those Barbari- HIERARCHY NOT CHRISTIANITY. 45 ans into Christians and cultivated men. If when those Northern warriors overran the Roman Empire, there had been in existence only one simple Church of Christ in "all the world; if, by the determination of the Author of our religion, that religion had been restricted to one single Church in Jerusalem for the space of five hun- dred years ; and if the period for its propagation had been detained and appointed at the very juncture when the fountains of the great deep of Northern savageism were broken up, and Huns, Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and all of Odin's brood from the ice womb of Empire had poured over the w r orld ; you may be sure that one single primitive Church, with the Papal Hierarchy out of the way, would have done more for the conversion of these men and the world, more for the good of the World in one single century, more to fill the world with the blessings and institu- tions of civilisation and Christianity, than the Romish Church accomplished for the space of nine hundred years. The ark of that single simple Church would have floated upon the face of that deluge, and w 7 hen it subsided, its inmates would have covered the earth with the garden of the Lord. There were elements of character in those floods of Northern savages admi- rably fitted to unite with and be moulded by the noblest, simplest, most vigorous elements of the Christian reli- gion. But the Romish Church, instead of converting those savages, corrupted them, corrupted their very virtues by the corruptions of Christianity ! Instead of leading them into the fold of Christ, it received them into the lap of the consolidated empire of those cor- ruptions, the vast personification of w r hich towers be- fore us, in the tremendous imagery of scripture, as at once the Mother of Harlots and the Man of Sin ! 46 FIRST LECTURE PIOUS LYING FOR THE GOOD OF THE CHURCH. II. We pass to our next division in the historical argument, which is the maxim that falsehood is justi- fiable in behalf of the Church. This became a most important element in the mixture of civil and ecclesi- astical power in the middle ages, and a great reliance and support of the Romish Hierarchy ; one of its dark- est, frowning, w T eather-beaten buttresses. The maxim that to lie and deceive becomes a virtue if religion or the Church can be profited by it, is to be traced to a very early period. Its introduction does not lie at the door of the Romish Church, though its adoption, sanction, use and establishment, are hers* You find the seeds of it in the second century, scattered into the Christian garden from those flowers of heathen philosophy, of which the Fathers were so fond, that they would mingle them with the healthful blooming truths gathered from the field of the New Testament. The Pagan Philosophers were accustomed to affix to their works some name of authority to give weight to their own speculations ; and impostures of the same kind were resorted to and patronized in the Christian Church, on the diabolical principle that truth may be defended by falsehood, to such an extent that it is utterly impossible to trust the writings of many of the early Fathers. Forgeries, doubtful statements, interpolations and direct falsehoods, became so com- mon, that you are afloat on a sea of uncertainty ; one thing, however, is certain, that pious frauds were sanctioned by the Church, and lying was adopted as a virtue. Eusebius, Bishop of Cesarea about the year PI OU S LYING. 47 315, and who died about the year 340, distinctly treats^ in one of his chapters, the following theological propo- sition, namely, How it may be lawful and fitting to use falsehood as a medicine, for the advantage of those who require such a method. You may well suppose how this business of pious frauds so sanctioned, would thrive as an element in the corruptions of Christianity. The multitude of sick persons who required falsehood as a medicine seemed greatly to increase, nor was it at all the homoeopathic principle on which the medicine was administered. Here was Paul's category in perfection ; speaking lies in hypocrisy, having the conscience seared as with a hot iron. It was the hypocrisy of benefiting the Church ; and the conscience, particular and universal, became so seared, that lying in this sort became an element of prosperous ecclesiastical existence. To this source you may trace the interminable catalogue of false miracles, astounding legends, absurd stories of saints and martyrs, coined and distributed with prolific ingenuity, which perhaps even in the pages of a pious man like Bede, you need not be at the trouble to sup- pose the writers of them believed, such pious lies being deemed perfectly justifiable ; so that if a man dug up the scull of a hippopotamus he might sell it piecemeal as the true head of Peter which had been growing un- der ground for the use of the faithful ever since the apostle's martyrdom. No language can describe the infinite superstition and absurdity of the passion for rotten bodies, bones, relics and miracles, with which, under the fostering care of this diabolical maxim, the w r orld became absolutely mad. In those days, says Jortin, the bones of a martyr had as little rest as a dog 48 FIRST LECTURE. in a wheel. If this lying spirit had been restricted to false miracles and the manufacture of saints' heads and martyrs' bones, it had been comparatively harm- less ; but it infected the whole existence of the Church. U A curious and critical examiner of the actions and writings of the most eminent and pious doctors of this age," says Jortin, and the same thing is asserted by Mosheim, " will, I fear, find almost all of them infected with this leprosy, not excepting Am- brose, or Hilary, or Augustine, or Gregory Nazianzen, or Jerome." But the point we are now particularly concerned with is the immediate connection of this maxim and spirit and consolidation of the Romish Despotism, and its existence as a know T n feature in the Romish Church. I might bring up a host of witnesses from the past, but omitting minor instances, I strike at once upon a great, well known-illustration of this matter. You have all heard of the Pope's Decretals, which, together with the forgery of the Donation of Constantine, of which 1 shall have occasion to speak, are justly described as the most celebrated monuments of human imposition and credulity. In this place, ] shall give you the description of them principally in the words of Mosheim. About the beginning of the ninth century, the Roman Pontiffs procured the forgery, by their trusty friends, of con- ventions, acts of councils, epistles, and other docu- ments, by which they might make it appear that from the earliest ages of the Church the Roman Pontiffs possessed the same authority and power, which at that dark period they claimed. Among these fraudulent supports of the Romish despotism, the so-called De- cretal Epistles of the pontiffs of the first centuries hold PIOUS LYING. 49 perhaps the first rank. Of similar authority aud value are the decrees of a Roman council, said to have been held under Sylvester in the year 324, but which was never known of by any one till the ninth century, than which nothing could be better suited to enrich and exalt above all human authority, the Roman Pon- tiff. In the darkness of the world there scarce re- mained any one either capable or disposed to move controversy respecting these pious frauds; and the history of subsequent centuries shows the use made of them for uniting all power, temporal and spiritual, in the Romish See ; a thing not denied at the present day by respectable and honest men, even though friendly to the Romish Pontiff. I might have gone more minutely into this division of our subject, and have taken other historians to de- scribe this curious matter ; I might have referred you to Fleury, the Romish ecclesiastical historian, or to David Blondell, or to Ayliffe's very admirable intro- duction to his great work on Canon law ; but I have chosen to take nearly the words of Mosheim, whose honesty and accuracy no man dare impeach. I shall of necessity touch upon this subject again, in speaking of the body and power of the canon law ; a most instructive investigation ; but sufficient has now been said to show how forgeries and falsehoods on a vast scale were used in the middle as;es to bind civil and ecclesiastical authority in one, and to shore up and consolidate the despotism thus formed. In the immense labor of examining and comparing the several edi- tions of the Justinian Code, the learned Ayliffe found in the first book alone, not less than one hundred and seven private interpolations of the clergy in favor 60 FIRST LECTURE. of themselves, to increase their own power and authority. Now on the general topic of concealment, as well as lying, in the Romish Church, the declaration haz- arded by Bishop Hughes is one of the most astounding we ever heard uttered in the teeth of truth. To say that it is the genius of the Romish Church to conceal nothing of her doctrines or her history, is much the same as if you should say that it is the genius of fire not to burn, or of the thick clouds not to veil the light. I shall not open the pit of abominations in the casuis- try of the Jesuits ; I shall not detail the catalogue of crimes and perjuries, absolved and pardoned before- hand ; the dispensation to assume any heretical reli- gion for the advancement of the Church's interest. On the general topic of concealment in the Romish Church, it might be sufficient to say that an ecclesiasti- cal system, which admits the policy and propriety of direct lies in its support, must a fortiori use the less ob- noxious stratagem of concealment, as is well known hath always been the custom, whenever occasion de- manded it. " It is very well known," says Peter Ju- rieu, " that the court of Rome, being governed by the most refined politics, makes no collection of pieces that may prove hurtful or dangerous to itself; or if any such were, would not, however, permit them to be made public." Hence, the eminent historian Ranke could not obtain admission to the records of the Vati- can for the abundant materials there gathered for a history of the Popes. The Cardinal Pallavicini in his history of the Council of Trent, confesses that the Ro- mish Church mixes in her conduct carnal and worldly policy; that her present government is framed by the PIOUS LYING. 