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$:

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES FOR 1887.

CHRISTENDOM:
ECCLESIASTICAL AND POLITICAL, FROM
CONSTANTINE TO THE REFORMATION

By JOHN HODSON EGAR, S.T.D.,
Rector of Zion Church, Rome, N. Y.
Sometime Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Nashotah
Theological Seminary,

NEW YORK :
JAMES POTT & CO., Publishers.
1887.

Copyright, 1887,
By JAMES POTT & CO.

Press of A. G. Sherwood & Co.,
47 Lafayette Place, New York.

CONTENTS.

PAGE.
I. Byzantinism, ••..., <.
II. The Roman Reaction, .... 61
III. The Conversion of the Franks, .... 121
IV. The New Imperialism, .... 175
V. Papalism, ...... 227
VI. Nationalism, ...... 201

PREFACE.

For some years it was my duty and privilege, as
Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Nashotah, to di
rect the studies in that department of the young men
preparing there for the Ministry of the Church. I then
found it both necessary and profitable to trace for them,
as well as I was able, the connection between the Ec
clesiastical and the Political History of the different
periods that came under review. The interest manifested
in these explanations suggested to me that a course of
lectures on this subject might be useful to such of the
intelligent laity as are desirous to inform themselves
about the past history of the Church ; and the design
of writing such a course, when I should have opportu
nity to set about it, gradually grew in my mind.
Other duties, however, prevented any serious attempt
to reali2e this intention, until last year I received the
honor of being appointed the Bishop Paddock Lecturer
for 1887. On being notified of the appointment, it
seemed to me that I could best fulfil it by giving my
lectures this direction; and, having consulted the Dean
of the General Theological Seminary, and received his
opinion that such a course would be within the inten
tion of the Foundation, this book is the result. I had
not the presumption to think (and I told my hearers
so, in the few words with which I prefaced the first
lecture,) that I could add anything to the instruction
which the students of the General Theological Seminary

vi Preface.
receive from their learned professors ; but I hoped that
what I wrote might be useful to some who have not
their advantages, if it should prove readable when in
print. It will be seen from this explanation that the opinions
expressed in these lectures have not been hastily con
ceived, or set forth without consideration.
It has not been thought necessary to give references
for facts which are the common matter of Ecclesiastical
or Secular History. The few that are given upon par
ticular points are to such books as I was able to consult
while writing in my own study.
Rome, N. Y.,
ffcast of tfje STransfiauration, 1887.

THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES.

In the summer of the year 1880, George A. Jarvis,
of Brooklyn, N. Y., moved by his sense of the great
good which might thereby accrue to the cause of Christ
and to the Church, of which he was an ever grateful
member, gave to the General Theological Seminary of
the Protestant Episcopal Church certain securities
exceeding in value eleven thousand dollars for the foun
dation and maintenance of a Lectureship in said
Seminary. Out of love to a former pastor and enduring
friend, the Rt. Rev. Benjamin Henry Paddock, D.D.,
Bishop of Massachusetts, he named his Foundation
"The Bishop Paddock Lectureship."
The deed of trust declares that :
"The subjects of the Lectures shall be such as apper
tain to the defence of the religion of Jesus Christ, as
revealed in the Holy Bible and illustrated in the Book of
Common Prayer against the varying errors of the day,
whether materialistic, rationalistic, or professedly relig
ious, and also to its defence and confirmation in respect
of such central truths as the Trinity, the Atonement,
Justification, and the Inspiration of the Word of God,
and of such central facts as the Church 's Divine Order
and Sacraments, her historical Reformation and her
rights and powers as a pure and National Church. And
other subjects may be chosen if unanimously approved
by the Board of Appointment as beingboth timely and
also within the true intent of this Lectureship."

iv The Bishop Paddock Lectures.
Under the appointment of the Board created by the
Trust, viz., the Dean of the General Theological Semi
nary, and the Bishops respectively of Massachusetts,
Connecticut and Long Island, the Rev. John H. Egar,
D.D., Rector of Zion Church, Rome, N. Y., delivered
the Lectures for the year 1887, contained in this volume.
They may be considered as bearing upon the Church's
"historical Reformation, and her rights and powers as
a pure and National Church."

I.
BYZANTINISM.

BYZANTINISM.

At the beginning of the fourth century, the Church
of Christ had extended itself throughout the length and
breadth of the Roman Empire, and had carried its mis
sions into countries beyond its bounds. It had passed
safely through all but the last of the great persecutions
by which the heathen emperors had sought to put it
down. It had successfully resisted the attempts of the
Oriental gnosis, and of Greek philosophy to adulterate
the faith in Christ ; and it had infused with that faith,
into the hearts of multitudes of every class and condi
tion the love of God and of the brethren, and the hope
of eternal life. It had fixed the brand of the Divine
displeasure upon sin and wickedness, and established
the tradition and habit of good morals and personal
purity through the example of several generations of
its members ; and it was constantly widening its in
fluence by the conversion of those outside and their
incorporation into its body. It was an extensive and
powerful organization, whose strength lay in the con
sciousness of a Divine mission and Divine help, in the
possession of a certain faith and a fixed rule of life, in

4. Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
the zeal and devotion of its clergy, and the loyal and
free adhesion of its laity. The arts it used to extend
its influence were such as convinced the mind and ap
pealed to the heart ; and the methods it employed to
keep it were such as trained its members to "hold the
faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace and in
righteousness of life."
At the time lam speaking of, the primitive polity
had developed and fixed itself so that there is no diffi
culty in tracing the means by which every member of
the vast company of the faithful was in active and actual
communion with every other member. I do not need,
for the purpose of these lectures to recapitulate, how
ever briefly, the facts which are accessible, in the nu
merous histories of the primitive Church, to every one
who cares to read. In ancient liturgies still extant we
have sufficient evidence to show what was the common
worship ; and in the ancient canons, the decrees of
Councils, and the writings of the fathers, we are certified
of the faith, the discipline and the government of the
Church. The baptized member, in whatever place, if
sound in faith and correct in life, was in communion
with the ascended Head of the Church through frequent
Eucharists, and with his brethren everywhere through
out the world, through the Bishops of the Apostolic
Succession. In every local church there were the three
orders of bishop, presbyters and deacons, and under
them a body of minor officers, through whom the cler
ical influence reached all ranks and classes ; there was

From Constantine to the Reformation. 5
a chosen band of devoted and perhaps ascetic individ
uals ; and there was a laity who followed the Gospel of
Christ in the midst of a world demonstrably and visibly
lying in wickedness. With some variety in detail, the
bishops and churches of each province or nation were
united, for the government of the provincial or national
Church, under one of their number as metropolitan or
chief, with whom they met in council from time to time,
as the canons prescribed, or the exigencies of the Church
demanded. The provincial churches were in commun
ion with one another by frequent messengers bearing
official letters, as well as by the presence of communi
cants or clergy properly certified, whose affairs led them
from one place to another. As individual schismatics
or heretics, or immoral persons were cut off from the
unity of the Church by exclusion from the sacraments
until their penance proved their repentance, so com
munities which were infected with schism or heresy were
refused the customary letters, and were held to be out
of the communion of the Catholic body as long as these
were denied. And thus, in the absence of General
Councils, or of the other expedients of later days, the
ante-Nicene polity was amply sufficient to secure the
external unity of the Church at large, as well as the
edification of the individual member.
So powerful a body as the Catholic Church of the
fourth century, animated with such an inward spirit,
and held together in such a comprehensive and effective
organization, disciplined by adversity, and welded to-

6 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
gether by persecution, so strong in temper, and so vast
in extent, could not fail, sooner or later, to impress the
head of the Roman Empire, either with a claim upon his
allegiance, or with a desire for its alliance. But when
the time came, whether the Emperor gave his sincere
adhesion to Christianity, or only courted its political
alliance, it was not in the nature of things that the
condition of the Church should be what it had been, or
that some modification of its organization and methods
should not ensue. The conversion of Constantine,
whether it were genuine or superficial, was an event of
no common magnitude, and contains within itself the
germ of much of the Church's history for the past fifteen
hundred years. It was the beginning of the union of
Church and State — it could not be otherwise — and the
action and reaction of these great powers one upon the
other, constitutes the external history of the Church
from that time until the present.
I propose in this course of lectures to review the
relation of Church and State from Constantine to the
Reformation, and to point out some of the ways in which
the history of the Church has been modified by that
relation. The connexion between the political and the
religious history of Christendom has not been brought
out as it should be for the information of the general
reader. The secular historians have viewed it from the
secular stand-point, and have praised or censured the
Church in different ages, according as it has seemed
subservient or otherwise to the necessities of national

hr ;;i Lonslaidine to the Reformation. 7
politics ; while the ecclesiastical historians have either
neglected the relation, or as Romanist, or Anglican,
or Lutheran, or Calvinistic, have presented views of
it, colored by their own bias, and such as we of the
American Church, studying it for ourselves, should not
take. Did Constantine give the Church his adhesion, or
did he only court its alliance ? That is the first ques
tion. My answer is, he did both — the first partially and
imperfectly, the latter urgently, but both really. It is
the fault of sceptical as well as of shallow historians,
that if they think they see men influenced by lower
motives, they cannot give them credit for higher
motives also, or appreciate the fact that the actors in
the scenes they describe may have a faith or a purpose
which they do not possess, and therefore cannot con
ceive. You all know in what darkening colors Gibbon
draws the portrait of Constantine, and how his character
has suffered or been glorified according to the controver
sial bias of the historian. To my mind the position of
Constantine in history is plain. He was a great man,
a great soldier, a great organizer, a great ruler, having
a definite policy to which he endeavored to bend the
Church because he believed in it. He was prudent,
temperate and continent by habit and self-restraint. He
won his battles by good generalship as well as by the
favor of Providence. He had the eye of a great military
engineer, as he showed in the choice of the site for his
city of Constantinople. He organized the Eastern

8 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Empire so that it preserved the form he gave it for a
thousand years after his time. And withal he was
naturally religious. He was a firm believer in Divine
Providence ; and he recognized in Christianity and the
Church the only instrument for preserving that belief,
or for infusing it into the minds of his subjects, and
bringing them back to that morality of which heathen
ism was so utterly void.
Now whatever were the weaknesses of Constantine —
and personal vanity was undoubtedly one of them — it
is not within the limits of probability that he allowed
himself to be swayed, in his treatment of the Church, by
the counsels of those who happened to gain his ear. It
is the convenient explanation of such as think his
actions to be inconsistent, to attribute them to the
weakness of a sovereign who could be approached
through his vanity, and wrought upon by the arts of the
courtier. But no one could have reached the sole occu
pancy of the Imperial throne as Constantine did, and
have so organized the empire that it existed with the
constitution he gave it, as long as it existed at all, who
did not know his own mind and pursue his own policy.
And just as soon as we have gained the key to that
policy, we shall find it to have been consistent through
out, and that Constantine not only had it definitely
fixed in his own mind, but so impressed it upon the
empire that it continued to be the policy of the emperors
through all the troubled and perplexed ages that
followed. I do not think that Constantine's adhesion

From Constantine to the Reformation. 9
to Christianity was more than an enlightened Deism for
many years after he began to interest himself in the
affairs of the Church. He accepted the truths of the
Divine Unity, and of the active intervention of Provi
dence in human affairs ; he recognized that Polytheism
was dead, and that Atheism was no creed for a man.
He allied himself with the Church, not only to conciliate
a powerful party in his contests with Maxentius and
Licinius, but because as between Polytheism and the
Divine Unity he was really with the Church ; and also
(and this was not the least powerful of the mixed motives
which animated him) because he saw in the Church the
means of bringing the religious sanctions of moral con
duct into the minds of 'his subjects, of making the
religious feeling a basis of loyalty to the Emperor, and
so of securing the stability of the empire. But as
regards the dogmas of the Catholic faith, it seems to me
that he was not unbelieving, but indifferent. If we may
judge from his somewhat ambiguous actions at an early
period, as well as his inconsistency with regard to the
Council of Nicaea, his idea was that he could combine
with Christianity, as he understood it, what was really
or philosophically religious in the effete paganism of the
age, and so attain, if not a unity of belief among the
people at large, yet such a mutual toleration and grad
ual convergence as might permit all parties to acknowl
edge that they worshipped the same deity — the same
Divine Providence — whether they called him "Jehovah,
Jove or Lord." Without a real acceptance of the

10 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Catholic faith, Constantine believed in the Church, and
therefore he would use the Church. He attached the
Christians, and especially the bishops, to himself per
sonally, by toleration, by justice and by favors. He
granted the clergy valuable privileges and exemptions.
He made companions of ecclesiastics and was inquisitive
into their doctrines. He prescribed the observance of
Sunday, and he not only listened to sermons but
preached them. But he put off his baptism until his
last illness, and then received it at the hands of an
Arian. And although he convened the Ecumenical
Council of Nicaea, which settled once for all the Faith
against Arianism, yet after a time he attempted to set
it aside. His real desire, I doubt not, was for a latitu-
dinarian creed which should allow diverse opinions in the
Church ; and his chief interest was that the Church,
through its teachings of morality, of order and of loyalty,
should be the supporter of the empire, and that the
unity of religion upon this basis should be the guarantee
of the Imperial throne.
There never was invented by the mind of man such
another perfect instrument of government as that
established by Constantine. Inheriting the traditions
of the empire from his predecessors, and profiting by his
education at the court of the astute Diocletian, he had
the genius to plan, and the skill to put in operation a
scheme of administration which left nothing to be
desired except a care for the welfare and happiness of
the people. As an instrument of the supreme power it

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 1
was perfect ; and it preserved the empire for a thousand
years, in the midst of commotions internal and external,
against enemies abroad and discontent at home, not
withstanding the folly of rulers, the selfishness of
officials, the degradation of the people, and the absence
of any feeling of patriotism in any class. To one
situated as Constantine was, with the history of his
associates and predecessors before his eyes, his object
as an organizer must be to consolidate the government,
so that revolutions and rebellions should be void of the
hope of success and the throne stable and secure. The
Imperial authority had grown up by the assumption of
all the effective powers of the Roman Republic into the
hands of the man who had the command of the army.
Following the example of the first Augustus, the
Imperator was consul when he chose to be, prince of the
senate, tribune of the people, censor, pontifex maximus,
and invested with perpetual proconsular authority. But
these diverse titles to power had by this time become
merged in the one fact of universal rule, resting upon
the loyalty of the army, and terminated when the army
deposed or murdered its general, or was defeated by
another general of superior ability or fortune. When
Constantine became sole head of the empire and the
army, he determined to put an end to this supremacy
of the army, by balancing it with other establishments,
the heads of which would be sufficiently jealous of each
other, if not faithful to the reigning sovereign, to be
unwilling to imperil themselves by combining together

1 2 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

for the sole benefit of one of their number. He there
fore reorganized the empire. He built Constantinople
for a new Rome, free from the traditions, but invested
with the privileges of old Rome, and he gave the senate
of Constantinople all the powers which still remained
to the Roman senate. Here he fixed his residence and
the seat of government. He divided the empire into
four praetorian prefectures, these into thirteen dioceses,
and these again into provinces, of which there were
about a hundred and twenty. He separated the military
authority of his subordinates from the civil authority,
and so took away the power of rebellion. By dividing
the military, the judicial and the financial departments
of the government, he made each of them a support of
the throne, instead of dangerous to it, as they were
when all combined in the hands of subordinates. It is
from the reforms of Constantine that modern adminis
trations have taken the principle of government by
bureaus, or departments.
It is a great mistake to infer from the history of
Gibbon or Milman that the Eastern Empire was a weak
and contemptible affair. It was, measured by its sta
bility, the strongest secular power which has ever
existed, and it might have continued to this day had it
known how to do two things : to admit the people to
that share in the government which would make it their
own, and to refrain from the endeavor to force the
Church into the framework of the political machinery.
But it had no sympathy with the people, and no real

From Constantine to the Reformation. 13
sense of the spiritual vocation of the Church. The
theory of the empire was despotic, and according to that
theory, all power over body and soul must centre in and
emanate from the emperor. Around him were grouped
in solid phalanx, the legislative, the financial, the judi
cial, the military departments, all of which received
their authority from him, carried out his will, and
existed by his decree. -But each department was kept
carefully distinct from the others, graded into ranks of
subordination, conducted on a fixed system of procedure,
and. manned by professional experts, who gave regu
larity to the administration, whatever were the charac
ter of the emperor, for the time being. " The numerous
individuals employed in each ministerial department of
the state," says Mr. Finlay, "consisted of (qu. consti
tuted ?) a body of men appropriated to that special
service, which they were compelled to study attentively,
to which they devoted their lives, and in which they
were sure to rise by talent and industry. Each depart
ment formed a separate profession, as completely
distinct and as perfectly organized in its internal
arrangements as the legal profession is in modern
Europe. A Roman emperor would no more have
thought of suddenly creating a financier or an adminis
trator than a modern sovereign would think of making
a lawyer."* This circumstance, he adds, affords an
explanation of the singular duration of the Roman
* Finlay, Greeks under the Romans, p. 238.