51 rules of this world, and that this is according to the intention of Christ. That it is not God's intent to root out of our minds our natural inclinations ; men are naturally fond of pleasure, wealth and honor, and averse from poverty ; and it is fit to accommodate the laws and form the Church according to these inclina- tions, and that it is a maxim not absolutely true that evil is not to be suffered, to the end that good may come of it. Under the head of opposition to learning this topic will receive additional illustration. I need not go to the pages of history to confute Bishop Hughes' positioa as to the genius of concealment in the Romish Church ; that Church, even in our own country has done it abundantly already ; and I only wonder at the boldness of such a position, when I remember the process of expurgation resorted to in the school-books of the public schools in this city ; the expurgation of all passages and lessons, though of an historical accu- racy beyond question, which recorded any facts or sen- timents illustrative of sin or error in the Romish Church. I hold in my hand one of these blackened ^nd expur- gated school-books ; and I ask you if this midnight page is evidence of a disposition to conceal nothing in the doctrines or the history of the Church ? Perhaps this page is intended for the minds of the boys and girls as a symbol of the fearless and open diffusion of knowledge. You see that by means of a lavish use of printer's ink, the types are, as the printers would say, thrown into pi ; now whether it is the genius of concealment, or the genius of truth, that has had a finger in this pie, I leave you to judge for yourselves. But perhaps you will ask, What is the nature of the disastrous lesson which it was thought necessary to 52 FIRST LECTURE. conceal from the minds of the children ? It is simply the character of Martin Luther, from the pen of the great historian, Dr. Robertson. Pass on a few pages farther, and you find two leaves immutably stuck together. Perhaps this is designed for the minds of the children as a symbol of the union of Church and State, and how difficult it is, not to say impossible, when they once come together, to pluck them asunder ; for you see it is impossible to get these two leaves apart, and in point of fact it is the use of civil law enforcing Church opinion that hath stuck them together. But what is the lesson so ignobly im- prisoned between them, and which the genius of a sys- tem that hath nothing to conceal, has thought fit to shut out with a brush of paste from the light for ever 1 Ah, if Rome had never employed anything but paste brushes and printer's ink against the truth, this lesson would have had no existence, no need of expunging. It is the historian Hume's account of the character and martyrdom of Archbishop Cranmer ! Perhaps, since Bishop Hughes avers that Rome disavows the union of Church and State, the sticking together of these two leaves is an emblem of the manner in which that union operates to keep the light from the people. Turn we now a few pages farther, and what have we here under the blanket of darkness, as Shakspeare might call it ? It is a passage in the speech of the Earl of Chatham, in which there is the occurrence of the phrase, Popish cruelties. Now it is not the genius of the Romish Church to conceal anything of her doctrines or her history ; and perhaps this blot in the page, making such an impassable gulf in the stream of Lord Chat- ham's eloquence, is an emblem of the evil consequen- r» I V 6 L Y 1 N G . 53 lies of schism in splitting and destroying the unity of the Church. But all this is plain prose ; let us see the effect of the genius of fearless non*concealment upon poetry. Here is a sweet lesson from that sweet poem " The Traveller," by the poet Goldsmith ; he is de- scribing the beautiful scenery and the people of Italy, and it is in this poem, you remember, that he says that man seems the only growth that dwindles there ; but that is not one of the lines blotted out ; that has no- thing about the Church or the Pope, or the church ceremonies in it. The lines are as follows : Though grave, yet trifling ; zealous, yet untrue ; And e'en in penance planning sins anew. Now really this crusade of sectarian expurgation against these poor inoffensive school-books is such a laughable freak of intolerance and folly, that it is almost impossible to make a serious business of it There is but one thing more wonderful than the folly, and that is, that such an insult upon the good sense, the liberality, the noble public spirit, and the freedom and fearlessness of truth, which have here- tofore marked the people and the schools of this city, should have been suffered to be perpetrated. Where were the Protestant Trustees of our Schools, or rather where was the precious material of common sense and an enlightened conscience, that men could lend themselves to the adoption of such a measure ? What a laughing-stock, or object of suspicious wonder, was presented in these mutilated pages to the minds of the children ! And if you say that a new edition gf the school book, omitting the blackened passages en- tirely, is now placed in the schools, this does not mend 4 54 FIRST LEGTUR E. the matter at all. It is a singular state of things in- deed, when a book that has received the approbation of all sects, and been used for years without fault in the schools throughout the nation, is to be interdicted in this city, and an expurgated edition prepared purpose- ly to meet the caprices of sectarian prejudice. If the genius of Romanism may come in to expunge and con- ceal whatever is not accordant with its notions, so may every other sect that may be represented in the ten thousand varying shades of opinion in the families of this city. If this 'be the case, put up your painting in some public square, and invite every interested indi- vidual to come and set a black mark upon that shade or feature in it, which does not suit either his own fan- cies or the caprices of his priest; and then let the painting so impartially daubed by the genius of uni- versal sectarianism, be engraved and stereotyped for the discipline and instruction of your children. The maxim that to lie and deceive becomes a duty in the service of the Church, hath been at the founda- tion of the vastest acts of perfidy performed during the middle ages. The Popes acted upon it when they as- serted the claims of St. Peter, and when they released men from all obligations to keep their promises to here- tics. The Councils acted upon it, when, as in the case of John Huss, they excommunicated and delivered over to the secular arm to be burned, those whose safe- ty had been promised. Both by Popes and Councils all moral obligations were confounded and dissolved. If a debt were contracted to heretics, there was no ob- ligation to pay it ; pity but the State of Mississippi had lived in those blessed days ! With what perfect ease and freedom she might have thrown herself back PIOUS LYING. 55 upon the past decisions of the Church, and told her creditors, You are all heretics, and we owe you nothing; for repudiation towards heretics is piety to the Church. " Fanaticism, 55 remarks Mr. Prescott in his history of Ferdinand and Isabella, " is so far sub- versive of the most established principles of morality, that, under the dangerous maxim, ' For the advance- ment of the faith, all means are lawful,' which Tasso has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly derived from the spirits of hell, it not only excuses, but enjoins the commission of the most revolting crimes as a sacred duty.' 5 " Be assured," said Pope Martin V., " that thou sinnest mortally, if thou keep thy faith with here- tics." " Be it known," said Pope Gregory IX., " to all w T ho are under the jurisdiction of those, who have openly fallen into heresy, that they are free from the obligations of fidelity, dominion, and every kind of obe- dience to them by whatever bond or means they are tied to them, and how securely soever they may be bound." " Justly therefore," remarked a Romish Bishop, u were some heretics burnt by the most so- lemn judgment of the Council of Constance, although they had been promised security." The Council of Constance itself declared that heretics w T ho had come under a safe conduct, should, notwithstanding, be pun- ished, and that whoever had given the safe conduct should not be obliged to keep his promise. So John Huss, coming to the Council under a safe conduct from the Emperor, was condemned to the stake and publicly burnt. Now if the Romanists in this country w 7 ish to strike out this historical fact from the school books of our children, it is like tearing down one of the warning beacons on a ledge of rocks in the highway of the ocean. Our next topic in the course of this investigation 56 FIRST LEO T U R E. will be the nature and consequences of the union of Church and State, in the employment of civil penal- ties for the compulsion of the conscience in religious things. This perhaps will be the most interesting part of our investigation, involving as it does the nature of religious liberty, the course which religious hierarchies have taken against it, and manifesting more tangibly, as we shall be able to do, the precise mixture of civil and ecclesiastical power in the middle ages, in the manner in which it was felt by the people. We shall see the monarchical tendencies of Popery, and its op- position to republicanism. We shall have occasion to trace distinctly the origin, nature and exercise of the dreadful power of excommunication. Our subject will take us into the literature of the middle ages, and we shall have occasion to look upon the great faces both of Chaucer and Dante. We shall see the structure of that curious body of scholastic learning, the canon law, and we shall see how religious truth could live, and yet be kept perfectly distinct from any influence whatever on the conduct. LESSONS FROM OUR REVIEW, And now 1 shall close with an enumeration of some of the lessons taught, and to be taught, in our review. I think we see distinctly the dreadful conse- quences of a disparity in the clergy, the inevitable strife, ambition, and persecution, growing out of the creation of hierarchical dignities and dignitaries, ris- ing one above another, with an accompanying corrup- tion of the clergy, till like a worldly Babel they pierce the skies, and bring down the lightning of heaven. I think we see also, as we shall develope more fully in the next lecture, the dreadful consequences of LESSONS FROM OUR REVIEW. 57 mingling the temporal and spiritual authority, and the necessity of guarding against all approximation to the same. If in this country one particular sect should get the patronage of the State to the exclusion of others; if those religious offices in the power of the government, such as the chaplaincies of our Navy, and of our military schools and establishments, should be so bestowed as to favor a particular sect, this would be an approximation to a state religion ; and the be- stowment of favors in any State is never very far sepa- rated from the infliction of penalties. I think we also see very clearly the universality and disastrous conse- quences of the lust of power, and how infinitely worse it is in the souls of Ecclesiastics than in Seculars. It invades and usurps God's province in the conscience. I do not now think of any monarch or State that ever, if not urged by ecclesiastical councils or influences, burnt a man to death even for the most atrocious crimes ; I say, I do not think of any instance, though such may be produced ; but the moment an Ecclesias- tic becomes inflamed with ambition, he seems to take naturally to the fire, and in the midst of it he places his victim, though the only crime is a difference of religious opinion. I think it is clear also that it is much more safe for the liberties of mankind that there should be divers religious sects watching one another, than that terrible overwhelming unity, which crushes all heresies by power, and all liberty of opinion with them. Better it were that every Christian should be in himself a separate sect, than the Church of Christ a compulsory Despotism. It was indeed this remorse- less, despotic, persecuting unity to which our blessed Lord himself was sacrificed, to prevent a schism in the 4* 58 FIRST LECTURE. Jewish Church. But under whatever form, save that of love to Christ, and a participation in his Spirit, this unity is vaunted, it becomes an unhallowed, worldly, vain, ambitious boast. By this it came about that men came to be called Church-men rather than Christ's-men, rather than Christians. It was this conversion of the Church into a great lordly Hierarchy, instead of a kingdom not of this world. By this change Christ is displaced by the Church ; this great figment of unity and aggrandize- ment, the Church 5 occupies that place in men's minds which Christ alone should occupy ; the glory of the Church and the power of the Church come to be quite another thing than Christ meant should constitute the honor of his kingdom. The glory of the Church and the power of the Church are sought, not as a means of honoring Christ, and spreading the blessings of his salvation, but as a means of worldly distinction and aggrandizement. Nothing can be clearer than this, that the glory with which Christ would clothe his Church on earth is not that of title, distinction, splen- dor, grandeur, power, hierarchical unity, but that of adding to it continually such as should be saved. It is the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, which Christ has made requisite, a unity w T hereby every joint in the whole body compacted together maketh and ministereth increase and strength in the spirit of love. It is the violation and destruction of this unity, it is genuine schism and division, when one party of be- lievers, distinguished by some self-erected and conse- crated sign, says to another party that will not assume that sign, You are not of the true Church. It is just as if the hand should say to the foot, Because thou art not the hand, therefore thou art not qf the body. UNCHURCHING MAXIMS. 