i 4 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
government (in the East), and of its inherent principle
of vitality.
Into such a despotic framework of government the
policy of Constantine sought to force the Church. That
power which held in its hands the practical instruction
of the people, the guidance of their opinions, and the
conduct of their lives, that too must be organized and
subjected to the Imperial rule. "That power Constantine
found embodied in the Christian Church, and nowhere
else. He must therefore enter into alliance with the
Church ; he must become its head, as the head of every
other department of government ; he must make it
useful to the empire by attaching it to the throne. As
Pontifex Maximus it was his office to regulate the
religion of the empire ; and his belief in his office, as
well as his belief in the Church, led him to make the
attempt, and to leave that attempt as a part of his
political legacy to his successors. "You are bishops
within the Church, I am bishop without," was a saying
of his, the meaning of which has been thought uncertain.
It merely meant, I am Pontifex Maximus of the Roman
Empire. The first measures of Constantine were measures of
simple justice. In securing toleration for the Christians,
in restoring their estates, in granting the clergy ex
emption from public offices, he was only placing the
Christian religion among the permitted religions of the
empire, and granting to the Church the same privileges
as were enjoyed by the heathen priesthood and temples.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 15
Nor is it to be wondered at that the gratitude of a lately
persecuted and proscribed people should be lavish in its
expressions of adulation, and generous in its judgment
of the authority which so befriended them. And when
the Emperor interested himself more particularly in the
affairs of the Church, the want of experience, if nothing
else, would make them blind to the dangers of inter
ference. The Emperor had as much right to be a
Christian as the meanest of his subjects, and as much
right to use his influence in favor of the religion he
professed. It was not until after the fierce contest with
Arianism, that the jealous watchfulness of the faithful
was aroused against imperial tampering with the faith,
and political passion added its fierceness to the odium
theologicum which has for so many ages been the bane
of controversy.
To accomplish the end Constantine had in view, if
this interpretation of his motives is correct, two
measures seemed to be necessary; the one to secure a
lax and flexible creed ; the other to mould the organi
zation of the Church into a hierarchy, by means of
which the whole body could be controlled from a single
centre. The rise of the Arian heresy offered the opportunity
to attempt the first. The history of this attempt, and
of its final defeat is an illustration of the inherent power
of the Church to preserve the faith by virtue of its
Catholicity, no matter what forces are opposed to it.
The dogmas of the Catholic faith are facts ; they are

1 6 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

dogmas because they are facts ; and they are propounded
to our faith to receive them as facts, upon the Divine
and human testimony by which they are authenticated.
The dogma of the Trinity is the truth of the Trinity, as
revealed through our Lord Jesus Christ ; the dogma of
the Incarnation is the fact of the Incarnation ; the
dogma or mystery of Redemption is the fact of
Redemption. The Church is a witness and keeper of
these truths, or facts, to preserve and hand down the
faith in them unimpaired from age to age. Heresy is
the attempt to overthrow the belief of some or other of
the facts of the faith, because it does not square with
the preconceived notions, or tendencies of thought, or
philosophical reasonings, or inveterate prejudices which
have taken hold of the mind. It has its roots in the
previous tradition or training of the individual or the
community which adopts it, and it is frequently the
outgrowth of the national tendency of a people. It
must be evident to a thinking mind, upon a survey of
the history of the four great General Councils, that un
less the Church had been Catholic from the beginning,
the different schools of Christian thought would have
diverged from one another according to the national or
sectional characteristics of the various peoples, and we
should have had, instead of one universal Creed, a mul
titude of doctrines as diverse as the philosophies of the
ancient world. Each national or sectional tendency
would have modified the faith in the direction of its own
one-sided bias, and there would have been, for exam-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 7
pie, a rationalizing and humanitarian creed at Antioch,
and a pantheistic and mystical creed at Alexandria.
But inasmuch as every part of the Church must be in
communion with every other part, in order that the
Church might be Catholic or universal, the opposite
tendencies providentially neutralized each other, and
preserved the equilibrium of the faith. And that is why,
in the order of Divine Providence, and under the gov
erning influence of the Holy Spirit, no body less than
the whole Catholic or universal Church can define the
faith ; because there is always in the schismatical, or
isolated body, a tendency to aberration, which must be
corrected through the communion of the members with
one another in the unity of the Spirit and the bond of
peace. The faith is a deposit ; it is not an invention,
not a development, not a reasoned-out system. It was
given once for all, to be handed down as it was received;
its mysteries are facts which once true are always true;
and when once the fact is assailed by a false logic or
false philosophy, the false logic or false philosophy must
be overthrown by those who are not misled by it ; and
then, when that is done, the truth remains what it had
been, and the Church continues to profess the faith once
delivered to the saints.
Now the Arian heresy was one in which the peculiar
tendency of the school of Antioch had thus perverted
the faith. The denial of the uncreated Deity of the
only-begotten Son was felt by the heathen themselves
to open the way for Polytheism into the Church. The

i 8 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
fact of an aberration came to light through the connec
tion of Arius, who had been a pupil of Lucian of Antioch,
with the Church of Alexandria. That, however, was
only the manifestation of the fact; the wide-spread
sympathy which Arius met with in the East showed
that the tendency was deep-seated ; and the time had
come when the Church Catholic must reassert the fact
that our blessed Lord is very and eternal God, in a
form which would not only put down the heresy, but
correct the tendency which gave rise to it. Had Con
stantine not mingled in the controversy, there is no
doubt that the previous methods of the Church, which
had been found effective in all other cases, would have
been sufficient in this. But in the Divine Providence,
as if to stamp at the beginning, the indelible character
upon the union of Church and State, and to frustrate
forever the attempt to make the faith indefinite from
motives of political expediency, the Emperor was led
to convene the Council of Nicaea, and in that, the first
Ecumenical Council, the faith was asserted in its integ
rity, and the term " of one substance with the Father,"
was added to the creed, to make Arianism impossible
forever after in the Church.
There is no doubt that Constantine did not desire
this result. His letter to Alexander and Arius jointly
shows that he considered the question whether our
blessed Lord is God to be worshipped, or a creature
whom to worship is idolatry, an unimportant one, on
which they might agree to differ. Indeed I think' his

From Constantine to tlie Reformation. \ g

assembling of the Nicene Council itself had as much
connection in his mind with the celebration of his
Vicennalia as with the vindication of the faith of the
Church. He intended it as a state pageant, a demon-
sttation of his adoption of Christianity as the state
religion ; and he hoped that he could persuade the
Christians to cease their disputes, and bury the question
in silence. But he had seen and known too much of
the temper of the Church, of its constancy under per
secution, to offer direct opposition when the decision
was determined on ; the unanimity of the decree (all
signed it but five) was too overwhelming ; and he con
tented himself with banishing the heretical leaders for
the present, and waiting for the time when he could
quietly set aside the Council.* Soon after the adjourn
ment of the Council he made a decree that no one should
be admitted into the ranks of the clergy, except to fill
vacancies, and that none should be ordained who were
liable to the curia,\ that is, who by their wealth were
responsible for the public and municipal service — a law
from which, of course, a dispensation could be obtained
by imperial favor, and in which there lies the germ of
the conge" d' elire which to this day places the nomina
tion of the English bishops in the power of the crown.
After some delay he revoked the sentence of banish
ment against Arius and his followers, and, professing to
* Was not the cloud upon Constantine during the latter part of his life
due in part to disappointment at the turn of ecclesiastical affairs ?
fFleury, B. XL, 31.

20 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
believe that they were really at one with the Church in
doctrine, ordered that the arch-heretic should be
received to communion, a profanation which the death
of Arius prevented. He permitted the Arian party to
depose Eustathius, the Bishop of Antioch, and .to
intrigue against St. Athanasius, whom he banished in
the year before his death. These acts are significant.
The history of the Eastern Church for the half-cen
tury between the Council of Nicaea and that of
Constantinople is, in reality, not so much the history
of the conflict of the Church with an obstinate and wide
spread heresy, as it is that of the Church with the
Imperial policy. The scheme of Constantine broke
down at the beginning so far as the faith was concerned;
and yet it continued to be the policy of the empire, and
the most desperate efforts were made to insure its
success. We are in the habit of calling Constan.tius and
Valens Arians, and of accounting for their conduct by
the assumption that they fell under the influence of the
subtle Arian leaders. The expressions are misleading.
It is not an uncommon experience in state-craft, that
subtle and wily men, who think they are using a ruler
for their own purposes, are in reality being used by him
for his purposes. I believe that this happened to the
Arian leaders at this time, and that the confusion thev
wrought was connived at by the emperors, not so much
out of sympathy with their doctrines, or belief in their
heresy, as in pursuance of a deeper policy, directed to
the complete subjection of the Church to the State

From Constantine to the Reformation. 2 1
What was demanded of the Catholic bishops was not
that they should give up their own personal belief in the
Eternal Son, but that they should admit to the com
munion of the Church on equal terms, those who denied
Him to be consubstantial with the Father. The
Emperor Gonstantius was not so much an Arian as a
Latitudinarian. He would have been just as averse to
a definite and exclusive Arian creed for the universal
creed of the Church as to the Nicene Creed, and he
tolerated and encouraged the making of creed after
creed, until he could find one sufficiently indefinite for
his purpose. The real creed of the so-called Arian
emperors was the creed of the Council of Rimini (A.D.
359); and it was their creed because on the point in
dispute it meant nothing and it said nothing. It was
suited to the imperial policy, not because it confessed
Arianism, but because it would permit the orthodox,
as well as the Arian of whatever shade of impiety to
confess it alike. It said the Son was like the Father —
and surely no one would deny that however unlike He
might be in some respects, yet there was something at
least in which He was like the Father. It was a creed,
therefore, admirably constructed to allow conformity
without faith. And this was just what the Emperor
wanted ; and therefore the Creed of Rimini became for
a few years the creed of the empire, while the Creed of
Nicaea remained the creed of the Church.
It was essential to the success of the imperial policy
that the compliant or the heterodox should have pos-

22 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

session of the principal sees, so as to make them centres
of the leaven by which the whole body might be
leavened. Arian prelates were placed by intrigue and
violence in Constantinople and Antioch, and strenuous
efforts were made to displace St. Athanasius from
Alexandria. That great saint, whose stainless charac
ter, inflexible orthodoxy, and indefatigable energy have
extorted from the great sceptical historian almost the
only sincere eulogy he has pronounced upon a Christian
prelate, was alternately banished by one emperor and
restored by another for a period of more than twenty
years, and saw no less than three Arian bishops intruded
into his see during his enforced absences. The disorders,
the intrigues, the injustice, the violence, the insults, the
murders, the tyranny incident to the attempt thus to
revolutionize the Eastern Church, may be read in his
tory. They would throw discredit upon the Christians,
were they not so plainly and manifestly the deeds of
the political power in its effort to enslave the Church.
The inherent weakness of Arianism as a positive belief
was evident just as soon as Julian the Apostate suc
ceeded Constantius, and proclaimed that contemptuous
toleration by which he hoped to leave the Christian
factions free to destroy each other, and the religion they
professed. The people welcomed back their Catholic
pastors with enthusiasm, and the Arians found them
selves bereft of power and influence as soon as they
ceased to be the tools of the Emperor. They obtained
a temporary influence again under Valens, and again

From Constantine to the Reformation. 23
threw the Church into disorder ; but under the lead of
St. Basil the Church fought a good fight, and the con
test came to an end when Theodosius obtained the
empire, and the Council of Constantinople reaffirmed
the Nicene Creed.
The Council of Constantinople (A.D. 381) marks the
end of the Arian controversy. Just as soon as the
Emperor gave up the attempt to force it upon the
Church, the natural weakness of the heresy showed
itself, and it fell into insignificance, although it remained
the religion of certain Gothic tribes who had been con
verted from heathenism under its ascendancy. The
mere politician or indifferentist may think the persist
ence of the Church to be bigotry, and the questions
involved to be of small account ; the infidel may ridi
cule the distinction between homoousios and homoiousios ;
but the sincere believer, who trusts to our blessed Lord
for salvation here and hereafter, who believes Him to
be able to save to the uttermost because He is God, and
who therefore worships Him as God — God of God,
Very God of Very God — knows the importance of "the
faith once delivered to the saints," and against the Rock
of that faith, the waves of worldly policy dash in vain.
The constancy of the saints had won the victory. The
Emperor henceforth could have no influence in the
Church, except as he professed her faith. Whatever
the intrigues and tumults which disfigure the history of
the Great Councils from this time on, this principle was
settled ; and the sustaining power of the Church's Head,

24 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

and the guiding influence of the Holy Spirit, made the
controversies and the scandals of which we read, the
means to bring out the faith clearer and clearer by the
successive expositions of Catholic dogma which they
compelled. Such, then, was the outcome of the imperial effort to
make the Church politically useful by giving it a lax and
flexible creed. The logic of events gave more success
to the other measure I spoke of as implied in the effort
of Constantine to annex it to the throne — the conform
ing the ecclesiastical organization to that of the empire.
In an aristocratic state of society the idea of rank and
precedence is a powerful factor ; and when those who
hold high office in the State are decorated with titles of
nobility, it is but insisting on the equal dignity at least
of the service of the Church, to give its chief officers
similar titles of respect. That which would seem mere
assumption under a simpler and more democratic policy
is only proper and decent in this case. Little or noth
ing was done under Constantine himself in this direc
tion. The sixth canon of the Council of Nicasa
recognized the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria and
Antioch, as possessing certain peculiar privileges, and
the seventh gave an honorary precedence to the Bishop
of Jerusalem. The Council of Constantinople advanced
the bishop of that city above Alexandria and Antioch
by its third canon : " That the Bishop of Constantino
ple have the prerogative of honor next after the Bishop
of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome." It also

From Constantine to the Reformation. 25
made a closer approximation to the imperial organiza
tion by its second and sixth canons. I have already
mentioned that Constantine" divided the empire into
four Praetorian Prefectures, these into thirteen Dioceses*
and these into about 120 provinces. The Council of
Constantinople erected the great synod of the Diocese
into a Court of Appeals, forbidding bishops to go out
side with their cases, and thus constituted the bishop
of the principal city, as president of that synod, an
ecclesiastic of superior rank under the title of exarch
or primate — exarch in the East, primate in the West.
The direct influence of the emperor, however, does not
appear until the Emperor Marcian procured from the
Council of Chalcedon the completion of the Patriarchal
system. Assuming that Rome, Alexandria, and An
tioch were Patriarchates by the recognition of their
privileges at the Council of Nicaea (though the canon
of that council does not really admit that inference),
the Council of Chalcedon, by its ninth, seventeenth and
twenty-eighth canons, enlarged and fixed the patri
archal jurisdiction and privileges of the Church of
Constantinople, giving it authority over the Dioceses of
Thrace, Asia and Pontus, with the power of ordaining
and requiring canonical obedience from the metropoli
tans of those Dioceses, and also the right to adjudicate
* The Dioecesis of the Empire, and of the Imperial Church must not be
confounded with the modern Diocese, the jurisdiction of a single bishop.
The modern Diocese is included in a province ; the ancient Dicecesis
included several provinces. Mistakes are constantly made in quoting the
canon of Constantinople, through forgetfulness of this difference.

26 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

appeals in causes ecclesiastical from the whole Eastern
Church. The Bishop of Jerusalem also obtained in this
council patriarchal authority over Palestine. The
organization of the Church was thus conformed to that
of the empire, the patriarchs corresponding to the
Praetorian Prefects, the exarchs, to the governors of
the Dioceses, and the metropolitans to the governors of
the provinces — the Bishop of Rome being given by an
edict of Valentinian III, of the year 445, supreme
appellate jurisdiction in the West, and the Bishop of
Constantinople, by these canons of Chalcedon, supreme
appellate jurisdiction in the East.
The intention of the Emperor in making the Arch
bishop of Constantinople the chief ecclesiastic of tht
empire, and as such the Minister of Religion in the
imperial cabinet, undoubtedly was to rule the Church
through him. The scheme was not a complete success.
The imperial influence being much more direct in the
appointment of the Patriarch of Constantinople than of
the others, was exerted to procure as occupants of that
see, persons of administrative ability and compliant
disposition, rather than great theologians or able
Churchmen ; and there are several instances, as Necta-
rius, Tarasius and Photius, where laymen who had been
trained in the civil service were promoted to be bishops
of the imperial city. The weakness of the patriarchs of
Constantinople as religious leaders, through this subor
dination to the court, was fatal to their supremacy, and
frustrated the attempt to enslave the Church through
their instrumentality.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 2 7
Dean Milman remarks that the Episcopate of St.
John Chrysostom was the last attempt of a bishop of
Constantinople to be independent of the political power,
and that his fate involved the freedom of the Church of
that city. The greatest preacher of Christendom and
one of its purest saints, he was called by the influence
of the favorite eunuch of Arcadius, the degenerate son of
the great Theodosius, from being a presbyter of Antioch
to the bishopric of Constantinople, that his eloquence
might delight the people and glorify the court. But he
was too honest, and too much in earnest to deal in
flatteries of the great, or to connive at the sins of the
powerful, and he speedily fell into disfavor with the
Empress Eudoxia, for the boldness with which he re
buked her luxury and extravagance. In the meantime
the Bishop of Alexandria was deeply offended at being
reduced, by the canon of Constantinople above alluded
to, from the second to the third rank, and was prepared
to take advantage of any circumstance which might
enable him to humiliate the Bishop of Constantinople.
The occasion came in this quarrel of Eudoxia with
Chrysostom. Theophilus of Alexandria, who was a
bold and unscrupulous man, was called in to pass upon
him an ecclesiastical sentence, and he willingly lent
himself to the malice of the court, which held over him
the menace of his own prosecution for offences of which
he was accused, in case he failed to carry out its wishes.
Chrysostom was unjustly condemned at the Council of
the Oak, and under color of that condemnation he was

28 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

banished and died of the barbarous treatment he
received in exile. His successors, having his example
before them, were more prudent and politic ; and
though there were good and holy and brave men among
them, the patriarchate of Constantinople was never able
to assert itself against the imperial power.
Before we go on to consider the effect of the great
Nestorian and Eutychian controversies upon the Church
and upon the State, it is necessary to say something
more about the imperial government as it was adminis
tered in the fifth century, and afterwards. Upon the
death of Theodosius in 395, his sons, Arcadius and
Honorius, succeeded him, the former ruling in the East
and the other in the West. From this time forth, the
East and the West were disunited, not again to be
joined together in their whole extent ; and what I have
further to say in this lecture relates to the course of
ecclesiastical history in the Eastern Empire. Arcadius
was succeeded in 408 by his son Theodosius II., who
reigned until 450, when he was succeeded by Marcian
as the nominal husband of his sister Pulcheria. The
dynasty of Theodosius came to an end in 457. The
emperors had now become, through the reforms of Con
stantine, civil rulers, rather than military dictators.
The feeble children of the great Theodosius were unable
to command the armies, or to direct the policy of the
empire ; they were protected from destruction as well
as deprived of influence by the etiquette and ceremonial
of the court ; the public business was carried on through

From Constantine to the Reformation. 29
the machinery which had been invented for that pur
pose ; it was designed as well to guard against the
disasters invited by the weakness and folly of an
incompetent sovereign, as to execute the will and
increase the power of an able ruler ; and it proved itself
competent to accomplish both purposes.
The imperial government possessed two great advan
tages over all other governments then existing.
One was the scientific administration of law and justice,
the other was the regular system of the civil service ;
both of which provided a career for an educated laity,
attached them to the existing order, and enabled them
to control and to prompt the public opinion. And op
pressive as were the burdens which the imperial gov
ernment imposed upon the people, there was at least
that regular administration which made their extent
and effect calculable by the prudent foresight of the
citizen, and that order which contrasted favorably with
the disorder of barbarian rule — and all rule but that of
the empire was barbarian. The administration and the
empire therefore remained firm, though emperors were
set up and put down by revolution after revolution,
and dynasty succeeded dynasty after the third or fourth
generation. The impulse given to lay education
through the needs of the civil service was a powerful
conservative influence in the East. M. Guizot, in his
Lectures on Civilization in France, speaks of the nu
merous schools in Gaul in the fifth century, and of the
support that was given to them by the government,

30 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

These schools shared in the decay of the Western
Empire, because under the barbarian rulers they opened
no professional career to the scholars ; and I may re
mark in passing, that it is altogether unjust to charge
the Church with responsibility for the ignorance of
what are called the dark ages. The Church suffered
severely from the calamities of the times ; it did all it
could (as Dr. Maitland has shown) to keep the light
burning during that period of transition ; and it was the
most potent factor in the revival of learning, when
society began to recover itself. In the East it was
different. The permanence of the imperial administra
tion ensured a career for the advocates, the judges,
the secretaries, the accountants, the registrars of the
empire, and the schools which became useless in the
West flourished vigorously in the East. Theodosius
II. founded a great university at Constantinople, en-.
dowing it with the means of employing fifteen pro
fessors of Greek and thirteen of Latin learning and
literature, with two professors of law and one of
philosophy. In the reign of Justinian it possessed
a philosophical, philological, legal and theological
faculty. The schools of Athens maintained their
reputation for rhetoric and philosophy. Alexandria,
in addition to its other faculties, was pre-eminent in
astronomy and medicine. The school at Berytus was
distinguished for the study of jurisprudence ; that at
Edessa for Syriac as well as Greek learning; at Antioch
and elsewhere there were universities. The youth

From Constantine to the Reformation. 3 1
who were ambitious of places in the public service or
in the legal profession attended them, and profited by
them ; and there was for this reason, until a late period,
an educated laity, as well as an educated clergy in the
Eastern Empire. These educated laymen found their
employment in the various government offices ; they
became familiar with the routine and system of the
administration, and enabled it to work with regularity
and order. In the department of law especially they
were pre-eminent. Not only is the excellence of the
Roman law admitted as an historical fact ; but it
has powerfully affected the jurisprudence of all modern
societies. Even the Common Law, so called, though
apparently antagonistic to what is called the Civil, that
is the Roman Law, is admitted by those who are
learned in legal antiquities to be indebted to it in many
ways ; while in those countries and states where the
Common Law does not hold, the entire fabric reposes
upon the solid foundation of the Codes of Theodosius
and Justinian. While the emperors took to themselves
the supreme legislative authority, and were able, as an
abstract right, to ordain anything whatever to be law
if they so pleased ; yet by the systematic method of
promulgating laws, by the procedure of the courts, by the
reasoning of advocates, the authority of jurisconsults,
and the reviews of courts of appeal, this abstract right
was practically restricted, and the administration of
justice was based on certain and well-known rules and
maxims, which gave confidence and ensured stability

3 2 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
to the judicial system, and confirmed the authority of
the judges, and of the empire of which they were the
officials. The senate of Constantinople, again, pos
sessed great authority in controlling the" general
administration, while the dependent position of its
members prevented that authority being regarded with
jealousy. The permanent existence of this body,
which, by the legal fiction that Constantinople was
New Rome, ana therefore Rome itself, had been given
the privileges of the senate of Old Rome, enabled it to
establish fixed maxims of policy, and to make these
maxims the grounds of the ordinary decisions of
government. By these means a systematic adminis
tration was firmly consolidated.
On the other hand, however, there were elements ol
weakness and disorder — clay mingled with the iron of
this stupendous organization. The government was
entirely separate from the people ; its interests were
diverse from theirs, and it consulted their welfare no
further than was necessary to secure its own ends.
The people had no voice in determining the public
policy; they had no influence in declaring war or
making peace ; they had no power of initiating or
approving or rejecting proposed legislation ; they made
no grants of supplies ; they were unable to refuse the
extortionate demands of the sovereign, or to apportion
the taxes that must be paid. The principal function
of the people in the State was to furnish the means
for the imperial expenditure, for the luxury of the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 33
court, for the extravagance of the emperor and his
favorites, for the expense of the army and the civil
service, and, as the empire declined in power, for the
subsidies of the barbarians. The taxes, therefore, were
at all times oppressive, and sometimes ruinous. The
efforts of the fisc, as Mr. Finlay remarks, were directed
to sweep the entire surplus of produce, and the entire
circulating medium year by year into the imperial
treasury. Time was counted by the indiction of fifteen
years, when a new valuation of the empire was made for
the purposes of taxation. Every estate was taxed to
the utmost, and to permit property to depreciate in
value or productiveness was a crime against the
emperor. The cultivator of the soil became attached
to the soil ; he could not leave it, because the proprietor
was liable for his capitation tax, as well as for the tax
upon the land ; and this was the origin of serfdom.
The members of a municipality, the Curiales, were
jointly liable for the whole tax levied upon the
community, and if one failed from inability to pay, the
others must make it up ; the duties of the Curia, there
fore, became so onerous, that persons were willing
sometimes to give away all their property rather than
discharge them, and laws had to be passed to prevent
their doing so. The proprietor of land could not enter
the army, because it was his duty to work his land,
that he might have wherewith to pay his taxes, and so
the military spirit died out from the class that makes
the best soldiers, the army was recruited from the lower

34 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

classes and the barbarian mercenaries, and the country,
being destitute of a militia, lay open to the incursions of
the barbarians. In this state of affairs there was no
political public opinion, none of that healthy stimulus
of political discussion which animates freemen, no
possibility of intelligent patriotism or enlightened
public spirit on the part of the citizen ; even the
interest in municipal affairs was destroyed, and the
intellectual power of the people, deprived of its natural
outlets in secular affairs, indulged a morbid appetite
for theological wrangling, or for debasing superstitions.
Here I must interpose a parenthesis upon the genesis
of superstitions. It is of course a commonplace of
modern scepticism to charge the growth of supersti
tion upon the clergy. The accusation is unjust. The
superstitions which disfigure the " dark ages " were
"survivals," as Mr. Tyler calls them, of lay heathenism.
Mr. Finlay points out how it was in the East : " Under
the jealous system of the imperial government, the
isolation of place and class became so complete that
even the highest members of the aristocracy received
their ideas from the inferior domestics with whom they
habitually associated in their own households — not
from the transitory intercourse they held with able and
experienced men of their own class, or with philosophic
or religious teachers. Nurses and slaves implanted
their ignorant superstitions in the households where
the rulers of the empire and the provinces were reared ¦
and no public assemblies existed where discussions

Prom Constantine to the Reformation. 35
could efface such prejudices. Family education became
a more influential feature of society than public in
struction ; and though family education, from the
fourth to the seventh century appears to have improved
the morals of the population, it certainly increased
their superstition and limited their understanding."
Returning to our immediate subject, I remark that
the history of the Eastern Church cannot be understood
without taking account of such facts, as I have above
alluded to. That the evils which affected the Church
for many ages are to be traced to the imperialist
scheme of Constantine, I believe to be capable of
demonstration, and when we have Church historians of
our own, who can survey the field from our American
stand-point of an Apostolic Church free from state
control, it will be demonstrated ; and Church history
will cease to be the puzzling and dreary record that it
is in the hands of mere Anglicans, or German Neolo-
gists, or secular politicians. Not only is injustice done
to several great emperors by viewing their characters
through the mist of theological prejudice, without an
appreciation of their difficulties as inheritors of a system
that was too strong for them ; but equal or greater
injustice is done to the Churchmen of this period by a
want of knowledge of the circumstances by which they
were surrounded.
St. Cyril of Alexandria, perhaps, of all the Greek
Fathers, has suffered most from this cause. The part
he took in the condemnation of Nestorius for the,

36 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

heresy which bears his name, has been misjudged, as if
all the complications of the political situation with
their consequences were to be laid at his door. Nesto-
rius, like St. Chrysostom, had been a monk and presby
ter of Antioch, and became Bishop of Constantinople
by the favor of the court. But there the resemblance
between the two men ends. Nestorius is represented
as being more eloquent than wise, and a sentence he
addressed to the Emperor in one of his sermons is
quoted as showing his temper: " Aid me," he said,
"against the heretics, and I will aid you against the
Persians; give me earth cleared of heretics, and I
will give you the Kingdom of Heaven." The crowd
applauded, we are told, but wise men shook their heads.
In a short time the hot-headed, self-opinionated man
was himself involved in the charge of heresy. Modern
writers are disposed to acquit him of an heretical in
tent or meaning; but I must confess ihat after a care
ful examination of what remains of his own words, my
own opinion is that Nestorius was a Nestorian heretic.
He objected to the term Theotokos (usually translated
Mother of God), as applied to the blessed Virgin, and
proposed that she be called Christotokos (mother of
Christ), instead. With the remembrance of the Arian
denial of the Divinity of Christ in their minds the
people took the alarm and excitement followed. For
Christos either includes Tkeos or excludes it. If
Christos includes Theos, then she who is Christotokos
is Theotokos, and Nestorius' objection to the term is un-

From Constantine to the Reformation. $7
tenable ; if, on the contrary, Christos excludes Theos,
then Nestorius' objection is tenable ; but only on the
condition that the Son of Man is not the Son of God.
Nestorianism, therefore, divides our blessed Lord into
two persons, and overthrows the Catholic faith, which
teaches that He who was with the Father before all
worlds, the only-begotten Son of God, is the same per
son who became man, of the flesh of the Virgin Mary,
his mother, and who as man suffered for our salvation.
St. Cyril saw the logical consequence at once. He
wrote against Nestorius, and with oriental vehemence
he issued twelve anathemas against the various expres
sions of the heresy. Nestorius replied with twelve
contrary anathemas, and these anathemas, to my mind,
demonstrate clearly the heretical character of their
author. The controversy became so fierce that a Gen
eral Council was called at Ephesus (A.D. 431) to settle
it, and Nestorius was condemned. It is not necessary
to go into the details of the history. The Council of
Ephesus defined the Catholic faith, and upheld the
truth upon the point in dispute ; and whatever we may
say of St. Cyril and his methods, we must remember
that the Court was in favor of Nestorius, that the
Emperor's commissioners made one-sided reports of
what was done, and so hindered St. Cyril from com
municating with his friends that he was obliged to
conceal his letter in a beggar's staff, and that the
Patriarch of Antioch was lukewarm out of personal
friendship for Nestorius. What I want to point out

38 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

particularly is that the political situation, with its effect
upon the jealousy of the hierarchy and the temper of
the people — the concealed discontent at the weakness
and oppressiveness of the government, and the want
of the power to express that discontent in any other
way than by embittering a theological controversy in
which the government took a side — had its influence
upon the proceedings of the Council of Ephesus and
the subsequent history of Nestorianism. It is an
instance of what may be called (without irreverence, I
hope), the irony of Divine Providence, that the man
who promised his aid against the Persians in return for
imperial aid against the heretics, should have originated
a heresy which was used by the Persians as a weapon
of offence against the empire. Adopted as the badge
of nationality and disaffection by large numbers of the
Syriac-speaking peoples on the borders of Persia,
Nestorianism invited its patronage, and obtained its
toleration, and became the exclusive form of Chris
tianity in the regions beyond the eastern frontier of
the empire.
Eutychianism (taking its name from Eutyches, a
monk of Constantinople, and a partisan of St. Cyril
against Nestorius) is the contrary error to Nestorian
ism. The one divided Christ into two persons, the
other denied the integrity of the two natures of our
blessed Lord, the Divine and human, either dissolving
the human nature in the Divine, or blending the two
into a mixture which is neither Divine nor hyman. Jt§

From Constantine to the Reformation. 39
history further illustrates what I have said, but it had
peculiar features, and is marked with greater violence.
As Eutyches was a monk it was a monastic heresy.
Now the monks, in the political condition of the East,
were the army of the Church against the imperial
despotism. Possessing the unbounded reverence of the
people, and willing to endure martyrdom at any time,
they were a power of which the government was
afraid, and the worst mistake which could be made by
a politician was to give a monk by persecution or death
the opportunity of canonization. Monasticism had
originated in Egypt, and the more fanatical members
of the monastic brotherhood looked to the Patriarch of
Alexandria as their chief, and were inclined to carry
the opposition of St. Cyril to Nestorianism to the ex
treme limit. Hence the heresy. Under the circum
stances the necessity of dealing with it was a political
calamity of the utmost gravity. But the Church could
do no otherwise than deal with it. I need not go over
the story of its righteous condemnation at the Council
of Chalcedon. You can read in Milman or Robertson
about Eutyches and his partisans, about Dioscorus and-
the Latrocinium, about Flavian and St. Leo, about the
murder of Proterius, about Timothy the Weazel and
Timothy the White, and Peter the Fuller and Peter
the Hoarse. My object is to s.how the connection of
ecclesiastical with secular history, and how the scheme
of Constantine entangled in its meshes men who would
gladly have done right if they could. The emperors