59 By God's great mercy we have in this country, un- til of late, been perfectly free from the stir and bluster of these unchurching maxims, although it was the brutum fulmen, no bishop no church, that drove our forefathers from Europe. And now you may think it strange that we hate so bitterly this sleeping assump- tion. But we know its fruits. It is a pithy proverb, A^burnt child dreads the fire. You may say it is harmless. Yes, at present it is a harmless insult ; but it has the capacity of persecution, and we cannot abide it, even sleeping. A black snake, a cobra capella, stiffened with the cold, is harmless ; but that is no reason why we should have such venomous reptiles at the door-posts of our houses. By and by, when the sun shines on them, they will creep into our parlors, they will hide beneath our pillows, they will sting us while we sleep. One would have thought, if a badge of exclusion must be taken, a shibboleth that would debar from the Christian name and privileges all who could not or would not pronounce it, it would have been either some doctrine clearly revealed in the New Testament, or, if a matter of discipline and government, some point set forth as clearly. Now instead of this, to take an eccle- siastical dignity and dignitary, such as men of all par- ties acknowledge is not to be found in the New Testa- ment, nor even in the whole first century of Christian- ity, and to make the possession or acknowledgment of that dignity essential to the name and essence of a Christian Church, and consequently to the name and privileges of a Christian, is an assumption of arrogance and bigotry, of which the bare statement, one would think, is sufficient to show the intrinsic wickedness and 60 FIRST LECTURE. absurdity. And yet, such is the arrogance of those, who pretend that a diocesan bishop is essential to the existence of a Christian Church. They take that which is not to be found in the divine constitution of the church by Christ and his Apostles, and breaking off the signets with which the Saviour hath sealed the as- semblies of his people, as branches of the True Vine, they affix a seal of their own invention, and thereupon and thereto attach the bull of excommunication to those who abide by Christ's signet and reject theirs. The men who resisted these pretensions in the face of rigorous penalties and of death itself, and who fled to this country for freedom to worship God, were, as has been powerfully delineated in a late magnificent ora- tion, a lofty, a heroic race; and now to revive those pretensions would be to revive in theory the very intol- erance from which our noble forefathers fled into the wilderness. It is to execute a bill of attainder on them, their principles, and their memories ; it is for us, here in this land, the plenty and the blessings of which we reap as the fruit of their unbending integrity of con- science, to enact, in reference to their character, the same unchurching, intolerant proscription, which drove their bodies out of England. THE NOBLENESS AND SACREDNESS OF OUR ANCESTRAL REPUTATION. And we may ask, where in all the world hath it been known that a nation hath thrown scurrility and contempt on the virtues of its ancestry ? Men have often feigned an ancestral origin more glorious and more virtuous than it really w r as; the ancient Greeks OUR NOBLE ANCESTRY. 61 would enshrine heroes as demi-gods, and common ad- venturers as heroes, when these stood at the fountain and birth of states and empires ; and ever after, as the stream grew wider and farther from its source, they made that source more honorable and glorious ; they magnified it in fable, ennobled it in history, surrounded it with the flame of undying poetry; but never hath the living stream of a nation's existence turned back to cast reproach upon its mountain origin. And here in this republic, for any party to do this, in regard to the noble principles and virtues of our Puritan Ancestors, is a piece of base recreancy, that every man who has a spark of patriotism in his being, must ineffably scorn. The party influences, or the sectarian religious influen- ces, that could induce men so to belie the noble part of their nature, are a gangrene in our system, which if it be not cured, eradicated, will destroy all patriotic and manly virtue among us. The memory of the early colo- nists of this country of every sect and persuasion, is a possession to be guarded and cherished not by a party or a church, but by the whole United States of Ameri- ca. The colonists of Georgia, of Virginia, of Mary- land, of New York, of Rhode Island, of Massachusetts, of all New England, whatever peculiarities of habit and opinion they brought with them, are the ancestors of this great nation, mingled their blood in the revolu- tion ; their united memory of character and noble deeds, constitutes the ancestral escutcheon of our origin ; and despised be the man, whether he be now a foreigner or native, who shall endeavor to cast a blot upon any part of it. If there have been imperfections, if there have been intolerance, if there have been a mistak- en religious faith, if there have been something of 62 FIRST LECTURE. the narrowness and superstition which beclouded and darkened all Europe, and out of which a part of our ancestry issued like lightning from the thunder-cloud, nay, like morning stars from the common darkness of nature, let it not be dw T elt upon to their discredit. Let us rather, like Shem and Japheth, go backward with the beautiful garment of filial veneration, and not, like accursed Ham, go out to uncover a father's nakedness. Whatever would lead a man to do this marks him for the scorn of his race ; and above all, if it be sectarian bitterness that would do it, it shows the mean and in- fernal quality of that ingredient ; for I had almost as soon a man would have burned my father at the stake because of his religious opinions, as cast a reproach upon his virtues, or endeavor to blot out their memory for the same cause. I am glad of the opportunity plainly and openly to say these things : and here I would add my tribute of thanks to Bishop Hughes, that he has put the Puritan Pilgrims and the Catholic Pilgrims of this country in the same place of grateful recollection in the heart of their descendants, that they fled from the bitterness of a religious persecution. We honor the memory of Sir George Calvert, the noble pre- siding spirit of the infant colony at St. Mary's, in Maryland, as w r e do the memory of the tenants of the Mayflower, for he did, in an intolerant age, what no other government in the wide world would do, put all Christian sects by law on an absolute equality. He went in some respects farther than the Puritans, for he rose superior even to the prevailing genius of his own Church. I say, we esteem it our privilege to honor his memory. Dear to our hearts is the memory of all the virtuous OUR NOBLE ANCESTRY. 63 colonists, but dear especially is that noble band, who fled to the savages and wild beasts of this wilderness, for freedom to worship God ! Dear is the memory of the first Puritan Church, and the first Puritan minis- ter of the colony of Massachusetts Bay ; a church though without a bishop, yet as truly a Church of Je- sus Christ, as the w T hole persecuting establishment of England ; and a minister, though superior to the figment of the Apostolical succession, and though the hand of no earthly prelate ever w r as laid upon him, yet as di- vinely ordained a minister of Jesus Christ, as any bishop, from the first Pope to the present moment. I am sure that I speak the feelings of every patriotic and liberal mind in this country, when I say that the mem- ory of our Puritan ancestors is a possession of which the whole nation should be proud and jealous. Our boast is not that we deduce our birth, From loins enthroned, and rulers of the earth ; But higher far'our proud pretensions rise, The sons of fathers passed into the skies ! We boast to have descended from an ancestry, who amidst persecution discovered and carried out the prob- lem, the possibility and the blessedness of which we, their descendants, are demonstrating to the whole world, a problem which we believe to be intimately connected with the possession and preservation of lib- erty for all mankind, A Church without a Bishop, and a State without a King. {At the conclusion of the Lecture, the Choir sung the following Kymn, written for the occasion.] THE PILGRIM'S LEGACY. The May-Flower, on New England's coast, has furl'd her tatter- ed sail, And through her chafed and moaning shrouds December's breezes wail, Yet on that icy deck, behold ! a meek but dauntless band, Who, for the right to worship God, have left their native land ; And to a dreary wilderness this glorious boon they bring, X< A church without a bishop, and a slate without a king " Those daring men, those gentle wives — say, wherefore do they come ? Why rend they all the tender ties of kindred and of home ? *Tis Heaven assigns their noble work, man's spirit to unbind ;— They come not for themselves alone — they come for all mankind ; And to the empire of the West this glorious boon they bring, "A church without a bishop, and a state without a king" Then, Prince and Prelate, hope no more to bend them to your sway, Devotion's fire inflames their breasts, and freedom points their way, And, in their brave hearts' estimate, 'twere better not to be, Than quail beneath a despot, where a soul cannot be free ; And therefore, o'er the wintry wave, those exiles come to bring <( A church without a bishop, and a state without a king." And still their spirit, in their sons, with freedom walks abroad, The BIBLE is our only creed, — our only monarch, GOD ! The hand is raised — the word is spoke — the solemn pledge is given, And boldly on our banner floats, in the free air of heaven, The motto of our sainted sires, and loud w T e'll make it ring— tc A church without a bishop, and a state without a king" SECOND LECTURE- INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT. There is a disposition in some quarters to regard eve* ry development of the nature of Romanism, as deline* ated in the pages of history, with the reproach of illibe- ral zeal or bigotry. We are sometimes told that we have heard often enough that the Catholics burnt John Huss, and the Calvinists Servetus, and that what we need is not to determine who did wrong in time past, but wherein is the security against its repetition in the fu- ture. And pray, how can we possibly learn to secure ourselves against its repetition in the future, but by knowing under what influences, in what circumstances, by what bodies or characters, it was committed in the past 1 For this purpose we must go into the depths and details of history ; in regard to religious persecu- tion, we must know who did it, and what for, by what motive, under what influences ; and as there is nothing so intensely interesting as the history of religious per- secution and of religious liberty, so there can be nothing more instructive to mankind. It is sometimes said that experience, like the stern lights of a ship, only serves to illumine the path that has been passed over. This is terribly true, if we are in the ship ourselves ; but if we are tracing the chart to find our right course from 66 SECOND LECTURE. the experience of others, then we wish that every sunk- en rock and dangerous shallow should be marked ; we want them marked before us, from the experience of those who have seen them only in the path that has been passed over, or who perhaps have made shipwreck upon them. That is the light of history, and that the way to use it ; and therefore the charge of bigotry against those who would look narrowly into the nature of the Romish Despotism, and put light-houses upon those fierce jagged reefs, where lie the hulks of so many splendid and costly argosies, is illiberal in the extreme. If Bishop Hughes may make researches into the middle ages, and come to us with the astounding discovery that it is to the Despotism of the Papacy that we owe whatever of civil liberty we now possess, I claim the privilege of examining those same ages, and tracing, for my own satisfaction, the steps of the Apostolical succession, by which the greatest and purest liberty in the world has come to us here in America, not, as we had supposed, from the struggles of our forefathers against monarchical and prelatical oppression, but straight down from the most depraved, hypocritical, and unalloyed despotism in Europe. I am sure such a discovery of our parentage in the middle ages is worth looking after. If, also, our republican practice of re- presentation can be found in their utter rejection of the people from all share in the choice of their ecclesiasti- cal rulers, in the appointment of Bishops by Monarchs, or by the Pope, and in the election of the Supreme Pontiff by the College of Cardinals, let us also trace that amazing fact. Or if our habits of free deliberative discussion can be found in conclaves that met to delibe- rate on the best method and material for forging chains INTRODUCTION. 67 for the people ; in the councils of the Lateran, or the council that deliberated on the question whether faith was to be kept with heretics, and then put John Huss and Jerome of Prague into the flames, and condemned John Wickliffe's poor mouldering bones to be dug up and burned, and the ashes thrown into the Trent ; let us have the pedigree ; and if we have wandered away from the paths of light in the Middle Ages, let us try and grope our way back again through the darkness of the Reformation. It might be recommended to the genius that made these discoveries, to consider the question whether Jefferson himself had not been search- ing the records of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, when he wrote the Declaration of American Indepen- dence ; there is no reason why that immortal docu- ment should not be found amidst the unequalled free- dom of those ages, as well as our Saviour's Sermon on the Mount, amidst their benevolence and immaculate morality. In truth, if any original mind will make such discov- eries, it compels us to follow him ; we cannot resist it, any more than we could avoid going to see the Ark of Noah, if it should be brought into one of the New York Dry Docks for exhibition. We are not therefore to be blamed for following Bishop Hughes into the middle ages ; and if while our instructor is explaining to us the uses of fulminating thunder, we read also a guide- book that describes the consequences of its explosions ; if, while he points us to a huge bomb-shell and tells us it was the nest-egg of liberty, we see it in the guide-book knocking whole cities to pieces and destroying thou- sands of wretched people at once w T ith its missiles ; we are perfectly right to come to the conclusion that such 68 SECOND LECTURE. thunder and such bomb-shells of freedom were better suited to the dark ages than to ours. If, when he leads us to the cave of Giant Pope, and tells us to observe the footsteps of civil liberty coming out of it, we, on looking narrowly, find there are many footsteps going in, but none returning, and that the cave is a vast cata- comb of bones and human ashes, I am sure we are very wise in telling Bishop Hughes that we will put our liberties somewhere else for safe-keeping. If he tells us to note the genuine republicanism of the Pope, and the very great aversion of the Church of Rome to the union of Church and State, we shall tell him that our native republicanism is quite good enough, and that we do not wish to have our veins opened, and any such ecclesiastical ingredients injected into them. Our tree of liberty stands, a native tree, and any graft from the trunk of Popish Republicanism seems to us very suspi- cious ; at all events we are sure that as our tree of liberty did not spring from the roots of the Hierarchical Despotism, so it cannot flourish under any of its dark shadows. We find that we feel the effect of those shadows first of all, there, where the baleful gloom is most pernicious, in the public schools of our children, and that they keep out not only the element of pure historic truth, but the light of heaven ; but as long as the country lasts, we will have those two things in our schools, Impartial History,, and the Word of God. By God's blessing we will have the sun and the air upon our Tree of Liberty as long as the world stands. UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 69 UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. III. Our third point of investigation is the alliance between the civil and ecclesiastical power, or in other words, the union of Church and State. On this point we have to go back to the combined civil and ecclesiastical constitution of the Roman Empire. The pontifical offices in that constitution were many and important. The highest of them were united with various civil dignities in the persons of the Emperor, the nobles, the senators and leading men of the State. Here w r as a vast politico-ecclesiastical hierarchy, against which the simplicity of Christianity was op- posed in every point. In this opposition, so far as the union of Church and State was concerned, the infant kingdom of Christ grew up, till the Emperor Constan- tine took it under his protection, and exercised a pow- er over it similar to that which as Roman Emperor he had always been wont to exercise over the religion of Paganism. He took the Christian C hurch into a strict alliance with the Roman State, and combined in his own person, as King Henry the Eighth did first in England, the highest ecclesiastical and civil authority. He could no longer indeed be himself a Prie st, and in establishing by law the Christian religion, he did in ef- fect impose the first limitation on the imperial authority. It w r as the first legal acknowledgment of any right in a subject apart from the control of the Emperor, when the Emperor himself was excluded from the right of administering the sacraments of the Christian Church. At the same time, in that establishment by law, he made himself the Supreme Head of the Church of Christ on earth, assumed to himself an authority which 5* 70 SECOND LECTURE. Christ alone possesses over his Church, and taught that Church to look to and trust in an earthly head as its protector. From this measure and this period is to he traced the mixture and confusion of spiritual and tem- poral power, which continued, with but little interrup- tion, for more than fourteen centuries; from this mea- sure is to be traced the assumption, openly, by the Church of Christ, of the characteristics of a kingdom of this world ; from this measure is to be traced the al- most boundless wealth and power of the Church as a worldly kingdom/ and the consequent ambition, cor- ruption and utter wickedness of the whole body of the clergy throughout Christendom. But you will remark that this measure could not have been adopted, this alliance could not have taken place, had not the Church before that period begun to assume the characteristics of a worldly hierarchy. Had the Church of Christ retained its primitive sim- plicity, Constantine, on becoming a Christian, would have found nothing in Christianity to take to an alliance with the State, except its religious spirit and obligations. He would have become one of a com- munity of Christians, who would have received him, as any other immortal being, into Christ's simple fold, but would have said to him, in respect to all worldly alliance or patronage of the State, Just let us alone, and simply give to us the liberty to ex- tend our religion, and the same privileges, and no greater, which all the subjects of the Roman Empire enjoy, and we ask no more ; we reject everything else, and we render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which are God's. But instead of this, the Church was already prepared, UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 71 when Constantine embraced Christianity, to assume the form of a vast organized, formidable hierarchy, with its ambitious degrees, its grades of power and grandeur rising one above another, its diocesan sees, with ecclesiastical divisions corresponding with the political divisions of the Empire, and contending for the supremacy, its gorgeous rites, its judicial courts^ its corporate properties, its convocations and its coun- cils. The Emperor Constantine, in incorporating this great institution by law, and placing himself at the head of it, in legalizing its courts, its possessions, its authorities, in exempting its higher clergy from secu- lar jurisdiction, and in compelling the magistrates to enforce its judicial edicts, did in fact assume to himself a mighty power, which before he did not possess. Nay, he may be said to have created a new worldly power, investing himself with the supremacy in it; taking, as it were, the mould made ready to his hands in the ec- clesiastical hierarchy, and pouring into it the element, which was to convert it from the spiritual kingdom of Christ into a consolidated body of combined spiritual and temporal power. It is true that there was not the full organization already existing; but the^tendencies in full there cer- tainly were, the prefigurings, the indications, the sug- gestions of such a system ; and the mind of Constan- tine was too acute and too quick not to note what would be of such vast utility to the consolidation of his Empire. There were potential ambitious tendencies in the Church, powerfully fostered by grades of author- ity, which only needed the wand of power in the hands of the Imperial Magician to touch them, and there should stand forth a vast Ecclesiastical Monarchy, the 72 SECOND LECTURE, very counterpart of the Empire, a rib out of its side, but ready to advance from a dependent monarchy in alliance, to an absorbing despotism in itself, that should cover and subdue the world. Alas ! the Church her- self had prepared herself for the indignity and misery of being wooed and won by the allurements of earthly pomp and splendor to a legalized establishment of alliance with the State. Instead of the Bride the Lamb's wife, the State's Mistress had made herself ready ; and the Emperor Constantine, for his part, knew no better, than to believe the alliance perfectly lawful and just. The best that can be said of it is that it was a marriage of convenience and not of love, on both sides; and it resulted, in the course of ages, as most marriages of selfishness and convenience do, in misery to both parties. Yet the Emperor Constantine was a great gainer; the union brought with it a vast addition to his reputation, his authority, his influence. His Ecclesiastical Bride had, to say the least, a mag- nificent dowry of prelacy and superstition to put at his command. He relinquished nothing of his power over the Heathen world, but he created and assumed a new power in the Christian world, and he saw plainly that it was for his interest greatly to increase that power. THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST UTTERLY FORGOTTEN. From this time forward the idea of the separation be- tween the spiritual and temporal power is more and more lost sight of and forgotten. In the Christianity of the New Testament, and in the early Church, it is an evident and simple element of Christian existence, and ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION FORGOTTEN. 