40 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

who reigned during the Eutychian excitement were
such men, and a few words given to each of them will
not be thrown away.
It is a proof of the tendency towards a stable and
legitimate government induced by the reforms of Con
stantine, that on the death of Theodosius II. without
issue, Marcian, the Thracian, became emperor as the
husband of Pulcheria, the sister of the deceased sover
eign. The Christian feeling of loyalty to the powers
that be, undoubtedly assisted in securing his throne.
He was a soldier and senator of mature age, and high
character. He shaped the policy of the Council of
Chalcedon, especially with regard to the patriarchate
of Constantinople ; and while he confirmed the con
demnation of Eutyches, he was disposed to leave to
time and the force of truth the destruction of the
heresy. He was really more interested in so organiz
ing the hierarchy as to bring the Church into subjec
tion to the Patriarch of Constantinople, and establish
ing the imperial authority through him, than upon
persecuting the heretics. He seems to have contented
himself with sending Eutyches away from Constanti
nople, and banishing Dioscorus from Alexandria. But
the banishment of Dioscorus exasperated the monastic
party, and they immediately began to agitate through
out the empire against the Council of Chalcedon.
Proterius had been appointed Patriarch of Alexandria
in place of Dioscorus; a Monophysite (the Eutychians
were called Monophysites) named Timothy, and

From Constantine to the Reformation. 41
nicknamed the Weazel, was set up against him ; a
Monophysite monk seized the see of Jerusalem ; Peter
the Fuller, another Monophysite, got possession of
Antioch ; and on the death of Marcian, Proterius was
barbarously murdered.
Leo the Elder, the next emperor, found the Church
in this disorder. He dealt with it with prudence ; he
took the opinions of the bishops by correspondence,
instead of assembling them in council, and finding them
adverse to Timothy the Weazel, he expelled him from
Alexandria ; and when he had made himself acquainted
with the state of affairs, he put the sees into the pos
session of the orthodox bishops, and succeeded appar
ently in confining the Eutychian heresy to the mon
asteries. The accession of Leo is another evidence of the
improvement of the political condition, and of the
rising influence of Christian feeling, notwithstanding
the manifold evils in Church and State. Leo received
the throne, in default of an heir to Marcian and
Pulcheria, by the consent of the army and the senate,
and desiring further to confirm his title by the sanc
tion of the Church, he was solemnly crowned by the
Patriarch of Constantinople — the first example of the
coronation of a Christian prince. All that Robertson
tells us of his secular affairs is that he procured the
murder of Aspar, one of his generals, who had advanced
him to the empire ; and so he gives the most unfavor
able view of his character. But it is to be remembered

42 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
not only that, according to the principles of the
government, the emperor had the supreme power of
life and death, and that his order made an execution
legal without form of trial, when reasons of state were
involved ; but that Aspar was a barbarian, and that
this was the age when the Huns under Attila, and the
Goths under Alaric, Ataulph and Theodoric almost
destroyed the empire ; and Mr. Finlay points out that
the removal of Aspar was necessary in order to reform
the army, to reduce the dangerous power of the
barbarian mercenaries, and to raise up a native soldiery,
which the policy of preceding emperors had dis
couraged. He remarks also, that Leo's civil adminis
tration was conducted with great prudence, and that
he endeavored to lighten the burdens of his subjects,
and to improve their condition. His orthodoxy as a
Churchman, and his prudence as a sovereign both con
duced to the peace of the Church during his reign.
Leo was succeeded, after reigning seventeen years
(457-474). by his son-in-law Zeno, as guardian of his
grandson, who died an infant, and Zeno then reigned
as the husband of Ariadne, who could confer the
throne, though she could not inherit it. His claim was
disputed by Basiliscus, the brother of Leo's widow,
and he was driven out of Constantinople. Basiliscus
made a party for himself by favoring the Eutychians,
and the disputes broke out with more violence than
before. But Acacius, the Bishop of Constantinople, an
astute and able man, who seems either to have had

From Constantine to the Reformation. 43
unbounded influence over Zeno, or to have been sin
cerely loyal to him, made use of the orthodox party
among the monks to thwart the designs of Basiliscus,
and in less than two years he was driven out, and Zeno
was restored. The people had now been enlisted in
the quarrel, and the monks did all in their power to
inflame them ; while the emperor and the bishops
appear to have desired to minimize the excitement,
and to smoothe the way for the return of the Eutych
ians, or Monophysites as they were now called, to
the Church. Zeno and Acacius, after a correspondence
with the bishops, issued an edict called the Henoticon,
or bond of union, which affirmed the true doctrine, but
did not insist upon the acknowledgment of the Council
of Chalcedon ; and those who accepted this were re
ceived to the communion of the Church of Constanti
nople. But the Bishop of Rome, to diminish the
credit of Constantinople, immediately took up the
quarrel, and the monastic party on either side refused
to concede anything ; and as the result of this attempt
at peace, the Church at the death of Zeno was divided
into three great parties : Rome and the West were
Chalcedonian, Constantinople and Jerusalem favored the
Henoticon, and Alexandria and Antioch were Monophy
site. It is to be hoped that it was partisan slander
which represents Zeno to have been exceptionally de
praved and vicious in his private life. Finlay thinks
that justice has not been done him as a ruler, remark
ing that the man who successfully resisted the schemes

44 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

and the forces of the great Theodoric, could not have
been a contemptible emperor, even though his ortho
doxy was questionable. He adds that the great work
of his reign, which lasted seventeen years and a half,
was the formation of an army of native troops to serve
as a counterpoise to the barbarian mercenaries ; and
that from his laws which have been preserved in the
Justinian code, he seems to have adopted judicious
measures for alleviating the fiscal obligations of the
landed proprietors.
Anastasius, the next emperor, who was a man of
mature age and of unblemished life, and who was
greeted in the theatre with the cry, "Reign as you
have lived !" secured his title by marrying the widow of
Zeno. He was a man fit to be emperor, and yet the
ill effects of Constantine's scheme for the union of
Church and State clouded his reign, humiliated him to
the lowest depth, and prevented a just appreciation of
his merits and of the benefits he conferred upon the
empire. He exerted himself to reform the administra
tion, and to lighten the burdens of the people. He
diminished the taxes, and yet by improved methods of
assessing and collecting them he increased the revenue ;
by judicious expenditure he was able to execute great
works for the defence of Constantinople, and yet to
leave at his death a surplus equal to about $70,000,000
of our money in the treasury. But unfortunately the
only method of reform which presents itself to an able
despotic ruler is that of increased centralization ; and

From Constantine to the Reformation. 45

this conception of government attaches to his relation
to the Church as to all other relations. The ecclesias
tical administration of Anastasius, therefore, was a
complete failure. His Archbishop of Constantinople,
Macedonius, was a weak man, pious and amiable, but
who had been selected for his compliant disposition,
to carry out the policy of Zeno and the Henoticon.
Anastasius was occupied for several years after his ac
cession with the war against the Persians. On return
ing to Constantinople he found that Macedonius had
been gained over by the orthodox monastic party, and
that the city was zealous for the Council of Chalcedon.
Its zeal found vent in insults to the Emperor, and he
had to be protected by a guard of soldiers when he
appeared in public. In his anger he imprudently
showed favor to the opposite party. He laid a trap for
Macedonius by procuring his subscription to a creed
which made no mention of the Councils either of
Ephesus or Chalcedon, and then he made it public.
The orthodox party thereupon denounced Macedonius,
and the Emperor seized the opportunity to depose and
banish him. His successor renounced the Council of
Chalcedon, and was acknowledged by the Patriarchs
of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem ; so that it
might seem as if not only the Emperor but the empire
was Monophysite. Political passion was immediately
aroused. Constantinople, which did not take kindly
to the financial reforms and economical expenditure of
Anastasius, being the place where much of the govern-

46 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
ment's money was expended, broke out into insurrec
tion ; and the Emperor, who was eighty years old,
appeared in the Circus without the insignia of royalty,
and offered to resign the throne. The tumults were
appeased by his humiliation ; but a Thracian general,
Vitalian, took advantage of the situation to revolt, and
marched upon Constantinople with 60,000 men, pre
tending to have taken up arms in defence of the
Council of Chalcedon. The barbarian power, however,
had been curtailed by the military reforms of Leo and
Zeno, and Vitalian was defeated. Anastasius died
emperor ; but the memory of his good deeds as a civil
ruler was lost in the animosities fomented by his
unwise ecclesiastical policy.
Notwithstanding the religious ferment, however,
the empire was strengthened by the firm and prudent
rule of Marcian, Leo, Zeno and Anastasius, and Justin
and Justinian reaped the benefits. Justin was severely
orthodox ; he put the episcopal sees -into the hands of
adherents of the Council of Chalcedon, and published
severe laws against the heretics, thus stifling the con
troversy about the Henoticon. He acceded to the
demand of the Bishop of Rome that the name of
Acacius be removed from the diptychs ; but as an off
set he permitted the Bishop of Constantinople to
assume the title of Ecumenical Patriarch. The
heretical opposition, however, was still strong under
Justinian, and he is credited with the politic arrange
ment of putting himself at the head of the orthodox,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 47

and his wife Theodora at the head of the Monophysite
party. The reign of Justinian constitutes an epoch in the
history of the Roman Empire. In it the scheme of
Constantine culminated ; the power of the emperor
was not only supreme, but was conceived of, not as
formerly under the forms of the Roman Republic, but
as simple, autocratic and self-centred. The codifica
tion of the Roman law in this reign is a monument of
the legal learning and intellectual power which the
emperor could call into his service ; but it vests all
authority in the person of the sovereign, and has been
studied in modern times in the interests of despotism,
as well as in the interests of justice. The emperor had
become a civil ruler, who directed all the operations of
government in every department, and whose throne
was hereditary when there were heirs, and elective
when there were not. The army was kept in subordi
nation by a distribution of commands which prevented
its concentration under any one leader. The bar
barian dismemberment of the empire was checked, and
its inherent vitality enabled it to absorb the tribes
which colonized its waste places ; while the victories
of Belisarius and Narses extinguished the kingdoms of
the Vandals in Africa, and of the Goths in Italy. The
finances were administered with a rapacity which
treated all the possessions of the people as the property
of the emperor ; even the revenues of the municipalities
were confiscated to the public treasury. It is not to

48 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
be thought that a sovereign so autocratic in all other
respects could refrain from the attempt to dominate
the Church ; the determination of Justinian to make
himself supreme in ecclesiastical affairs is quite as
apparent as his wish to heal the religious dissensions
by the ever-alluring and ever-deceptive expedient of
compromise. This is the secret of his dealings with
the Bishop of Rome after the reconquest of Italy, and
of the frivolous question of the "Three Chapters " so-
called, to determine which he assembled the Fifth
General Council. The proceedings of that council
were, in truth, a diplomatic struggle with the emperor,
in which the Church evaded the snare that had been
laid for her ; and although some of its canons are of
first-rate importance in the theology of the Incarna
tion, yet as regards the main subject for which it was
convened, we may well acquiesce in the judgment of
the learned French Catholic Dupin, that the Church
was thrown into a wonderful confusion for a matter of
very small consequence.
The net result, at the end of Justinian's reign, of
Constantine's scheme for the union of Church and
State, and for making the unity of the Church a support
of the unity of the Empire, by a lax creed and an
administrative subjection to the emperor, may be
calculated with considerable accuracy. The fact was,
that before the close of the sixth century, the nations
and races, which were oppressed by or hostile to the
empire, adopted heresy as their national religion ; and

From Constantine to the Reformation. 49
the Universal Church, so far as it was orthodox in the
faith, was practically limited to those peoples whose
speech was Latin or Greek, and who therefore furnished
the officials of the administration. This tendency
began to show itself at the first appearance of Con
stantine in the affairs of the Church. After the
Council of Aries in the year 313, where the Donatist
schism was treated of under his superintendence, and
the decision was confirmed by his authority, the dis
contented and down-trodden remnants of the old
Punic population of North-western Africa made the
cause of the Donatists their own, and pillaged and
murdered for the glory of God and the purity of the
Church — the first Puritans in name, as well as in
nature. The Goths and Vandals adopted Arianism to
preserve themselves as a pure race, to prevent absorp
tion into the empire, and to furnish a pretext for such
insubordination or aggression as might be to their
advantage. Nestorianism was favored in Persia, be
cause it was under the ban of the empire. The Syriac-
speaking inhabitants of the East were either Nestorian
or Monophysite ; the Copts in Egypt and the Abyssin
ians were Monophysites, while the orthodox among
them were called Melchites or Royalists. In the year
596, the Armenian Church, being under the Persian
yoke, and finding conformity to the Church of the
empire to be a political disadvantage, as exposing its
members to persecution for disloyalty, formally re-

50 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

nounced the Council of Chalcedon, and is classed to
this day among the Monophysite Churches.
The terrible effects of this disruption of the Church
were fully evident in the political sphere when the
tremendous energy of Mohammedanism threw itself
upon the empire. The hosts of the false prophet could
never have made their inroads upon Eastern Chris
tendom, had the population been loyal to the govern
ment, and filled with the spirit of patriotism as well as
animated with a zeal for true religion. As it was, the
religious dissensions increased the disloyalty and in
difference which the government had generated by its
oppressive and rapacious tyranny. And the misfortune
was, that the religious differences masked the real cause
of the disaffection, and led emperors who were really
desirous of the good of their people away from the re
forms which might have bettered their condition and
assured their loyalty, into further repetitions of the
abortive attempts to heal the breach by political
theology. The disloyalty seemed to be based upon
religious disaffection, whereas in reality it caused that
disaffection ; and therefore, as the physician was wrong
in his diagnosis, he could not be right in the remedy
proposed. It is no wonder that Heraclius, after the
Persians had overrun the East as far as Egypt, and
when the Mohammedan cloud began to loom upon the
horizon, should make another effort at compromise. A
great soldier may be pardoned if he does not see the
bearings of a theological proposition ; but all the same

From Constantine to tJie Reformation. 5 1

the Church would have been false to the trust com
mitted to her, had she not branded the Monothelite
heresy. Heraclius was a great general and a great
emperor ; but his theological blunder very sensibly in
creased the difficulties of his later years. The con
troversy raised by it wis not brought to an end for
half a century. In the Sixth General Council, Mon
othelitism was condemned, and its condemnation
involved that of Pope Honorius who favored it.
The Iconoclastic controversy would furnish other
facts illustrative of the position taken in this lecture,
but I cannot go into it at length. Image-worship
itself was Eastern rather than Western, and monastic
rather than clerical. It took its rise from the political
custom of showing outward reverence to the standards
of the army, and the statues of the emperor. If it is
right to salute the national flag, it is right to salute
also the symbol of the Kingdom of Heaven ; if it is right
to do reverence to the image of the sovereign, it is cer
tainly no less right to do reverence to the image of the
Saviour. That was the whole question. In times of
politico-religious excitement, such reverence shown on
the one side, denied on the other, would be the badge
of party, and the symbol of disaffection. The attempt
to put down the use and cultus of images of the Saviour
and the saints was suggested by the Mohammedan
wars ; and the whole miserable history shows how
both parties were entangled in the net of Constantine's
devising. But I cannot enlarge upon this. I must ask

52 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

your attention for a few minutes longer, whilst I
attempt to sum up, as briefly as I can, the moral effect
of the union of Church and State in the Eastern
Empire, during the period of which I have taken a
rapid review, upon the clergy and the laity of the
Church — that is, upon practical Christianity.
First upon the clergy, and especially upon the
bishops. The union of Church and State imposed upon
the bishops many secular cares, and mixed them up
with the politics of the government. It is plain that
when religion is made an affair of state, it is the duty
of prelates to be statesmen, and it may be their tempta
tion to be demagogues. If St. Gregory Nazianzen, St.
Chrysostom and St. Augustine were great saints, as
they were, we must remember that neither St. Gregory
nor St. Chrysostom were capable of ruling Constanti
nople, and that St. Augustine's episcopal see was a
small town in Africa. St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St.
Ambrose, Innocent I. and St. Leo were men of a
different stamp, and had a different part to play ; and
Theophilus and Cyril and Dioscorus of Alexandria were
men of a different stamp still. That Theophilus and
Dioscorus were more fit for nobles of the empire than
for prelates of the Church, their history manifests ; and
that the fair fame of St. Cyril is tarnished with political
intrigue and demagogic violence cannot be denied.
But there are no nobler nor greater men to be found
anywhere than the class to which St. Athanasius, St.
Basil, St. Ambrose and St. Leo belong. And as re-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 53

gards the lesser men, and the men in lower stations, it
is true that the power came to them and was not
sought by them ; it came to them because they were
the only men who were able to exercise it in the
general decline of society under the oppression of the
government. The office and the power from which
others shrank devolved upon them, and the population
was saved from utter barbarism by the powerful influ
ence of the Church. The bishop, as the defender of
the curia and the real head of the people in the
municipality, enjoyed extensive authority over the
municipal corporations and the mass of the laboring
population, gradually acquiring the power of a civil
governor, the curia being his senate.* As the leaders
of the people and the defenders of the Church, the
clergy stood between the people and the government ;
and if at times they became subservient, and at times
yielded to the temptation to become demagogues, we
must remember that their circumstances were more
difficult than any we are familiar with, and that the
evils which affected the Church had their origin in the
State. Our respect for the Churchmen of the East is
vastly increased when we compare them with the
Bishops of Rome as subjects of the Eastern Emperor.
• It was easy for the Bishop of Rome to pose as the
Church's champion when he was under the protection
of the Western Emperor or the Gothic King. But the
* Finlay, History of Greece, Vol. I., pp. 243-4, Vol. II., p. 25. I am
Indebted to Mr. Finlay's volumes all through this lecture.

54 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

feeble resistance of Liberius to Constantius, of Vigilius
to Justinian, of Honorius to Heraclius, and the treat
ment of Martin by Constans II. show us against what
odds the Church of the East contended for the faith
once delivered to the saints.
As to the effect upon the people. The adhesion of
Constantine to Christianity undoubtedly made the
Christian religion fashionable, so to speak, and induced
many to an external conformity, and a professed
interest in Church affairs, which was not accompanied
with a sincere desire to lead the Christian life. As
time went on, the influence of the Church upon such
persons and their descendants would at least improve
their morals, and create such an opinion in favor of
religious truth and right conduct as would and did
react upon society for its improvement. But that
improvement, and the real religious feeling of the
people is not the matter of which ecclesiastical history
is made. It is quiet and retiring and domestic, and
does not appear upon the surface. History, as usually
written, is after all like our daily newspapers, in which
crime and immorality and the abnormal take up too
much space, and the quiet, orderly life of the millions is
unnoticed. In the conflicts with heresy, and the
stormy scenes of politico-ecclesiastical commotion, the.
turbulent spirits make the noise, and the sincerely
religious, who live by their faith, and who constitute
the real strength of the Church, are little seen or
heard of.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 55
On the other hand, however, the reserved rights of
the Church in matters of faith and doctrine, for which
she had successfully contended throughout the Arian
period, gave occasion to every discontented element in
the body politic to assert itself whenever a theological
question arose. Paradoxical as the assertion may seem
to those who take a superficial view, theology was the
only subject of general interest in which thought was
free — in which there existed the constitutional right of
opposition to the party in power. The outcome of the
Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople was that the
emperors were compelled to acknowledge the right of
the Church herself to declare what her doctrine is ; and
this acknowledgment constituted her the only bulwark
of free thought against the despotic power of the gov
ernment. In the absence of a political public opinion,
which was impossible because the people had no real
influence in the government, all the political animosities
and discontents of the people turned themselves into
the channel of theological discussion ; and it is a suffi
cient explanation of the acrimony of dispute, of the
universal interest in the conflicts with the Nestorian,
the Eutychian and the Monothelite heresies, and par
ticularly in the Iconoclastic controversy, and of the
turbulent commotions which accompanied them, and
the scenes of violence which disgraced them, that they
furnished the outlet for the pent-up political passion of
those who cared less for Christian truth than for some
safe way of showing opposition to the government.

5 6 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Earnestness and zeal for the truth is one thing, political
passion is another ; and yet they may be mistaken, the
one for the other. The odium theologicum is not a
religious, but a politico-religious temper ; and the
change of temper apparent in religious controversy after
the union of Church and State, not only among the
ecclesiastics, but also among the people, was due to the
political interests involved, and the political passions
aroused, and cannot fairly be charged upon the Church
—against which no such accusation can be sustained
from the records of primitive Christianity, when zeal for
the faith was just as strong, and the conflict with heresy
as strenuous. The Church furnished the only means of
a constitutional opposition in the body politic. We all
know how, under a free political constitution, the rights
of the opposition are secured in Congress or in Parlia
ment, and the value to the commonwealth of the party
out of power, in holding the party in power to its
responsibility. No such political rights existed in the
empire ; and therefore all the passion and contention
which in our system find a safe outlet in the recurring
elections, spent themselves under the emperors in theo
logical disputation, and occasionally in riot and murder
for the sake of religion. This condition was hurtful
both to the State and to the Church, and gives the
enemies of religion occasion to blaspheme. While it
tempted the clergy to insist upon coercion as a means
to unity, it drew into the contest all the turbulent ele
ments of society. When the emperor was orthodox

From Constantine to the Reformation. 5 7

the malcontents upheld the heresy ; when the emperor
favored the heretics, they were moved to clamor the
grievances of the orthodox ; and in consequence, the
imperial policy, instead of using Christianity to sustain
the throne by appealing to an enlightened and generous
loyalty, wrought dissension, stereotyped differences,
and was a powerful factor in the breaking up of the
empire. And yet this very condition of politico-ecclesiastical
ferment was the working of the leaven in the three
measures of meal according to our Lord's parable. It
intensified the universal interest in Church affairs, and
indirectly helped forward the growth of the better life
among the mass of the people. It was better than the
religious indifference which accompanies the cessation
of religious controversy at the present day. The actual
Church in any age falls far short of the perfection of the
ideal Church, which is for all ages — for time and for
eternity. But it may be that the actual Church, with
all its imperfection, is doing its work better in that age
and under those conditions which exist, than the ideal
Church, could it have been realized, would have done.
The Church is a field in which tares grow with the
wheat ; it is a net which draws fish of every kind, both
bad and good ; it is a leaven which by its fermentation
leavens the whole lump. This may be our comfort
under the difficulties of the present day — under our
impatient sense of the want of ideal perfection in the
Church as it now exists ; as well as our light in reading

58 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

the Church history of the past. As regards the Byzan
tine Church, with which we have had to do in this
lecture, it is the testimony of a writer who has no
theological bias, that the moral condition of the Byzan
tine Empire in the ninth century was superior to that
of any equal number of the human race in any preceding
period of the world's history ; and that the superior
moral tone of society was the conservative principle
•which prolonged its existence to so late a period, not
withstanding its manifold defects.* That moral superi
ority must be attributed to the influence of the Church
upon the people ; for there was no other power which
could have evolved that result out of the unclean
heathenism to which it succeeded.
* Finlay, Byzantine Empire, p. 258.

II.
THE ROMAN REACTION.

II.
THE ROMAN REACTION.

I have in this lecture to invite your attention to the
history of the principal see of Western Europe during
the time covered by the last lecture, and to show you
how the same causes which threw the East into disorder
acted, in a different way, but with as great potency, in
promoting the aggrandizement of the see of Rome, and
contributing to the rise of that political and ecclesias
tical power which ultimately became the Papacy. My
object in this lecture is not controversial, but historical ;
because I believe that to set forth the facts of history
as I have read them and understand them, and to point
out their bearings upon the development as it gradually
unfolded, is a sufficient argument on any points of
controversy that may suggest themselves.
It was a long journey from Nicaea to Canossa — from
Constantine's invitation of Bishop Sylvester in 325 to
the Nicene Council, to the deposition of Henry IV. of
Germany by Pope Gregory VII. in 1076 ; and the foot
prints of the travellers are not washed out from the
sands of time. Their monuments remain by the way
side to mark the path they trod ; and we may learn

62 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

from the footprints and the monuments, what was their
condition at the various stages of the journey.
I pointed out in the previous lecture, how, and under
what influences, the hierarchy of the imperialist Church
was built up as a pyramid, in narrowing stages, until it
remained only to crown the whole with a single head.
Beginning with the laity as the foundation, there rose
in ranks above them, first the priesthood, then the
bishops, above them the Metropolitans, ascending
higher the Exarchs or primates, over them the
Patriarchs. Who should be seated at the summit,
supreme in power and dignity over the whole ? In
this question is contained the whole long struggle of
Imperialism and Papalism. Given the determination
of the head of the State to make himself also the head
of the Church, there arises immediately the spirit of
reaction, which erects a head of the Church (that is
a head on earth, Christ Himself being the true Head of
the Church) to oppose the usurpation of the State.
The theory that the head of the State is, ex officio the
head of the Church is Imperialism — I named it Byzan-
tinism in the title of the last lecture ; the theory that
there must be an earthly, visible head of the Church, to
govern both Church and State, is Papalism. The one
theory produced the other, and the resistance to the
one was the means of the success of the other. But
inasmuch as neither Imperialism nor Papalism is a part
of the Divine Order and Constitution of the Church,
neither can be successful in establishing a complete

From Constantine to the Reformation. 63

j

and ecumenical jurisdiction. Imperialism became domi
nant in the East, and Papalism in the West ; and the
result was the Great Schism of Christendom, never to
be healed until Church and State are disunited through
out the length and breadth of the world, as they are in
the United States to-day.
Here, however, I desire to interpose a remark by way
of caution. In reviewing the history of a thousand
years, including what are called the dark ages, we are
called upon to take note of many things which seem
to us to be corruptions in the Church. But in judging
of them, we must remember that there is a variable as
well as an invariable element in the organization of the
Church, to enable it to adapt itself to the circumstances
of a various and changing world ; and that some adap
tations which would really be corruptions among us,
worked well in other and very different times. More
over (and this is another consideration), a disturbing
element having been introduced into the administration
of ecclesiastical affairs, through the union of Church
and State, it was impossible that the external history
of the Church should not show its influence. Men
with the best intentions, working under the actual
conditions, and endeavoring to act for the best, added
to the evils they attempted to remedy, and increased
disorders which they desired to check. Instances of
this have been seen in the previous lecture. It is a
part of the same truth that measures looking to the
reformation of manifest evils, attempts to adapt the

64 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

working of the Church to the exigencies of the times,
changes of theory to meet practical difficulties, expe
dients honestly intended to remove confessed and
palpable corruptions, have themselves become sources
of corruption after they have outlived their term ; and
it is shown in many examples, that the laudable effort
of one age, has itself become a corruption in a succeed
ing age. Now it is a cheap and easy way of accounting
for these phenomena, to attribute them to the corrup
tion of the men themselves, to the ambition of prelates,
to the ignorance and superstition of the priesthood, to
the unbelief and hypocrisy of those who professed the
faith in Christ. The temptation, so to explain them, is
very great on the part of those who have broken with
the historic continuity of the Church of Christ ; they
are interested in having it so, to justify themselves in
schism. But I believe that these explanations are for
the most part not only false in themselves, but fatal to
a true historical method. We shall better get at the
facts of history by looking for the good in men, than
for the bad in them. Believing, as I do, that the
Papacy in its historical development is a falsehood in
theory, and a corruption in fact, I can yet see that
the men who contributed most to the formation of the
theory and the working out of the fact were, in their
measure, sincere, earnest, able men, righteously indig
nant at sins they sought the power to punish, and at
corruptions they believed themselves commissioned to
reform. I believe that God rules His Church, and has

From Constantine to the Reformation. 65
enabled it to do its work in the souls of men under the
most various and apparently hopeless circumstances ;
and that Christ is in His Church to sustain the faithful
in one age as much as in another. I believe, however,
that any tampering with the Divinely constituted order
of the Church leads to practical evils which are only
palliated by human expedients, however sincere and
well-meant, and that these can be reformed only by a
return to that Divinely constituted order. And it is
with these beliefs that I purpose to comment on the
history to which I have now to call your attention.
I touched briefly in the last lecture upon two or three
points in the polity of the primitive Church, upon which
I must here say a few more words.
1. — In the ante-Nicene period there was no such
hierarchy of Archbishops, Exarchs, Primates, and
Patriarchs, above the Bishops of the Apostolic Suc
cession as was developed in the course of events
already noticed. The rule was that of the 35th
Apostolical Canon : " The bishops of every country
ought to know who is the chief among them, and to
esteem him as their head, and not to do any great
thing without his consent ; but every one should
manage only the affairs that belong to his own parish, *
and the places subject to it. But let him [i. e., the
chief) not do anything without the consent of all ; for
by this means there will be unanimity, and God will be

* Parish at this time meant what we mean by Diocese.
5

66 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

glorified by Christ in the Holy Spirit." The national,
or in the early Roman Empire, the provincial Church
had its chief bishop, but he was only a bishop ( and the
Pope of Rome to this day is nothing more) ; and he
was not in all cases a Metropolitan. Three apparent
exceptions to this rule are only exceptions in regard
to the extent of the jurisdiction, not in regard to
its nature. The Bishops of Rome, Alexandria and
Antioch had larger territories than the rest ; but their
authority in them was only that of the Apostolical
canon,* and their subsequent development into the
great patriarchates followed the course traced in the
last lecture.
2. — The second point is, the completeness of the
system under which, without a visible head, under the
headship of our Lord Jesus Christ, the whole Church
universal was bound together in visible unity, in the
one faith, the one discipline, and the one order.
Throughout the Church there were continually passing
and repassing, duly accredited messengers of the
clergy, bearing to the " chiefs " of each nation or
province, letters written in an official manner — literce
formatce — conveying intelligence of what was done in
the provinces from which they were sent ; and, if the
affair were of sufficient importance, or of general in
terest, asking the concurrence of the churches, or
presenting a case for adjudication by the Church
*See my article in the Church Review for April, 1874.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 6 J

Catholic. By means of these literce formatce duly
received and preserved in the archives of the Churches,
accurate information was everywhere obtainable of the
condition and history of the whole Catholic com
munion ; we cannot open the Ecclesiastical History of
Eusebius anywhere without seeing the use he made of
them. By this means, also, the division was made
between those who continued in the Church's unity,
and those who broke it by schism or heresy. To give
or withhold these letters, to receive or refuse them
was the test of Catholic communion, and the sufficient
means by which the authority of the Catholic whole
was brought to bear upon the local church to reclaim
the erring, or to cut off the contumacious. The rule
was stated by St. Basil in a letter to the Bishops of
Pontus, who had been set against him: "The fair
thing," he says, " would be to judge of me, not from
one or two who do not walk uprightly in the truth, but
from the multitude of bishops throughout the world
connected with me through the grace of the Lord.
Make inquiry of Pisidians, Lycaonians, Isaurians,
Phrygians of both provinces, Armenians your neigh
bors, Macedonians, Achaians, Illyrians, Gauls, Span
iards, the whole of Italy, Sicilians, Africans, the healthy
part of Egypt, whatever is left of Syria ; all of whom
send letters to me, and in turn receive them from me.
From the letters they send hither, and from those sent
back to them, you may learn that we are of one spirit,
of one mind. Whoso, then, shuns communion with me,

68 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
it cannot escape your accuracy, cuts himself off from
the Catholic Church."*
3- — The third point is, the efficacy of this system for
the termination of controversies, the definition of
doctrine and the adjudication of cases appealed from
any portion of the Church, by a truly ecumenical
decision. By these means a judgment of the Catholic
Church upon any matter was arrived at as fully and as
accurately as by the assembly of a general council in
later times ; for example, on the Quartodeciman con
troversy, the Montanist heresy, or the Novatian schism.
The assembly of the bishops in the national or provin
cial councils was thus given, so to speak, an ecumenical
character ; their communications with one another
enabled them to collect at any place the concurrence
of local decisions for a final settlement of a question
which had arisen.
Now had there been no union of Church and State,
there would have been, I believe, no need of any other
polity for the Church than this of the ante-Nicene
period. But when the emperor began to exert his
power and influence in Church affairs, this primitive
system broke down and new adjustments were neces
sary. When heretics or favorers of heretics were
assisted in gaining possession of the Episcopal sees,
and sustained in them by the imperial authority ; when
orthodox bishops were driven out by the military arm,

* St. Basil Ep. 204. Could the Bishop of Rome say more ?