73 of the Christian institutions. From the time of Con- stantine it goes out of being, and the effort of the Ro- mish Church, from the period of her acknowledged su- premacy, becomes, more and more clearly and indispu- tably and without concealment, the possession and con- centration of supreme and independent power, both spiritual and temporal, within herself. In this sense, then, it may be said that the Romish Church, at the time of its most uncontrolled despotism over men's lib- erties, disavowed the union of Church and State, be- cause she arrogated to herself t the possession of all power in both, because she said within herself, I am the State, and from me all temporal as well as spiritual power flows. But if this assumption could not be car- ried out to the full, the Romish Church, compelled to content herself with something low T er, always deemed lawful and right whatever union of Church and State might enable her to carry forward her purposes. She never denounced that Union, except so far as it lessened her own power ; she always maintained that union if it might increase her power ; and she only left it, or repudiated it, in order to rise superior to it, in order herself to control the State. Rome for example, in the very vigorous language of Campbell on the clerical claims of authority over the secular powers, "Rome always asserted resolutely, and in most cases success- fully, the clergy's right of exemption from being taxed by the secular powers ; but it was in order to slip into the place of those powers, and assume the prerogative of taxing them herself. This, though always contro- verted by temporal rulers, she so effectually secured, that Sovereigns, in any remarkable exigenc^, especially when they could plead some holy enterprise, such as a 74 SECOND LECTURE. crusade for the massacre of infidels or heretics, were fain to recur to the Pope, as the easiest and surest way to obtain the assistance of their own clergy. This also gave the Pope an easy method of bribing princes to his side, when he wanted to destroy or mortify any adverse power. It was his usual game to play the bishop against the king ; but this, when his subalterns proved mutinous, he could successfully reverse, and play the king against the bishop." In this place it is, that in furtherance of our ar- gument, I may rpost conveniently and appropriately add, what ought not to be omitted, some notice of the famous scheme prepared in the Council of Trent for the reformation of secular persons and authori- ties. The whole chapter of thirteen decrees shows perhaps more perfectly and conclusively the nature of the Romish claims, and the mixture of civil and ecclesiastical power in the middle ages, than any other document in history. The council, confident that princes will acquiesce, and cause due obedience to be rendered to the clergy, admonishes them before other things to oblige their magistrates, delegates, and other temporal lords to render their pastors that obedi- ence, which those princes themselves are bound to per- form to the Sovereign Pontiff; and for this purpose anew enforces whatever has been decreed by the sacred canons and the imperial laws in favor of ecclesiastical immunities, which ought to be observed by all under pain of anathema. Some of the decrees were as fol- lows, namely : That ecclesiastical persons may not be judged in a secular court, not even on plea of public utility, nor however doubtful may be their clerical title. That in causes spiritual of matrimony, heresy, patron- ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION FORGOTTEN. 75 age, beneficial, civil, criminal and mixed, over persons and goods, howsoever belonging to the ecclesiastical court, the temporal judges shall not intermeddle, nor any appeal to the secular magistrate be suffered. That neither the emperor, kings, nor any prince whatsoever, shall make edicts or constitutions, in what manner so- ever, concerning ecclesiastical causes or persons, nor meddle with their persons, causes, jurisdictions or tribu- nals, no, not in the Inquisition ; but shall be bound to offer the secular arm to the ecclesiastical judges. That the temporal jurisdiction of the ecclesiastics, though with mere and mixed power, shall not be disturbed, nor their subjects drawn to the secular tribunals in causes temporal. That the letters, sentences and citations of judges ecclesiastical, especially of the court of Rome, so soon as they be exhibited, shall be intimated with- out exception, published and executed. There was also an epilogue, admonishing all persons to have in veneration the things which concern the clergy, as pe- culiar to God, and not to suffer them to be offended by others, renewing all the constitutions of popes and holy canons, in favor of ecclesiastical immunity. The study of these decrees may throw much light on the nature of power in the Middle Ages. The ecclesi- astical power could command the aid of the secular; this always constitutes the union of Church and State, and the supremacy, in a dark period, of the clergy. There was a distinction of the kinds of power, into tem- poral and spiritual ; but the clergy confounded them whenever they pleased, and the greater part of the ec- clesiastical power was strictly temporal. " Under the general term spiritual, they had got included the more important part of civil matters, also, affairs matrimo- 76 SECOND LECTURE. nial and testamentary, questions of legitimacy and suc- cession, covenants and conventions, and wherever the interposition of an oath was customary. Add to these that they were the sole arbiters of the rights avowedly civil of the Church and Churchmen, and in everything wherein these had, in common with laymen, any share or concern." It is to the Emperors Justinian and Charlemagne that we are to look for the main sources of such a body of mingled temporal and spiritual authority as is here exhibited. What the effect of it must have been for ages on the morals of the clergy themselves, and the well-being of the people, almost every faithful histo- rian has depicted, in presenting the reality of life as it was, in the events that unfolded it. The independence produced in the Bishops over the inferior clergy, when the right of election was taken from them, and the Bishoprics became regal appointments, tended to make that class the most immoral and despotic of all eccle- siastics. " Sole administrator of the revenues of the church," says an Episcopal historian before quoted, " the Bishop possessed the most ample means of plun- der and usurpation ; while his close connection with political transactions, and the weight which he exerted in the most important deliberations of the State, so in- terwove the temporal with the spiritual office and du- ties, and also added to his legitimate authority so much temporal power, that there were few excesses which he might not hope to commit with impunity. It is therefore without surprise that we find him at one time advancing to battle at the head of his armed attendants, and at another engaged in marauding expeditions, from mo- tives of plunder or private hostility. His habits and VAL5E POSITION OF GUIZOT. 77 taanners alike departed from the ecclesiastical charac- ter, and he grew to resemble the rude barons who sur- Tounded him, both in the extent of his power, and the insolence with which he exercised it." I may add to this what seems the symptom of the highest possible degree of disease in the mingling and confusion of temporal and spiritual things in the Church, the organization of the new religious order of the Knights Templars and others. It has almost always been a question whether the profession of arms were permitted to Christians, or were compatible with sal- vation ; but the Romish Church contrived to make it, as Fleury himself has remarked, a state of perfection, and to join to it the three vows essential to a religious •life. FALSE POSITION OF GUIZOT. It has been said by Guizot that the Church at the period of the incursions of the Northern barbarians upon the Roman empire, was driven to an assertion of the separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, as a means of defence against barbarism. But in point of fact there was no such assertion. The Church never said to the barbarians, " Spiritual and temporal power is distinct, therefore respect our consciences, keep to yourselves, and trench not upon the Churches privileges ; 5J but she said, " The Spiritual power is su- perior to the temporal, which is bound to pay obedience to the Church, and to carry into execution her edicts." And this was an assertion which corresponded with the whole habits of veneration for priestly authority to which these Northern invaders had been accustomed. 6 TO SECOND LECTURE, They could understand much more clearly the voice of the Priesthood when it said, We are your gods, or the omnipotent ministers of God, than if it had said, We hold a spiritual authority totally separate from the temporal, and therefore you must respect us. And let me add, the superstitious multitude were much more ready to obey, as well as clear to understand, the sim- ple despotism of the first principle, than the simple, but, to their minds, unintelligible spiritualism of the last. It is in itself one of the greatest absurdities, and, moreover, it is flatly contradicted by all history, and is a mere groundless dream of generalization, to suppose that a principle which was only acted on and under- stood in the severest early purity of the Christian Reli- gion, and which had been lost sight of and reversed in practice from the time of Constantine, should be suddenly assumed in the midst of increasing corruption, and flashed forth in a preserving light for the protection of the Church from the tide of Northern Barbarism. And yet Guizot has carelessly asserted that the separation of temporal and spiritual power is one of the great benefits which the Christian Church extended to Euro- pean society in the fifth century ! Why ! this benefit would have been nothing less than a revulsion and obliteration of the whole ecclesiastical laws of the em- pire, from Constantine downwards. And yet it is here supposed to have been conferred upon the world amidst the darkness and storms of a deluge of barbarians I But the same writer himself contradicts this position in his very next sentences, when he says, " There already prevailed in the bosom of the Church a desire to sepa- rate the governing and the governed. The attempt was thus early made to render the government entirely inde- FALSE POSITION OFGUIZOT. 79 pendent of the people under its authority, to take pos- session of their mind and life, without the conviction of their reason, or the consent of their will. The Church, moreover, endeavored with all her might to establish the principle of theocracy, to usurp temporal authority, to obtain universal dominion. And when she failed in this, when she found she could not obtain absolute power for herself, she did what was almost as bad ; to obtain a share of it, she leagued herself with temporal rulers, and enforced, with all her might, their claim to absolute power at the expense of the liberty of the sub- ject." What now becomes of Guizot's first hasty as- sertion ? A Church undertaking to confer upon the world the benefit of a separation of the spiritual and temporal power, and yet laboring to usurp temporal authority, to obtain universal dominion, and in order to get a share, at least, of absolute power, leaguing her- self with temporal rulers, and enforcing with all her might their claim to absolute power at the expense of the liberty of the subject ! If any w 7 ho hear me are disposed to doubt that Guizot could have committed such an inconsistency, could so have stultified his own erroneous argument, by so clear an after flashing of the truth, they are requested to turn to pages 56, 57, and 58 of the English edition of his History of Civili- sation, and read them consecutively. There is not a mind in this assembly but will see in a moment the correctness of what I have advanced. It only shows the facility of hasty, unfounded generalization. SO SECOND LECTURE HISTORICAL PROGRESS OF THE ROMISH DESPOTISM, Let us now, in the period from Gregory to Charle- magne, for 200 years, and afterwards down to the Reformation, trace some of the steps of this mixture of spiritual and temporal power, this union of Church and State, and finally this centralization of all power in the Despotism of Rome. One thing is remarkable, you will find, in tracing this union, in