From Constantine to the Reformation. 69
and unjust sentences of deposition were issued against
such men as St. Athanasius by packed and partisan
councils ; and when time-serving or timid men were
willing to hold communion with Catholics on the one
side, and with heretics on the other, it ceased to be
possible to obtain a Catholic exposition of doctrine, or
to decide an appeal for right and justice by the means
previously found sufficient. Two principal modifica
tions of the ecclesiastical polity were necessary to
meet the requirements of the situation.
1. — The first was an instrument for settling con
troversies upon doctrine as they arose. The assembling
the. Council of Nicaea by Constantine established the
precedent, and the failure of the attempt to set it aside
in the interests of Arianism or Latitudinarianism formu
lated the theory of a General or Ecumenical Council,
as such an instrument. An Ecumenical Council is in
theory an assembly of the bishops of the whole Church,
brought together to bear witness to the truth as
originally revealed to, and continuously held in the
whole Church; and having the further function of
establishing canons of discipline, as called for by the
circumstances of the Church and the times. But inas
much as in no Ecumenical Council were the bishops
all actually assembled, and as political expedients
might be (and were) resorted to to secure a pre
arranged decision, and a selection of bishops might be
made to compose the Council, who were supposed or
known to favor the desired decision, it was soon found

70 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

that the mere assembly of a Council, and the con
firmation of its decrees by the emperor were not
sufficient to guarantee its Ecumenical character. In
process of time, therefore, it came to be seen that a
General Council was not constituted by numbers (for
several Councils larger than that of Nicaea -are not
allowed to be such); nor were its decisions binding
upon their first publication ; but that it needed to be
accepted and ratified by the Church at large, as having
been impartially summoned, as having the liberty to
deliberate under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and
as bearing witness to the truth held and professed
in the Church from the beginning. And so it was that
in a controversy about doctrines, the last resort was to
an Ecumenical Council, fully called, freely deliberating
and generally received. It never entered into the
head of any one in the early ages of the Church that
the Bishop of Rome could establish a doctrine by
virtue of his infallibility.
2. — The second adjustment needed was an appellate
authority — a Court of Appeals, so to speak — to which
a bishop or other member of the Church, oppressed by
a partisan or heretical faction, could appeal from the
unjust sentence of his own provincial synod. In the
confusion wrought by Constantius there were many
such cases, and the old method of appealing by letters
to the consensus of the Catholic Church which was not
disturbed by the local trouble,* was made impossible
* " Securus judicet orbis terrarum." — Augustine. See Newman's Apo
logia, p. 157.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 71

by the new relation to the emperor. The head of the
State was willing enough to accept this appellate
jurisdiction ; but it was speedily apparent how danger
ous it would be to concede it to him, and canons were
made against " troubling the emperor's ears." I showed
in the last lecture how this matter of appeals was
regulated for the Eastern Church by the Councils
of Constantinople and Chalcedon — an appeal being
allowed from the synod of the Province to that of the
Diocesis, and in the last resort to the Patriarchal
throne of Constantinople ; but during the half-century
succeeding the Nicene Council there was no settled
rule, either in the East or the West. To some, as we
shall see, it appeared the safe plan to make the Bishop
of Rome the appellate authority ; and the persistent
claim to that authority, founded upon a strained
construction of certain canons of the Council of Sardica
(A.D. 343),* was the means by which that prelate,
aided by the circumstances of the times, attained his
commanding position in the West.
During the progress of the Arian troubles, the
Bishop of Rome was applied to, on several occasions,
by those who were oppressed in the East, to represent
their case to the Western Emperor, that he might
exert a restraining influence over the Emperor of the
East. St. Athanasius, who had been banished by
Constantine, was restored at his death, by his son
* Usually assigned to the year 347 ; but see Robertson I. , 226, note.

72 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

Constantine II., who ruled in Gaul, Spain and Britain,
and was undisturbed as long as he lived. On his
death, he was again banished, and retired to Rome,
where by the influence of the western bishops he
gained the ear of the Emperor Constans, who required
Constantius to restore him ; which he did, and Athan
asius remained in possession of his see until the death
of Constans, when Constantius again displaced him.
So on the accession of Valens, the bishops who held
the Synod of Lampsacus, fearing persecution, applied
to Liberius, Bishop of Rome, to secure the protection
of Valentinian, the Western Emperor ; and later still,
St. Basil and his adherents applied to Damasus of
Rome, and other western bishops for the same media
tion with the same Emperor. In the meantime, how
ever, an attempt had been made to invest the Bishop
of Rome with a real appellate authority. The Council
of Antioch, which condemned Athanasius in 341, had
passed certain canons, which virtually provided that
the rehearing on an appeal should be before the authors
of the original injustice ; and that if a bishop appealed
to the Emperor he should have no hope of restoration.
The idea of the Arians was to obtain, by imperial help,
control of the Metropolitan sees, and by the operation
of these canons, gradually to weed out the Catholic
bishops. To prevent this, the Council of Sardica,
which was held immediately after that of Antioch,
enacted, as a temporary measure, that in case of
injustice done to a bishop by a provincial synod, the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 73
matter should be laid, " for the honor of the Apostle
Peter," before Julius, Bishop of Rome, who should, in
case he thought a rehearing necessary, name certain
bishops from the neighboring provinces to sit as
assessors, and also, if he thought it necessary, delegate
one of his own presbyters to watch the case. The
mention of Julius, Bishop of Rome, by name, shows
that this provision was only intended for the time then
being ; since the authority so conferred would of
necessity lapse at his death ; and yet these canons
were the starting-point for the assumption of all the
power which the Roman bishops ultimately obtained.
But, just as a seed, in order to germinate, needs to
be planted in suitable soil, and to have heat, air and
moisture, so a claim of power and authority, which is
new and in the germ, needs, in order to be successful,
circumstances favorable to its success. Unless there
are reasons why the public should favor it and advance
it, it falls into ground barren and unfruitful. It is not
sufficient for the historian, therefore, simply to mark the
steps of growth ; a philosophical view of the subject
points out the causes and conditions of the development.
There can be nothing more admirable in its way, than
the complete and succinct review which Dr. Hussey
compresses into three short lectures,* of the various
steps by which the Bishops of Rome ascended to the
Papacy ; but the student of those admirable lectures
* Hussej's Rise of the Papal Power. Oxford, 1863.

74 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

must feel that something more is wanting than the
account there given ; and that the facts brought for
ward need to be analyzed, and the causes which made
the usurpation successful explained. A power and
authority which were new were claimed by the party
interested ; in some cases the claim was resisted and
disallowed, in others it was successfully asserted ; the
circumstances need to be understood, the causes which
give it vitality, the conditions of its growth. Such
causes, conditions and circumstances, in this case, I find
in the union of Church and State, the reaction against
the imperial despotism, and the need the Church had
of a leader in that reaction. It is an easy and popular
explanation, that the removal of the seat of empire
from Rome to Constantinople left the field open for the
Bishop of Rome ; that the Bishop of Rome put himself
at the head of the barbarian kingdoms, and assisted
their nascent civilization, and that he received his
ample reward in their affectionate allegiance to him.
But this explanation, though plausible and popular, is,
like many plausible and popular explanations, insuffi
cient and misleading. For the fact is, that the enormous
expansion of the Bishop of Rome's credit and influence
in the fourth and fifth centuries, arose out of the con
nection with the Eastern Church, and the part he was
enabled to play in the controversies and disputes which
distracted it. The Western Church was comparatively
free from Arianism and unanimous in support of the
Nicene Council, and the Western Emperor did not find

From Constantine to the Reformation. 75
or make occasion to interfere actively in Church affairs.
The Bishop of Rome, therefore, was free from the incon
veniences to which the eastern bishops were exposed,
and was able to act as the champion of orthodoxy
against the Emperor of the East at less personal risk to
himself, because he was out of his reach. It was to the
interest of the Eastern Church, in its conflicts with the
emperor, to make much of the bishop of the city which
gave its name to the empire. And therefore, instead
of casting in his lot with the new life of the West, the
Bishop of Rome clung to the eastern connection as
long as he could, and was, for a long time, thought a
more considerable person in the East, than he was in
the West.
But while the Eastern Church, in its contests with
the Emperor, was willing to exalt the Bishop of Rome's
authority, it was very jealous of his interference in its
own proper affairs, and met every assertion of his
supremacy with a distinct and decided negative. The
canons of Sardica were never received in the East, and
as soon as opportunity offered, the appellate system of
the Eastern Church was arranged so as to exclude his
interposition. And therefore, in studying the relations
of the Eastern Church to the see of Rome, we meet
with two classes of facts, which it seems hard to har
monize, and yet which are quite consistent with the
situation. On the one hand we find expressions of
oriental adulation and exaggeration applied to the see
of Rome ; on the other hand, we find a somewhat

76 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

unceremonious disregard of its assumptions. And we
may safely conclude that the Eastern Church under
stood the Roman policy from the beginning, and was on
its guard against it.
It stands to reason that the idea of a Roman suprem
acy in or over the Church should take root at Rome
itself before it did elsewhere ; and therefore it is quite
important to know when and by whom the claim was
first made, how it was received by the Church at large,
and what circumstances limited it, as well as what
enabled it to make progress against the opposition
which its novelty provoked. Now we can put our
fingers upon the precise point of time when the idea of
a primacy of power in the Church — a supremacy, if you
will — entered into the mind and policy of the Bishop of
Rome. It was when Damasus succeeded Liberius.
And the treatment by Damasus of St. Meletius of An
tioch, and of St. Basil and his adherents, under the
persecution of the Emperor Valens, opened the eyes of
the Eastern Church at once to the nature of his
pretensions, and made it forever after watchful and
suspicious of the encroachments of his successors.
When Julius of Rome wrote to the bishops of the
Council of Antioch in 341, that instead of proceeding
as they had done against St. Athanasius and the others,
" word should have been written of it to us all, that so
a just sentence might proceed from all," it is plain that
he had no idea of anything else than the old system of
the ante-Nicene Church. It was against this Council of

From Constantine to the Reformation. ff
Antioch that the Council of Sardica passed the canons
I have spoken of. While Liberius was bishop — he who
was banished by Constantius, and who after two years
of exile failed in constancy and consented to the con
demnation of Athanasius — there was no opportunity to
assert the prerogative, even in the form which the
Council of Sardica granted it. But when Damasus
succeeded to the Roman pontificate (Oct. I, 366), the
idea of an executive and appellate authority over the
Church entered with him into possession of the Roman
see, and became a part of its tradition and policy.
Several circumstances concurred to favor it at this time,
and I must ask your patience to permit an explanation
of them. In 364 Valentinian became Emperor. He
was a successful general, and for military reasons
selected the West for his dominion, committing the
empire of the East to his brother Valens. The two
brothers seem to have pursued different policies in
matters of religion ; while Valens attempted to compel
the orthodox to hold communion with the heretics,
Valentinian pursued a course of non-intervention in
Church affairs, except so far as was necessary to keep
order in the State. But the condition of the Church of
Rome on the accession of Damasus compelled the
authorities to have recourse to the Emperor. His elec
tion was disputed, a faction set up Ursinus against him,
and the dissension grew so fierce as to lead to riot and
bloodshed and slaughter. The Emperor restored order
by banishing the faction of Ursinus, and confirmed the

78 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
authority of Damasus by several decrees, among which
was one that enacted (if the words are a quotation, as
they seem to be) that " the pontiff of religion with his
assessors should judge concerning religion" — a trans
lation, apparently, into legal language, of the provisions
of the Sardican canons.
Now this term " pontiff" inserted in an imperial
decree, and given thereby a legal value, is a matter of
much more importance than appears at first sight. In
law, words are things, and are subjected to legal
manipulation, extending or limiting powers as the
lawyers determine. This decree, therefore, enabling
the Bishop of Rome to assume the legal title of
" pontiff," permitted the pretension that the powers of
Pontifex Maximus in the Roman State appertained to
him so far as the Christian religion was concerned—
especially after the Emperor Gratian abdicated the
office, as we are told he did. It is curious that
Damasus is called " the pontiff" in various documents
of the time ; and it may be permitted to conjecture
that being not only an astute politician, but a man of
some literary affectation, he had adopted it as the
Latin equivalent of the Greek Episcopus, and had the
adroitness to secure its insertion in the imperial re
scripts for which he had to petition, to be delivered from
the party of Ursinus. However this may be, and
whether Valentinian used this particular term or not,
it is certain that Theodosius did, in that famous decree
which he issued in 380, on taking the government of

From Constantine to the Reformation. 79
the East : " We would have all the nations whom our
gracious government rules, to be of that religion which
the Apostle Peter is proved to have delivered to the
Romans, * * * which also it is plain the Pontiff
Damasus follows, and Peter, Bishop of Alexandria,"
etc., etc. It is unquestionable that the term is given
to him in this decree, as a legal title ; and the effect of
its legal use, as a distinctive appellation, upon the
position of the Bishops of Rome could not fail to be
great, seeing that they knew how to take advantage
of it.
It was a great thing for the Bishop of Rome, that
the Emperor acknowledged him to be Pontiff, and
made his faith the rule of orthodoxy for the empire.
But there is something more to be noticed in this
decree of Theodosius. The Emperor adduces the
faith of Peter of Alexandria, as well as of " the Pontiff
Damasus," to certify the religion which " the Apostle
Peter delivered to the Romans." Now it is natural to
understand by " Romans," the members of the local
Church of Rome ; but if that be the meaning, why is
Peter of Alexandria associated with Damasus as a
witness to it ? Let us remember that as far back as
the early part of the third century, Caracalla had
bestowed the Roman franchise upon all the free inhabi
tants of the empire, thereby making them citizens of
Rome ; and let us remember also that the Bishops of
Rome, in their controversies with the patriarchs of
Constantinople, claimed that Antioch and Alexandria

80 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
should take precedence of Constantinople, because
their Churches, like that of Rome, were founded by St.
Peter, the former by the Apostle in person, the latter
by his disciple St. Mark. Now the Church of Antioch
at this time was in dispute between Meletius and
Paulinus, and therefore could not be referred to in
Theodosius' decree ; but the associating Peter of
Alexandria with Damasus shows that Theodosius
meant by Romans, not the actual inhabitants of the
city, but the possessors of the franchise throughout the
empire. It was easy therefore to infer that as " Pontiff"
and Bishop of Rome, Damasus was in a certain sense,
Bishop of the Romans, Pontifex Maximus and so
regulator of the religion of the empire.
And that was what Damasus intended to be, as his
conduct with respect to St. Meletius of Antioch showed.
Scarcely a year had passed, however, before Theodosius
discovered important reasons for modifying his decree.
At the time of its publication he was at Thessalonica,
and the Bishop of Thessalonica, Ascholius, had special
relations with Damasus. Macedonia and Achaia had
up to this time been attached to the Western Empire,
and Ascholius had attended the Western Councils ; but
Gratian, when he appointed Theodosius Emperor of
the East attached these countries to his government
for military reasons, and so Ascholius became associ
ated with the Eastern Church. Damasus therefore
made him the medium of communication with the East,
and trusted to him for information concerning its

From Constantine to the Reformation. 8 1
affairs, and in this way drew him under his influence.
Theodosius while at Thessalonica had a severe illness,
during which he received baptism from Ascholius ; he
therefore naturally consulted him with regard to the
Eastern Church, and so his decree reflected the ideas
of Ascholius and Damasus. But shortly afterwards
the Emperor went to Constantinople, and there met
St. Gregory Nazianzen, who gave him a better account
of the Eastern Church and its relations with Damasus ;
whereupon he issued another decree of different tenor,
and in a short time assembled the Second General
Council to settle the affairs of the East.
Here I have to ask your attention to an episode in
Church history, which is really the key to the relations
of Rome and the East for all subsequent time, and
which is not given by the historians the importance it
deserves. In the last year of the reign of Constantius
(A.D. 361) a Council of the politico-ecclesiastical party
which was supported by the Emperor, transferred
Eudoxius, who was the head of that party, to Constan
tinople, and made St. Meletius Bishop of Antioch in his
place. In a few days they found out that they had
made a mistake ; for Meletius was orthodox, and as
soon as he had gained the attention of his flock, began
to preach the Nicene faith. He was therefore deprived
and banished, but returned to Antioch on the accession
of Julian. At the same time Athanasius returned to
Alexandria, and with him there came two western
bishops, Eusebius of Vercelli, and Lucifer of Calaris,

82 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
who had been exiled to the Egyptian desert some
years before by Constantius. These two were sent by
Athanasius to Antioch to labor for the peace of the
Church ; but Lucifer, being a hot-headed man, refused
to communicate with Meletius, and consecrated a
presbyter, named Paulinus, to be Bishop of Antioch. *
Paulinus had been the minister of a congregation which
remained firm through all the preceding troubles, and
therefore Athanasius could not reject his communion,
though he regretted his consecration, and would have
been willing to acknowledge Meletius, to whom the
orthodox East were devotedly attached. There was
thus a schism among the faithful, Egypt acknowl
edging Paulinus and the East Meletius, while the West
stood aloof from both. Matters were in this state when
Valentinian and Valens became Emperors ; and Valens
not only threw his influence in favor of the Latitudi-
narian party, but sought to compel the orthodox to
communicate with heretics of all sorts. He expelled
again all the bishops banished by Constantius who had
returned under Julian, and Meletius with the others
was sent into exile. A persecution now raged all
through the East, vivid pictures of which, and of the
misery and confusion it wrought, are given in the
letters of St. Basil, and in the ecclesiastical historians.
Not only were orthodox bishops displaced and com
pliant tools put in their stead, but friendships were
* This Lucifer, on returning to the West, became the founder of a sect
called Luciferians, which gave Damasus much trouble.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 83

broken, confidence was abused, weak men turned
traitors and tricksters made gain of. lack of conscience,
the steadfast were wounded by false friends as well as
open enemies, and the faith was in danger of perishing
through proscription professedly in the interest of
toleration. In this state of affairs there was, humanly speaking,
but one door of hope for the down-trodden orthodox
East. It was not without risk for subjects of the
Eastern Empire to appeal to the Emperor of the West,
but it might be done if the Western Church would take
up their cause. Two deputations were sent into the
West while Liberius was Bishop of Rome, one in 364,
and another in the spring of 366, to solicit such
mediation of the western bishops with Valentinian as
would induce him to restrain Valens. They were
kindly received, but there was no opportunity of
reaching the Emperor, who was engaged in military
operations against the Germans, and they had to be
content with the literce formatce that were granted
them. Matters were in this condition when Damasus suc
ceeded Liberius ; but his own affairs were in such a
state that Damasus had neither power nor inclination
to exert himself in behalf of the East. The persecution
continued unchecked, and unabated. In 370 St. Basil
became Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. He imme
diately revived the plan of seeking union with the
West, and so of reaching the Western Emperor. He