pursuing the course of civil and ecclesias- tical power, that almost invariably the point where they meet, the point of union, is a point of enormous oppression and crime. Kept by themselves, and under the Divine law r of mercy to the world, these two sys- tems of influence, like two enormous thunderclouds, may let fall their contents on the earth in a shower of blessings ; but the instant they unite, then the light- ning descends, and where it strikes, burns and shatters. Just so w T ith either the union of spiritual and temporal power in one, or the league of spiritual and temporal power for each other's assistance; the meeting is dis- astrous and destructive to mankind; the thunder roars, and the lightning strikes, burns, and shatters. Nothing can stand against it. The league of civil and ecclesi- astical power has always proved a compound blow- pipe of despotism ; it can burn up everything. The first great manifest instance of this union occurs in the year 751, when Pope Zachary, in order to gain the assistance of France against the Greeks and Lom- bards, assisted the usurper Pepin to depose his master and benefactor Childeric, the King of France, and to possess himself of his crown and kingdom. The Ro- PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 81 mish writers say that Zachary, by his pontifical power, deposed Childeric, and raised Pepin to the throne. Pope Zachary's successor, Stephen IL, confirmed this act of usurpation, and sent a pontifical letter, enjoining Pepin and his kingdom to assist the Pope and the Ro- mans by making war upon the Lombards. Pepin ac- cordingly marched an army over the Alps against the Pope's enemies, and in his turn assisted the Pope to usurp the imperial dominions in Italy. The next year the Lombard king again invaded Rome, and again Pepin marched into Italy, and in conjunction with the Pope conquered his enemy, and bestowed upon him the beautiful Grecian provinces in the north of Italy, which he had wrested from the Lombard king. The motive of Pepin in this unexampled liberality, which laid the foundation of the Pope's temporal dominion, and constituted him a temporal sovereign, was to ex- piate his sins, and especially to secure forgiveness for his crime against Childeric. Thus Pope Stephen and King Pepin became reciprocally guarantees of each other's usurpations, Stephen by his spiritual power, and Pepin by his temporal. Our next step in tracing the progress of this union, brings us to the Emperor Charlemagne. After the death of Pepin, the Lombards again invaded the Pope's territories, and again the Pope sought the monarch's assistance. Charlemagne crossed the Alps with a powerful army, overturned the Empire of the Lom- bards, confirmed the donations of Pepin to the Pope, besides adding some other cities and provinces in Italy to be possessed by the Romish Pontiff in perpetuo. In all this the politic Charlemagne was looking to su- preme dominion, and needing the concurrence of the 82 SECOND LECTURE. Romish Pontiff; the Pope was ready to pay almost any price for such a magnificent increase of the tem- poral possessions of his See ; and accordingly in the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III., Emperor of the West. The donations of the Emperor to the Pope were gained from him partly by means of a forged grant of Constantine to the See of Rome, conveying from that Emperor to the possession of the Church, the city and adjacent territories of Rome. Pope Adrian had sent this forged grant to Charlemagne, who fully believed its authenticity, exhorting him to make restitution of what had formerly been given to St. Peter and the Church. Through all the confusion and uproar in the kingdom of Charlemagne, which for near two centuries followed the death of this great Emperor, the power of the Popes was consolidating, but their dependence on the Imperial Crown still remained. In the year 1073, in the Popedom of Gregory the Seventh, we have another most important era of Pontifical Power, in w T hich the project was conceived, and its execution commenced, of abolishing the connection between the Church and State, by making the State itself dependent on the Church, by centralizing and consolidating uni- versal temporal power in the Roman Pontiff. The foundation was laid by the Seventh Gregory, a most remarkable man, who succeeded in plucking both from the Roman people and the German Emperor all right of interference in the election of the Pope, and fixed that election in the College of Cardinals. One century afterwards another Pope appeared, prepared to carry out the designs formed by the vast ambition of Gregory, and to consummate the Papal Supremacy, temporal TH GPv ESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 83 and spiritual, over all kingdoms, ranks, and conditions of mankind. This was Innocent III. He excommunicated kings, laid kingdoms under interdicts, gave their crowns and possessions to Emperors and Princes, raised the war of persecution against the Albigenses, absolving the sub- jects of the Count of Thoulouse from their oath of alle- giance, excommunicated King John of England, laid the kingdom under an interdict, and declared the throne vacant. He convened the fourth Lateran council, in which all Christendom, East and West, Church and State, submitted to him. In the Crusade against the Albigenses, a pure, simple-minded, holy band of Chris- tians, Innocent III. issued a rescript to all the Lords of the South, to the French king, and to the nation, to take up arms against the Reformers. All the privi- leges, temporal and spiritual, bestowed on those who fought for Jerusalem, were offered to those who would butcher the Albigenses. As to the reproaches and slanders with which it has been attempted to blacken the character of the Albi- genses, as if this would be some excuse for the infernal crusade against them, I simply refer you to the French Historian, Sismondi, for a fair and impartial survey of their doctrines and their virtues. To a person thorough- ly acquainted with the Church of Rome, it would be sufficient seal and testimony to the real excellence of any body of sectarians, that in the plenitude of her power she persecuted them unto tortures and death ; to her, an evident token of perdition, but to them of salvation, and that of God. " Those very persons," says Sismondi, " who punished the sectaries with fright- ful torments, have alone taken upon themselves to 84 SECOND LEC T URE. make us acquainted with their opinions ; allowing, at the same time, that they had been transmitted in Gaul from generation to generation, almost from the origin of Christianity. Nevertheless, amidst many puerile or calumnious tales, it is still easy to recognize the principles of the sixteenth century amongst the heretics who are distinguished by the names of Vaudois or Al- bigeois." Among other things, they charged with idolatry the exposure of images in the churches. Their country was lovely, their community happy and pros- perous. Pope Innocent, the Fanatic of Hell, resolved to exterminate them. Under this Pope grew up the dreadful conflicts be- tween the Guelphs and Ghibellines, which devastated all Italy, the first party supporting the rights of Empe- rors, the second the usurpations of the Pope. Thus the centralization of power went on, the very conflicts that seemed to shake, in the end consolidating it, throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For a season it was the habit of mankind to have a Pope in everything ; centralization and despotism were the prevailing ideas in religion, in philosophy, in politics. The Pope in Rome, Aristotle in philosophy, and the German Emperor in political power, divided the world. But this idea of centralization, unity, despotism, admit- ting in religion no rivals, the pontifical power soon ab- sorbed all others, by the very universality and remorse- less simplicity and consistency of its claims. The great whirlpool of the world admitted inferior eddies to circle within itself, so they did but all tend towards the great devouring centre. Thus the various orders of monks in these centuries were so many legalized licenses to the spirit of sectarianism, that otherwise PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 85 would have burst out in hostility to the Church of Rome. The Popedom acted like the French Govern- ment in sanctioning houses of ill-fame, and gathering a revenue out of them. The pontifical power provided and sanctioned these craters for the lava of opinion, of sectarianism, as so many safety-valves, that, being kept under management and control by the great cen- tral power and intelligence, could let the steam of heresy itself collect and roar and spend its fury, since it all combined to turn the engine of pontifical despot- ism with more resistless, overwhelming force. In point of fact, heresies were broached among these monks, that, if they had been discovered in any organization or state that did not acknowledge the Pope's supreme authority, would have been the signal for the massacre of the inhabitants of whole provinces. Thus, if liberty of opinion must be admitted, the pontifical despotism adopted the policy, as somewhere has been expressed, and I think in Jortin, of " walling them in," and let- ting them play their tricks, like so many lunatics, in. their separate wards, all under the seal and keeping of the Ecclesiastical Empire. This could well be done with all heresies but those that proceeded directly from the word of God, and laid open the enormous vices of the Romish Constitution. Against such as these, extermi- nating crusades could always be launched by the Pope's fulminating thunders. The varieties of philo- sophical opinion could be safely admitted, indeed they were absolutely useful to the Pontifical despotism, as giving employment and exercise to the strongest and acutest minds under its dominion, whose awakening energies would otherwise inevitably have worked upon the glaring abuses of the Church, upon the con- 6* 86 SECOND LECTURE. cealed truths of the Gospel, and upon the ideas of popular and individual freedom. Besides, when any of the vagaries of philosophical opinion went too far, or became absolutely dangerous, the terrors of excom- munication were ready at hand to cut off their sources of life, and convert them into monsters for the world's devouring fear and hatred. I am reminded of the familiar couplet in one of the primers of our child- hood, — r The cat doth play, And after slay. For as a cat does with a mouse before she eats it, so did the Court of Rome in her play with heresies, and with permitted heretics ; when she became tired with them, or when they sought to escape her jurisdiction, but a word and a blow was needed. And if they were scriptural heresies, the heresies of true piety, the whole malignity of that court was let loose upon them from the first discovery. It is quite impossible to follow the course of the Ro- mish Hierarchy in its union of all power, temporal and spiritual, in and under itself, in greater detail, from the point where we have now arrived, for we enter on a sea of miseries. It will be sufficient to indicate, as personifications of the nature and spirit of this Hierar- chy, Pope Gregory IX. in the thirteenth century, un- der whom Death on the Pale Horse rode over the world through the gates of the Inquisition ; Boniface VIII. in the fourteenth, who styled himself universal Lord, in all things spiritual and temporal, who declared in his Bull Unam Sanctam, that there is but one Church of Christ under one head, all out of which PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 87 necessarily perish ; that the swords spiritual and mate- rial are both in the power of the Church, the first to be wielded by the priesthood, the second for the priest- hood by kings and soldiers ; that the temporal power is subjected to the spiritual, otherwise the Church would be a double-headed monster ; that whosoever resists this order of things resists the ordinance of God, and that it is absolutely necessary to salvation that every human being should be subject to the Roman