84 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
wrote to St. Athanasius, who was all-powerful at Rome,
pleading that he would recognize St. Meletius, and
send some of his own ecclesiastics with his messenger
to the West ; since, if the East and the West were
united, "the Rulers \i. e., the Emperors] would respect
the faithfulness of the multitude." * Athanasius so far
acceded to this request as to send a messenger to
Rome, who, on his return, was accompanied by a
deacon named Sabinus with letters to Athanasius,
which he sent to St. Basil and his friends. Encouraged
by this little, St. Basil and the friends of Meletius wrote
other letters to the West, which they sent back by
Sabinus, asking that the bishops of the West would
send a deputation to visit the Churches. No answer
was returned ; but the next year the letters themselves
were sent back as unsatisfactory, and it was intimated
to the writers that if they wished for any help from
the West, they must write in a form dictated by
Damasus himself, t Wherein they were defective does
not appear ; but there can be little doubt, from St.
Basil's expressions in his subsequent letters, that what
was wanted was some acknowledgment of the Roman
"pontificate," according to the new ideas of Damasus.
St. Basil was deeply disappointed, and expressed his
opinion freely on the pride of the Roman bishop, and
although some of his friends were in favor of another
embassy, he would not consent to it, and nothing more

* St. Basil, Ep. 66. + St. Basil, Ep. 138.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 85
was done for two years. Damasus now seems to have
felt it necessary to put some pressure upon the friends
of Meletius, and in 375 he wrote a letter to Paulinus of
Antioch, acknowledging him, and making him the
medium of his communications with the East. I must
quote the sentence in which St. Basil announces this
intelligence to Meletius, still in exile. " Letters have
reached us," he says, "signifying that there have been
brought to Paulinus and his party several epistles from
the West, as if tokens from some principality, and that
the chiefs of his faction thought great things, and
glorified themselves with these letters ; then that they
set forth a creed, and with that were ready to enter
into communion with our Church."* About this time
Valentinian died, and his son Gratian, still a youth,
became Emperor of the West ; and some of the
Easterns seem to have thought the time propitious for
another effort. They proposed that St. Basil's brother,
Gregory of Nyssa, should go to Rome ; but St. Basil
objected, asking " what benefit would there be to the
common cause from the approach of such a man, whose
manners are foreign to slavish flattery, to one high and
lifted up, and sitting somewhere aloft, and for that
reason unable to hear those who from the ground call
out the truth to him."t In 376, however, certain
presbyters went to the West, and St. Basil wrote a
letter by them to the bishops of Gaul and Italy. " At
*St. Basil, Ep. 216. tst- Basil- EP- 2I5-

86 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
different times in the past," he says, " we have called
upon your love for support and sympathy ; but because
the vengeance was not fulfilled, ye were not permitted
to assist us. Our chief desire is that through your
considerateness our confusion be made clear to the
Ruler of your world \i. e., to the new Emperor
Gratian] ; but, if this be difficult, that some of you
come to us for visitation and comfort of the afflicted,
that they may be eye-witnesses of the sufferings of the
East." Some kind of an answer was returned, and
other letters were written the next year ; but beyond
an acknowledgment of them by Damasus nothing was
done. In 378 Valens was killed in battle against the
Goths. Gratian then made a decree permitting all
who had been banished for religion to return to their
homes ; among the rest St. Meletius returned to
Antioch, where he held a Council of 146 bishops, who
made a statement of their faith, which they sent
into the West. In January 379, Theodosius became
Emperor of the East, and now that both Emperors
were orthodox, the West awoke from its apathy. The
western bishops proposed that Meletius and Paulinus
should together rule the church of Antioch, and that
a Council should be held at Alexandria to settle all
other affairs. But the East was naturally suspicious of
this new-born zeal, and both propositions were respect
fully declined.
Such was the situation when Theodosius came to
Constantinople in the winter of 380-1. There, as I

From Constantine to the Reformation. 87

said, he learned from St. Gregory Nazianzen the truth
concerning the Eastern Church, and superseded his
decree of the year before, making the faith of "the
pontiff Damasus," and of Peter of Alexandria the test
of orthodoxy, by another decree commanding that the
churches be delivered to " the orthodox bishops who
hold the Nicene faith," and defining a holder of the
Nicene faith to be one " who confesses the omnipotent
God, and Christ the Son of God to be one in name, God
of God, Light of Light ; who does not violate the Holy
Spirit by denying Him ; who acknowledges the un
divided substance of the incorruptible Trinity, which in
the Greek language is called ovaia. * Theodosius then
summoned the bishops to Constantinople to form the
Second Ecumenical Council, and when St. Meletius
arrived in that city, he received him with such marked
favor that it seemed necessary to account for it by the
fable that before his elevation the Emperor had a
prophetic dream, in which Meletius handed him the
insignia of sovereignty. St. Meletius presided at the
Council until his death ; after which the Council conse
crated Flavian to be his successor. But the Westerns
objected to this, as to all else that was done at the
Council, and continued their opposition until the suc-

* By this word ovaia Theodosius excluded hypostasis from being a test
word. Some of the Easterns took hypostasis in the sense of subsistence,
others in the sense of substance. The one side asserted three hypostases
in the Trinity, the other only one. This was not a question of heresy,
but only of the use of a word,

88 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
cession of Paulinus died out, drawing down upon
themselves on more than one occasion the sharp
rebuke of Theodosius. Theodoret tells us that the
schism lasted for seventeen years — that is, from the
letter of Damasus to Paulinus, in 375, to the death of
Evagrius, his successor, when the East made good its
position against Rome, and peace was restored.
Now it was under these circumstances, and with a
full consciousness of the Roman claim, based in the
first instance upon the canons of Sardica, but enlarged
by the ambition of Damasus, and with a firm determi
nation to erect a barrier against it, that the Council of
Constantinople passed its famous canons, giving Con
stantinople the second rank, " because it is New
Rome," making the synod of the Diocesis the receiver
of appeals from the provinces, and prohibiting the
invasion of one Diocesis by the bishops of another.
The treatment which the East had received from
Damasus, his evident attempt to assert an authority
over it as the price of his active intervention, his cold,
unsympathetic and selfish neglect of the suffering
churches in their hour of need, his sudden activity
when the danger was past, and his attempt to unsettle
the settlement of the Council — these things opened the
eyes of the bishops of the East to the Roman policy,
and determined them to put an effectual bar in the way
of any future assertion of Roman supremacy. And in
all subsequent history, the East never forgot the lesson it
had been taught by this episode of Damasus and Meletius.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 89
I have dwelt upon this passage of Church history at
greater length than agrees with the scale of these
lectures, because of its importance as marking the
beginning of the Roman claim of supremacy, its relation
to the constitution of the empire, and its rejection from
the very first by the East. This claim was the special
tradition handed down by Damasus to his successors,
and it suffered no diminution in the hands of such men
as Innocent I., Celestine and Leo the Great. As I read
Church history, the claim originated with Damasus ;
but once consciously adopted, it was used to impart a
new meaning to the acts of ecclesiastical intercourse
which were customary in the Church, and to throw back
its shadow upon the past by misinterpreting its records.
And therefore, in studying this period of Church his
tory, it is very necessary to observe, not only what the
bishops of Rome claimed, but how their claims were
received and met by the Church at large. It is evident
that when new ideas enter a system at any centre which
is powerful enough to give them currency, while the old
ideas rule in the surrounding environment, the same act
will be differently interpreted by the different parties.
That which was done with a definite intent according
to the old ideas, will be twisted to a new meaning by
those who are engaged to advance the novel theory ;
and, vice versa, the act done with a definite intent to
establish the new claim may be unsuspectingly allowed
as a customary transaction of the old system. The
polity of the primitive Church was subjected at this

90 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

time to this double interpretation, and as circumstances
favored the pretensions of the Roman see, it was grad
ually transformed by infusion of the new ideas into the
old practice. Things were done as they always had
been done, but a new meaning was put upon them ;
and that which had been the common right of all
bishops was considered a special prerogative of the
Bishop of Rome.
i. — Thus, for example, the ordinary liters formatce
informing the bishops of the Church generally of the
transactions in any particular province were taken by
the Bishop of Rome, when they were sent to him, as an
application for the confirmation of a sentence by pontif
ical authority, or as the appeal of an aggrieved party
for a rehearing ; or, if the decrees of a Council were
communicated for information, they were assumed to
be submitted in order that they might obtain the force
of law by his approval ; whereas there had been no such
intention on the part of those who sent them. The
typical instances are those of the African Church in the
affairs of Pelagius and Celestius, and later of Apiarius.
Pelagianism, as a heresy, affected the whole Church;
the Africans therefore reported their condemnation of it
to Innocent I., of Rome, asking him, according to the
ceremonious mode of address of the time, to affix to the
statutes of their humility, the authority of the Apostolic
see. Innocent replied, congratulating them on knowing
what was due to the Apostolic see, and concurring in
their sentence. But some time after, Celestius appeared

From Constantine to the Reformation. 91
at Rome, and appealed to Zosimus, Innocent's successor,
for a reversal of his condemnation ; and Zosimus,
agreeably to the principle that appeals must be encour
aged by a decision, if possible, in favor of the appellant,
took up his cause, and would have pronounced his
acquittal, had not the Africans, whose great light was
St. Augustine, possessed sufficient influence at court to
procure an imperial decree condemning the heresy ;
whereupon Zosimus wrote to Africa that he held the
matter under consideration, and shortly after he con
demned Celestius, covering up his retractation with the
assertion that the bishops of Rome inherit from St.
Peter a divine authority equal to St. Peter's, so that no
one can question their decision. The Africans, how
ever, paid no attention to this claim of Zosimus, having
previously informed him that as the cause arose in
Africa, he could take no cognizance of it. The case of
Apiarius had a similar result. He had been degraded
by his bishop for immorality, and appealed to Rome.
Zosimus commanded his restoration, and the Africans
refused. Zosimus sent a legate to enforce his decree,
who quoted the Sardican canons as belonging to the
Council of Nicaea. The Africans thereupon sent to
Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch for correct
copies of the Nicene canons, and finding them to agree
with their own copies in not containing the alleged
provisions, they requested the Bishop of Rome to relieve
them of the presence of his legate, both then and for
the future.

92 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
2. — So again, when the number of Councils and the
canons they enacted increased as they did in the fourth
century, the bishops of outlying or secluded districts
would naturally have recourse to some well-informed
authority to learn what the rules were. When St.
Amphilochius was made Bishop of Iconium in Pisidia,
he wrote to St. Basil for instruction in the canons, and
St. Basil sent him in reply his three canonical epistles,
so called. In the same way, Himerius, Bishop of
Tarracona in Spain, wrote to Siricius, the successor of
Damasus, for information of the same sort, and Siricius
replied with a letter of precisely the same character as
St. Basil's. But because Siricius was Bishop of Rome,
his letter is set down as a decretal epistle ; as if the
Bishop of Rome, instead of telling him what the law
was, or what he thought it was, had enacted it by his
own authority. And so we are told in the histories,
that this letter of Siricius is the first authentic decretal.
It was in fact, so far as appears, the first decretal ever
issued by a Bishop of Rome — truly not a decretal at
all ; but, for all that, the origin and foundation of that
whole mass of decretal law, by which the Papacy
profited so much in after times.
3— Once more : When Ascholius of Thessalonica
acted in correspondence with Damasus in the affairs of
the East, he had no idea that he was being made a
Vicar Apostolic of the see of Rome ; and yet his
alliance with Damasus was made the precedent for a
claim of jurisdiction over Eastern Illyricum, and each

From Constantine to the Reformation. 93
succeeding bishop of Thessalonica was duly furnished
with letters committing to him the powers {vices,
whence vicar) of the Apostolic see. And so the prec
edent was established upon which the doctrine was
built up, that the Apostolic Vicariate constituted the
bishop who exercised it the primate of his Diocesis, and
that the nomination to the primacy of a national
Church in the West was the prerogative of the Bishop
of Rome. Eastern Illyricum (that is, Macedonia and
Greece), because of its peculiar relations both to the
East and the West, was so situated as to allow the
precedent to be established there. The extension of
the idea was permitted in Gaul by the dissensions of
the churches of Aries and Vienne, in which Leo the
Great dealt so hardly with Hilary of Aries. Thence it
advanced into Spain ; it went with Augustine into
England ; from England it was taken by Boniface into
Germany, and so it spread over the West. The East
always rejected it.
The case of Hilary of Aries is important because it
produced the imperial decree which really established
the Western Patriarchate. It was an incident in a long
contest between Aries and Vienne, important cities in
Southern Gaul ; and the story shows the policy of
Rome in fostering appeals by favoring the appellant
whenever it was possible to do so. There were two
questions involved, one the right of Aries to be the
metropolis of a province, which Vienne denied ; the
other the right of Aries to the primacy of Southern

94 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Gaul, which Vienne also denied. The dispute con
tinued from the pontificate of Innocent (about A.D.
400) to that of Symmaehus (about A.D. 500), and as
I have not time to tell the story, I shall merely remark
that the Bishop of Rome received appeals alternately
from the Bishops of Aries and Vienne, and usually
decided, without any care for consistency, in favor of
the appellant. This is Dr. Hussey's summary of this
case : " Zosimus," he says, " made a new regulation,
professing in that to restore the rightful primitive
custom of Apostolic times ; Popes Boniface, Celestine
and Leo condemned this, and set it aside. Leo called
it a temporary arrangement, and by a decree of his own
ordered that Aries should be subject to Vienne ; and
then, after a few years, ordered something different,
which was a kind of compromise between the two
claims. Anastasius had changed this again ; and now
Symmaehus revoked Anastasius' acts, on the ground
that all the ordinances of St. Peter's chair must be
perpetual and unchangeable." In the course of this
dispute and the matters growing out of it, Hilary came
into collision with St. Leo, planting himself upon the
rights of his see, and refusing to accept Leo's regula
tions. Leo thereupon procured an imperial rescript,
confirming, or rather conferring upon him — since it had
no real existence before — the patriarchal authority
over the West : "We decree, by a perpetual sanction,
that nothing shall be attempted against ancient custom
by the bishops of Gaul or other provinces, without the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 95

authority of the venerable Pope of the eternal city :
but whatever the authority of the Apostolic chair
ordains shall be law to them ; so that if any bishop
when summoned shall omit to come to the court of the
Roman bishop, he shall be compelled to come by the
governor of the province."
But this, patriarchal authority over the West, with
which the Bishop of Rome was invested by the weak
and worthless Valentinian III., speedily fell into tem
porary abeyance. Within thirty years from the date of
this decree, the last Western Emperor was deposed, the
insignia of sovereignty were sent to Constantinople, and
the Emperor of the East was informed that the one
ruler of the world needed no colleague, since his barba
rian servants or allies would relieve him of the care of
his western dominions. In the troublous times which
saw the establishment of the new kingdoms of the West,
there was little opportunity for the exercise of patri
archal jurisdiction, and the decree of Valentinian became
obsolete. It is somewhat difficult for the student of such a
manual as Robertson, for example, unless he is very
well read, to connect the secular with the ecclesiastical
history of the times. How many of us remember that
just at the time St. Chrysostom was banished from Con
stantinople by the hostility of the Empress Eudoxia,
the Emperor Honorius was driven by the fear of Alaric
to transfer the seat of government in the West from
Milan to Ravenna ; that when Pelagius was publishing

96 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

his heresy, and Augustine took up his pen to fix the
theology of the West for so many ages, Alaric was
besieging Rome for the third time ; that by the time
Pelagianism was condemned, the Goths had entered
Spain ; that while the Council of Ephesus was dealing
with Nestorius, the Vandals were conquering Africa ;
that during the interval between the Councils of Ephesus
and Chalcedon, the Franks had passed the Rhine, and
the Saxons had begun their descents upon Britain ; that
in the year of the Council of Chalcedon one of the
decisive battles of the world was fought, and Attila was
defeated by Aetius and Theodoric upon the field of
Chalons ? Perhaps we do remember that while St. Leo
was protesting so energetically against the decrees of
Chalcedon which made Constantinople supreme in the
East, he was sent on a mission to Attila to turn him
from his purpose of destroying Rome, and that he suc
ceeded ; but are we so sure, without looking up the
chronology, that it was in the pontificate of Leo, that
Genseric the Vandal took and plundered the eternal
city ? And yet the secular and the ecclesiastical history
are connected more closely than might appear at first
sight. The ruinous policy of the government, which destroyed
all political freedom, ground down its subjects by tax
ation, reduced the free tillers of the soil to the position
of serfs fixed to the land, and prevented their entering
the army, lest their capitation and land-tax should be
lost, made it necessary to fill up the armies with the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 97
bands of barbarians. These barbarians were astute pol
iticians as well as able soldiers ; they had a keen eye to
their own interest ; and they understood that so long
as they kept themselves from absorption into the mass
of the subjects of the empire, they were the arbiters of
its destinies. They were Arians, therefore, partly at
least for political reasons, to keep up the distinction
between the Barbarian and the Roman ; and while they
were willing to take service under the empire, they were
just as willing to have a grievance against it, when ad
vantage was to be gained thereby. And so it came to
pass that the orthodox empire depended for its defence
upon those whom its laws subjected to persecution,
whenever it was strong enough, or foolish enough to
persecute them. Under these circumstances it was the
crowning act of folly in the weak and foolish Honorius,
after the murder of Stilicho, his ablest statesman and
best general, to publish a decree excluding all but
Catholics from the service of the State. That decree,
followed up by an infamous and senseless massacre of
the wives and children of barbarian soldiers, threw thirty
thousand veterans into revolt, and opened the road to
Rome for Alaric, and the road to Gaul and Spain for
Ataulph.* So, too, the rigorous laws against the Don-
atists in Africa, who boasted four hundred bishops, and
several thousand clergy, made the members of that
schismatical communion look upon Genseric and his

*Gibbon, Ch. XXXI.