Pontiff. In the person of Alexander VI. in the fifteenth century, de- nominated the Nero of the Popes, with his son Csesar Borgia, we have the climax of combined power and wickedness. Alexander and his son were one and the same incarnation. As the unity of the heart is to be seen in its own central action, as well as in the quality of the blood which it sends to the very extremities of the body, so the perfect nature of the Pontifical despot- ism is to be seen in its play in its own central temporal sovereignty. " The head of the Church/' says the his- torian Ranke, " pursued the interests of his temporal sovereignty with greater ardor and pertinacity than heretofore, and devoted all his activity to their advance- ment. For some time things had strongly tended this way. Formerly, said an orator in the Council of Basle, I was of opinion that it would be well to sepa- rate the temporal entirely from the spiritual power ; but I have learned that virtue without force is ludi- crous ; that the Pope of Rome, without the hereditary possession of the Church, is only the servant of kings and princes." Pope Sixtus IV. pursued this scheme of personal domination ; Alexander VI. completed it. After a description like the dark, stern coloring of Tacitus, of the hell of crime in Italy under Alexander's 88 SECOND LECTURE, despotism, Ranke observes, " there was but one point on earth where such a state of things was possible ; that, namely, at which the plenitude of secular power was united to the supreme spiritual jurisdiction. This point was occupied by Caesar. There is a perfection even in depravity. The complaint arose that the Pope labored for the coming of the kingdom, not of Heaven, but of Satan." Now, I wish you to remark from this review the manner in which the Church of Rome may be said to disavow the union,of Church and State. It is simply thus in the sense of Boniface VIII., " that the temporal power is subjected to the spiritual, otherwise the Church would be a double-headed monster." Wher- ever there has not been this subjection, the Church has sought the loan and use of the temporal power for her purposes ; in a word she has been contented to ally herself with the State, whenever she could not render herself superior to it ; and now, wherever in all the world the Romish Church can employ the arm of the State for her purposes, that union of Church and State will be deemed legitimate and just. Need I point to modern instances ? There are some most marvellously to our purpose. You may take the Sandwich Islands, for example. I would like to ask, What was the violent introduction and estab- lishment of the Roman Catholic religion in those islands, together with the trade in French brandy, en- forced at the mouth of cannon, by French ships-of- w r ar? Was it not the use of the secular arm by the Romish Church to accomplish her purposes ? Was it ever disavowed either by the French Government or the Romish Church ? It was as palpable an instance PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 89 of tyranny in the union of civil and ecclesiastical power, as can be found in the whole history of the middle ages; nor is the use of the secular power any more repudiated now, than it was in those ages. Nor can any man doubt that had our own country been in a position similar to that of the Sandwich Islands with reference to the French Government and the Ro- mish Church, and as w T eak as the Sandwich Islands, precisely the same tyranny would have been exercised upon us. For why should not French priests and French brandy be enforced upon one country as w T ell as another ? We indeed are too strong ; but I am simply showing that the principle, the disposition, the willingness exists, and except by individuals, as in the case of Bishop Hughes, is never, that I am aware of, disavowed. Nor do I think that Bishop Hughes' dis- avowal would have the slightest effect upon his own Church, if that Church should have presented to her an opportunity to establish herself by power. She would have no scruple whatever to use the arm of secular authority in her own behalf. I suppose that she would feel bound to do this by her own spiritual allegiance to the PontifFat her head. If Bishop Hughes disavows it, so much the greater credit to him ; but the disavowal is in the face of the practices and princi- ples of his ow 7 n Church in all past generations. I hope, for one, that the Romish Church in this country will bear him out in this disavowal, will remind him of it, will keep him to it. Other men have disavowed it besides himself; the great Romish ecclesiastical his- torian, for example, the excellent and learned Abbe Fleury, makes the same disavowal, and uncovers w T ith great plainness many of the enormities of the Romish 90 SECOND LECTURE. system ; but his voice has no effect whatever on the Church. Bishop Hughes has denominated the union of Church and State, which in point of fact has characterized the existence of the Romish Church ever since its organi- zation as the supreme universal hierarchy, a historical accident. It is a singular accident, which took 1500 years in happening, and which is still happening every day. He makes the acute remark that if God by his own omnipotence had ordered the affairs of the world differently for 1500 years, those affairs would have happened differently. RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. IV. We come now to the fourth great principle of evil, the employment of civil penalties for the compulsion of the conscience in religious things. This is the most dreadful result of the alliance between the civil and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Were there no other alli- ance, the use of civil penalties by the Church would con- stitute such an alliance. It is vain to say that the Church does not seek such alliance ; if, w T hen the use of civil penalties is offered or rendered possible by the State, the Church avails herself of them, she deliberate- ly unites herself to the State. It is the very principle in common law, that the receiver is one with the thief. And now, in pursuit of this point, I shall show what indeed has already been made manifest, the perfect truth of that popular view of the subject, wherein we are apt to imagine that the Church and the State were two great tyrants, who, if they had kept separate, could not have accomplished much to the detriment of mankind ; and who, for this reason, agreed to unite, for RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. 91 the purpose of more effectually enthralling their com- mon subjects. I agree perfectly with Bishop Hughes, in supposing that at the period when the union of Church and State first took place, it is quite probable, that neither the heads of the State, nor the authorities of the Church, had the slightest anticipation of the ulterior consequences to which it has led. But the am- bition which had already become rife in the Church, and which grew with frightful rapidity after this union, almost immediately laid hold of it as the origin of reli- gious persecution, and the means of unlimited temporal authority and power. At first it is manifest the great bond of union was the legalization of that ecclesiastical tribunal of which I have spoken. It is very clear that such a spiritual tribunal existed by courtesy before the time of the Emperor Constantine. Being by him estab- lished by law, and temporal authority given to it, it be- came a mixed temporal and spiritual judiciary of irre- sistible power. I shall not attempt to trace in detail the history of religious persecution. Everywhere it is the history of the union of Church and State. The Emperor Honorius, in the year 4 14, made a cruel decree against the African Donatists, denominated heretics. The civil magistrate in Africa, fearful of offending the Emperor, by showing any favor to the Donatists, unwilling also to put the law against them in execution, consulted Augustine, who advised him by all means to use the utmost rigor as the best way of converting these schismatics, and of compelling them to come in ; since it was better that some should burn themselves, as they had threatened to do in their own churches, than that they should all burn eternally in hell. It is a me- lancholy truth that Augustine was one of the first ad- vocates for the severe punishment of heretics. In the 92 SECOND LECTURE. year 385 Priscillian, a Bishop in Spain, was by the Emperor, through the persuasions of some Bishops op- posed to him, committed to a civil judge for sentence, and was, with some of his adherents, put to death ; the first instance on record of a criminal prosecution for heresy. The laws of Theodosius against heretics, and for the prohibition of their worship of God according to their own conscience, were of inexorable severity. " The theory of persecution," says Gibbon, " was es- tablished by Theodosius, whose justice and piety have been applauded by the saints ; but the practice of it in the fullest extent, was reserved for his rival and col- league Maximus, the first among the Christian princes who shed the blood of his Christian subjects on account of their religious opinions. Since the death of Prisci- lian, the rude attempts at persecution have been refined and methodized in the holy office, which assigns their distinct parts to the ecclesiastical and secular powers. The devoted victim is regularly delivered by the priest to the magistrate, and by the magistrate to the execu- tioner." The councils of the Church united with the laws of the empire, to establish the dominion of terror and force over men's consciences. Their grand business came at length to be the condemnation and punishment of reli- gious opinion maintained in opposition to the Church. Uniformity of religious opinion was the law of the ec- clesiastical despotism ; the punishment of opinion was the crushing weight of ecclesiastical unity. This mix- ture of spiritual and temporal power was not confined to ecclesiastical courts or bodies. Bishops and other Church dignitaries became Counts, Dukes and Mar- quises, with temporal territory and jurisdiction. " In the acts of the Council of Soissons, about the middle of the RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. 93 ninth century, Bishops are empowered to scourge and beat the peasants and vassals belonging to any of the nobles, when they deserved correction. Thus, say? Fleury, the prelates mingled temporal with spiritual jurisdiction. But they carried their insolence much farther, for about this time they began to claim the power of deposing Jdngs." (Jortin. 4: 501.) From this time downward the path of the Romish hierarchy is almost literally tracked in blood. The history of the Inquisition is a history of war on the part of the Romish Church united with the State against the freedom of religious opinion. This remark- able invention, and the establishment of it in the vari- ous countries of Europe, and its instrumentality in sup- port of the Papal power, constitute the most perfect development of the dreadful influence of the union of temporal and spiritual power against the liberty of man. And this institution, this horrible engine of cruelty, is solely the institution of the Romish Church ; it is the offspring of the combination of temporal and spiritual power in that Church. And yet, in the lan- guage of Bishop Hughes, this combination is simply 61 a historical accident in the annals of the Catholic Church. It happened so ; but if Providence had ar- ranged the outward affairs of the world differently, it would have happened otherwise. " The Inquisition is one of the most tremendous accidents that ever hap- pened to mankind ; the union of Church and State by which this accident happened is itself also an historical accident w T hich was happening for fifteen centuries; but if God had made a different world it would not have happened. The history of the crusades against the Waldenses 94 SECOND LECTURE. and the Albigenses is another of those horrible acci- dents springing from the accidental union of Church and State in the Romish Hierarchy. The proclama- tion of the Crusade by Pope Innocent III., and the army of half a million, under the banner of the Church, to exterminate with fire and sword the poor band of conscientious religionists, are the most infernal acci- dents in history. Such, too, was the massacre of the whole 23,000 people of Beriers. Such, too, was the comprehensive answer of the Romish Abbot who or- dered the assault/when consulted as to the fate of any Romish inhabitants who might be in the city, "Kill all! God will find out who belong to him!" A ferocious expression, which, Croly well observes, passes into a portraiture of the men and their times. These were the accidents of history ; historical accidents these, that make up the body of history for centuries. These tremendous events are, however, the accidents more particularly of the Romish Pontificate ; itself the greatest of all historical accidents. BURNING FOR HERESY JX ENGLAND. We will now pass over to England, and survey one of these accidents there, that it may be seen that they were not confined to the Pontifical court, nor to any part of the Romish Church, nor to any exclusive age in her existence, but were common to all countries and times, where the great historical accident of the Romish Church itself was established. We pass to the land of John Wickliffe, to the reign of Henry the Fourth, who seized the crown by the deposition of King Richard. BURNING FOR HERESY IN ENGLAND. 95 In this usurpation of the throne he was greatly assisted, mark you, by Archbishop Arundel, and being resolutely bent upon securing possession of the crown, by what- ever means, he courted the favor of the Church ecclesi- astics. This could be gained in no more direct way, than by the punishment of the followers of WicklifTe. Their number w T as multiplying so rapidly, that the clergy began to regard the existing laws made to check the growth of heresy inadequate to their object. Whereupon they worked upon the king in representing the advantage he would gain by having a new law for the burning of heretics. Hence, in the year 1401, the bloody statute, called the statute ex officio, was enacted by the English Parliament at the instigation of this Henry the Fourth, set on by the Romish ecclesiastics, authorizing and commanding the bishops to proceed against all persons suspected of being tainted with he- resy. Such as were found guilty, and would not recant, w T ere to be u burned in the sight of all the people, to the intent that this kind of punishment might be a ter- ror unto others." This is one of the most remarkable examples in all history of the union of Church tyranny and State despotism for the destruction of men's liber- ties. We see two bitter usurpations uniting for the same selfish purpose, the support of despotic power ; they seek to accomplish it by the same end, and strengthen each other's ascendency by imprisonment, tortures, and flames. The formation of this statute, by the English Parliament, w r ith the influences under which it was procured, is a historical accident that reads a most terribly instructive lesson to mankind. It was the first time that the records of English juris- prudence were disgraced by a law to burn human be- 96 S E COX D LECTURE. ings for the crime of choosing their own religious opi- nions. This is so amazing an exercise of bigotry and infernal cruelty under the guise of religion, that it is interesting and satisfactory in the highest degree to see the precise motives under which the power and its practice were established, to feel assured that there was no mixture of piety or of conscience in it, but the most diabolical league on record for the support and success of selfishness and crime. The king sought to support his usurpation by the favor of the priests ; the priests sought to support their usurpation by the power of the king ; and both joined in putting men to death for the liberty of conscience. Under this law, William Sau- tre, the pious rector of the parish of St. Osithe in Lon- don, was the first person burned to death in England. In grouping together the points of evil in the gov- ernment of the Church from the fifth to the twelfth century, Guizot observes, that in respect to liberty, two bad principles met together. " The first was a denial of the rights of individual reason — the claim of transmitting points of faith from the highest authority downwards, throughout the whole religious body, with- out allowing to any one the right of examining them for himself. The second vicious principle was the right of compulsion assumed by the Romish Church ; a right, however, contrary to the very nature and spi- rit of religious society, to the origin of the Church itself, and to its primitive maxims." A third evil and tyrannical principle Guizot mentions, that of violent interference with human thought, human lib- erty, private morals, individual opinions, the inward man, the conscience. Now unite these principles, as Guizot declares they w r ere united in the Romish Church, SAUL THE PERSECUTOR. 97 and you have the most perfect, dreadful, remorseless, of all despotisms. You have a despotism that despot- izes and persecutes on principle, and for pretended conscience' sake. Of all fanaticism, that is the most dreadful. " With an anathematizing Deity, an ana- thematized world, and himself safe in the heart of the only Church, the zealot wants nothing that can render him malign and insolent." These are the words of an acute and powerful writer, the author of " Ancient Christianity." The Apostle Paul was an example of this fanaticism before his conversion ; and he was the most terrible enemy of human and religious liberty then in exist- ence. He persecuted the Church of Christ because he verily thought he was doing God service; and he thought himself bound to do it for the consolidation, the unity, of his own hierarchy. St. Paul, before his conversion, was the incarnation of Churchism without religion ; the prophetic incarnation in a Church aban- doned of God, of that zeal for the unity of the Church, that zeal for an Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which after- wards constituted the sole piety of the world for ages, and which flamed over the earth as Paul did over Judea, haling men and women, and committing them to prison, to tortures, to death, because they dif- fered from the established religion — because they would worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience. Doubtless Divine Providence suffered Paul to pass through this remorseless discipline of savage zeal, that when he came out of it, he might have such a horror of religious persecution, such a dread and hatred of zeal without love, and such a spirit of indo- mitable freedom, as should form an example to the world. Accordingly, you see in him an eagle eye to 98 SECOND LECTURE, discern the features of that despotism which even then was beginning to cast its frowning shadows over the cradle of the infant Church. You see in him a spirit of fearless independence, a resistance to oppression, a jea- lousy against those who were coming in privily to spy out the liberty which they had in Christ Jesus, an elec- tric fire of religious freedom, that you see nowhere else. Not another Apostle ever was appointed to utter that great sentence, " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." It was to this man, to whose spiritual sight was unveiled, as he was guarding and praying for the spiritual welfare of Christ's Church — (her spi- ritual welfare, which was all the welfare he cared for, and all the welfare in danger ; and not her temporal power, which he had nothing to do with, and of w r hich she would have enough, if she sought first the kingdom of God and his righteousness) — it was to this man, thus wearing out soul and body in the flame of Christ, love to his people, that was unveiled and bodied forth from out the darkness of the future, the vast tow- ering form of Anti-Christ, sitting in the temple of God, and showing himself that he is God. The soul of the Apostle, for a season, must have quailed before that vision ; it made him ever afterwards a sadder and a wiser man. He saw, filling the w 7 hole horizon of the world, the grim features of the Man of Sin and Son of Perdition ; and again and again did the vision come up to him ; and, when it did, then his prophetic pencil touched into definite light, for others, some of its awful prominences. Then he spake of seducing spirits and doctrines of devils ; of lies in hypocrisy and consciences seared with hot iron ; of forbidding to marry and com- manding to abstain from meats. Then he said, " Let EXCOMMUNICATION. 99 no man judge you in meat or drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath. Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary hu- mility and worshipping of angels." Then he said of those false brethren who came in privily to bring them into bondage : " To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour, that the truth of the Gospel might continue with you." EXCOMMUNICATION — ITS ORIGIN, POWER, AND ABUSE. Connected intimately with this branch of our argu- ment is the history of the origin, nature, and dreadful increase and abuse of the power of excommunication. The simplicity of Church discipline in the primitive Church, you may find in the 18th chapter of Matthew, patient, quiet, affectionate, and, in the last resort, that, namely, of cutting off the offender from the member- ship of the Church, designed for his good and for the purification of the Church, and not for punishment. The first real abuse of this power was when Church censure came to be regarded as a punishment and a compulsory measure, or an assertion of pre-eminence on the part of one Church over another, or of one bishop over others; Even in the time of John, this evil had commenced : " I wrote unto the Church, but Diotre- phes, who loveth to have the pre-eminence among them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his evil deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words ; and, not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and for- biddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the Church" In the case of those who made divisions and offences, contrary to the Gospel, Paul's direction was simply to " avoid them." (Rom. 16, 17.) And again, 100 SECOND LECTURE (2 Thess. 3, 14), a to note such a disobedient man, and have no company with him, that he might be ashamed. Yet, count him not as an enemy, but ad- monish him as a brother." I have already delineated the progress of the mixed civil and ecclesiastical judicature, and the unlimited height of power to which it arose, traced so clearly by Campbell and others, to Paul's simple caution not to go to law before unbelievers, and also to the 18th of Matthew. In a like gradual manner, on such passages as have now been noted, grew up a system of Church punishments, grades of penances, and at length the supreme and awful terrors of excommunication in the middle ages. At first, the measure of excommunica- tion was resorted to principally in reference to those who, in times of persecution, fell away — the lapsi, as they were called; and schisms and controversies took place concerning the treatment of such lapsi. The first instance of an appeal to the civil power in the disci- pline of the Church, was about the year 313, in the case of the Donatists, against whom severe laws were passed by the emperor. When the general councils, supported by imperial power, came to establish posi- tive articles of faith for catholic uniformity, schisms and heresies became frequent, and theological contro- versies became political disputes. Henceforward, ex- communication became a mixed civil and ecclesiastical weapon of dread severity and power. Banishment was connected with it — exclusion from various privileges and offices, and ineffable odium and disgrace. The bishops availed themselves of the arm of the state to put down their enemies; and, in proportion as the morals of the Church became more corrupt, the treat- ment of heretics became constantly more severe. The E X C OM M US I ^ c\ cC (XT- C C &L S a cc