98 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

Vandals as deliverers, and materially assisted in the
Vandal conquest of Africa .* Once the barriers were
broken down, the barbarian irruptions continued, until
they had settled themselves over the whole West, and
established new kingdoms, which, while nominally a
part of the empire, were really independent of it, and of
a different faith. These movements affected the impe
rial city most disastrously ; sieges, plunderings, and the
loss of the annual tribute of grain from Africa, dimin
ished its wealth and its population ; and Rome entered
upon its period of material decline just at the time that
its bishop was pressing his claim of supremacy most vig
orously — a claim which had no meaning for the barba
rians of the Arian faith, and which they would take
good care should not be practically acknowledged by
their Catholic subjects.
It is idle to say, when this was the situation, that
the Roman see obtained its credit and its power from
the gratitude of the barbarians, whose guidance it took
upon itself during this formative period of modern
history. The Goths in Italy were not converted from
Arianism by Rome, they were exterminated by Justin
ian ; the Goths in Spain were not converted by
Rome, they were converted by the native Catholic
clergy ; the Franks were not converted by Rome. It
was not until Augustine was sent to England by
Gregory the Great, that Rome began to have any
real influence in the new life of the West.
* Gibbon, Ch. XXXIII.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 99

The real power which advanced the credit of the
Roman see during these ages was the reaction against
the Byzantine despotism over the Eastern Church ;
and this is the explanation of the fact that although
the new map of Europe had been marked out, in out
line at least, by the year 500, the Roman see clung to
the eastern connection until the first half of the eighth
century. I have shown in the previous lecture what
the imperial policy was towards the Eastern Church,
and what entanglements resulted from it. In the
political or diplomatic struggle between the Church
and the Emperors, in which the Emperors endeavored
to make the Church subservient to the imperial policy,
or to adjust the situation to the necessities of the
empire, and the Church strove to retain its autonomy
as a witness to the faith and a legislator in the affairs
of religion, the Bishop of Rome became, so to speak,
the constitutional head of the opposition ; and the East
was willing to exalt his authority, as a counterpoise to
that of the Emperor, to any extent short of acknow
ledging that the primacy implied a supremacy. Against
the supremacy it was firm and decided from the be
ginning ; and yet the Bishop of Rome, because of his
influence in the affairs of the Eastern Church, was a
much more considerable person in the opinion of the
East, than he was in that of the West. We may
therefore take it as a matter of course, that Rome would
continually be making the claim of supremacy, and
that the East would quietly ignore it — accepting its

100 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
authority and influence, so far as it agreed with the
Patriarchal theory of the Eastern Church, and was
founded on those ideas of Catholic unity, according to
which the concurrence of the five patriarchates was
required for the settlement of any affair of ecumenical
importance. For this idea of Catholic unity was the strength of
the Church in these eventful times ; and that all the
more, because, though the empire was nominally one,
it was in practical effect twofold. The five patri
archates covered both empires, and therefore, when
the Eastern Church was thrown into disorder by the
imperial policy, it was enabled to call in the West to
arbitrate between parties, or to throw its weight into
the scale, on the ground that Catholic unity must be
preserved, not only in the East, but between the East
and the West. How favorable this was to the pre
tensions of the Roman see is evident at a glance ; but
at the same time it was a deduction from the true
theory of Catholic unity, as realized in the primitive
Church. It agreed also with the theory of the imperi
alist Church of the East, so that it was very easy for
the different parties to concur in common action while
each was acting under different ideas. There are
many times in history, when ideas in this way overlap
or interlace, and we cannot understand the course of
events unless we give due attention to this fact.
Thus when Innocent I. refused to hold communion
with Arsacius, or Atticus of Constantinople during the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 101
life time of St. John Chrysostom, or until his name,
after his death, was inserted in the diptychs, he might
hold, and his successors might assert that he acted as
judge in the appeal of Chrysostom, according to the
Sardican canons, or according to the supposed inherent
powers of the see of St. Peter. The act would bear
that interpretation at Rome. But in the East it would
be remembered that such action was according to the
ancient custom of the Church, by which all bishops
had the right and duty of refusing the communion of
those who were in schism or heresy ; and therefore
that submission to the demands of Innocent was no
acknowledgment of his supremacy or appellate juris
diction, but a recognition of right and justice to the
persecuted saint. Or again, when the patriarchal
system was fully established, although the inferior
bishops had not the same influence they had in the
primitive Church, yet, on that theory, what Innocent
did was only what any of the patriarchs had full right
to do, and what it was his duty to do when circum
stances required.
Now it needs to be remembered that in the situation
of the Eastern Church, as in the primitive Church, the
only way to right a wrong, or to correct an error of any
magnitude, was by such action as this to establish a
schism, to throw the responsibility of the schism upon
the wrong-doer, and then to appeal to the five Patri
archates in General Council assembled, or by other
concurrent action, to determine the issue so raised, and

1 02 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

to labor for the restoration of unity by the correction of
the wrong. The remedy was heroic, because the
Emperor became a party in the case, and there were
times when it would have been better not to have applied
it — when the wrong would have righted itself had it
been let alone ; but the issue once raised must be carried
through to the end, unless the Eastern Church would
be tied, hand and foot, to the Imperial throne. This
consideration will enable us to take a different view of
the ecclesiastical history of the East from that which
has been current since Gibbon set himself to belittle it.
It was a battle of giants, not of pigmies. It was not
only the contest for the integrity of the faith in Christ
against political expediency ; but it was the arena of
the only political activity allowed to the subjects of a
despotic government, because the Church only had
reserved rights which the Emperor could not take away ;
and therefore it manifested oftentimes, with the zeal of
the Christian, the passion and violence of a political
struggle. The evil was in the system — in the union of
Church and State — rather than in the men. And be
cause there were evils to be combated, the strong men,
the great men, sought to accumulate power in their
hands, that they might combat them successfully. That
was true of the ablest and best emperors ; it was true
also of the ablest and best ecclesiastics. The fact is,
that in an abnormal situation, men on both sides are
sometimes right when they are wrong, and wrong when
they are right. Let us do justice to the motives and

From Constantine to the Reformation. 103

conduct of Marcian, and Leo, and Zeno, and Anastasius,
and Heraclius, and Leo the Isaurian ; and let us also do
justice to the motives and conduct of Innocent and
Celestine, and St. Leo, of Cyril of Alexandria and John
of Antioch, of Acacius of Constantinople and Sophro-
nius of Jerusalem, of John of Damascus, and Theodore
of the Studium.
All these considerations must enter into the study of
this portion of the history of the Eastern Church, and
then the true Catholic course of that history may be
traced amid all the eddies and counter-currents of the
times. Let it be granted, in the case of Nestorius and
the Council of Ephesus, that St. Cyril was actuated by
a desire to humble the see of Constantinople, which had
been exalted above Alexandria, and that he displayed
a violent and arbitrary temper at the Council of Ephe
sus ; still it is true that Nestorianism was a heresy which
the Church must repudiate, that it was the duty of St.
Cyril to oppose it by breaking off communion with
Nestorius, as well as by writing against him ; that it
was his duty also, to present the issue to the Church for
settlement, and that it was, as a part of that duty, his
duty to call the Bishop of Rome to the common adju
dication. Let it be granted that Celestine treated the
matter as an appeal to himself, upon the new theory
that was current at Rome ; still it is true upon Catholic
principles, that he had a part in the adjudication, and
that the Eastern Church accepted his concurrence, and
quietly set aside his assumptions.

1 04 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
In this connection it is important to notice, that
although the controversy concerning the reception of
the Council of Ephesus was long and bitter in the East,
the Bishop of Rome took no particular part in it. His
function was discharged when he had assisted at it by
the presence of his legates, and concurred in its decrees
after they were published. In due time the Eastern
Patriarchates also concurred, and the ecumenical char
acter of the Council was determined by that concurrence.
The relation of St. Leo to the Council of Chalcedon
further illustrates our position. Eutyches was the
favorite of Chrysaphius, the eunuch who had most
influence with the weak Emperor Theodosius II., and
who is said to have had in mind the deposition of
Flavian, the Bishop of Constantinople, and the eleva
tion of Eutyches in his place. The condemnation of
the Eutychian heresy, therefore, was mixed up with a
miserable court intrigue, in which all the influence and
power of the empire was on the side of the heretic.
Dioscorus, the Bishop of Alexandria, lent himself to
the schemes of Chrysaphius, and was put at the head
of a second Council of Ephesus, which had been called
on the appeal of Eutyches, with instructions to con
demn Nestorianism afresh — that is, of course, the
party opposed to Eutyches. St. Leo was invited, up
on Catholic principles, to take his part in the
determination of the question ; but he received the
notification as an appeal, upon the principles current at
Rome. He conducted himself with consummate states-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 105
manship and ability, as well as with thorough honesty ;
his orthodoxy was unimpeachable, and his celebrated
letter to Flavian was worthy to be made a standard of
doctrine. The "Robber-Synod" of Ephesus had the
temerity to refuse to hear it read, and to try to compel
the legates of Leo to assent to the condemnation of
Flavian as well as to the restoration of Eutyches. An
imperial rescript confirmed this council ; but the
Church immediately repudiated it, and the cause of
Leo, as well as of Flavian, became the cause of ortho
doxy against imperialism. Leo demanded a true
General Council to be held in Italy, and obtained the
concurrence of the Western Emperor in the demand ;
but just at this juncture Theodosius died, the eunuch
Chrysaphius was put to death for his manifold iniquities,
and the orthodox Pulcheria called Marcian to the
throne of the East as her husband. The General
Council was held, but not in Italy ; it was convened at
Chalcedon ; the legates of Leo presided amid the
acclamations of those who remembered the proceed
ings of two years before, and who therefore identified
his cause with their own; Dioscorus was condemned
for his part in those proceedings ; the faith was defined
against Eutyches ; the letter of Leo to Flavian was
read and approved ; and the name of Leo was saluted
with the appellation of Patriarch.
But although the state of matters just at this time
created an enthusiasm in favor of Leo, the Emperor
and the Eastern Church were not unmindful of the

1 06 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Roman pretensions, or incautious enough to acknow
ledge them. Six years before the Council of Chalcedon,
the Western Emperor had granted the decree before
mentioned, giving to St. Leo the supreme appellate
authority over the West ; and in view of that decree
(as the Council expressly said in their synodical letter
to Leo), the Emperor Marcian proposed, and the
Council enacted, those celebrated canons spoken of in
the last lecture, which settled the hierarchy of the
Eastern Church, and the patriarchal authority of the
Bishop of Constantinople. It was of no avail that Leo
rejected them, and opposed them with all his might ;
they are the law of the Eastern Church to this day.
I have already remarked upon the disturbances in
the East after the Council of Chalcedon — how the
nations and races which were oppressed by the empire,
and were not Greek or Latin, adopted Nestorianism or
Eutychianism as their badge of discontent, and how
Zeno the Emperor and Acacius the Bishop of Con
stantinople endeavored to allay the dissensions by
publishing the Henoticon. Acacius was probably the
ablest politician who ever occupied the see of Con
stantinople, and he advanced its pretensions to the
greatest height. He held communion with those who
accepted the Henoticon (which was not unorthodox);
among others with Peter Mongus of Alexandria, and he
had compromised the legates of Pope Felix III., by in
ducing them to be present at a service at which the
name of Peter was recited in the diptychs. For this.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 107
Felix excommunicated him, and declared him to be
deposed ; whereupon Acacius publicly removed the
Pope's name from the diptychs. A schism now began
which lasted thirty-five years. It materially increased
the troubles of the Emperor Anastasius ; it enabled
Pope Gelasius, who was a worthy successor of St. Leo,
to compare the Pontifical with the Imperial preroga
tive, and so to advance the Roman claim another step ;
it consigned Pope Anastasius, Gelasius' successor, to
immortal infamy in the pages of Dante, for a disposi
tion to leniency ; it gave Pope Symmaehus an oppor
tunity to console himself for his subjection to the
Gothic King Theodoric, by exalting himself above the
Emperor ; and it was healed by the Emperor Justin's
command to remove the name of Acacius, now de
ceased, from the diptychs.
Here again, the political explains the ecclesiastical
history. The Bishop of Rome at this time was under
the barbarian Odoacer, and the Arian Gothic King
Theodoric, and it was much to their interest that there
should be a schism between the Catholics of the East
and of the West. They were nominally vassals of the
Emperor at Constantinople ; but they had no desire
that he should interfere in their affairs ; and so long as
the schism lasted they were secure on that side— at
least Theodoric was. You remember the saying
attributed to Ataulph, the founder of the Gothic
monarchy in Gaul, that he once aspired, in the confi
dence of valor and victory, to blot out the name of

108 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Rome ; but when he reflected that laws were necessary
to a state, he determined to maintain the Roman
Empire. This was the policy of all the more en
lightened Goths. They saw that they had not the
experience or ability to manage the vast administrative
and legal machinery of the empire, and yet that with
out it, they could not rule their Roman subjects. They
continued, therefore, the fiction of the empire, even in
their own independent kingdoms, for the sake of the
civilization that depended on it, and that which they
won by the sword, they were willing to legitimize by
the imperial permission to retain. When the last
Western Emperor was deposed (A. D. 476) the in
signia of sovereignty were sent to Constantinople,
with the profession of allegiance to the Emperor there.
It was Zeno, the author of the Henoticon, who received
them. Theodoric obtained Zeno's consent to dispossess
Odoacer of Italy, and to hold it as a kingdom depend
ent on the East. The permission was a mere pretence ;
for Theodoric paid no tribute, and the Emperor was
unable to demand any ; but it served its purpose to give
Theodoric a legitimate title so long as he could hold
the country.
But Theodoric knew very well that his title would
not hold, if the Emperor felt strong enough to dispossess
him, and could count on the loyalty of the Catholics of
Italy, and their hatred of an Arian ruler, and therefore,
as I said, it was to his interest that there should be a
schism between the East and the West. The politics

From Constantine to the Reformation. 109
of the time entered into the internal affairs of the
Roman see. The dispute between Symmaehus and
Laurentius, at the close of the fifth century, was con
nected with a Byzantine intrigue. When Zeno died
and Anastasius ascended the throne (A.D. 491),
Theodoric sent Festus, a noble Roman, to Constanti
nople, to solicit his confirmation as King of Italy.
Festus resided at Constantinople some time as Theod-
oric's ambassador, and while there he entered into
some engagement with Anastasius to procure the
Bishop of Rome's consent to the Henoticon, and so to
heal the schism. On the vacancy of the see, therefore,
while the people and clergy elected Symmaehus, a
party of whom Festus was the head set up Laurentius.
It was a political quarrel, disguised as a religious one,
and was carried on with great acrimony, and not with
out bloodshed. Theodoric was appealed to ; he decided
that the bishop who had the greatest number of suf
frages and the prior consecration, should hold the see.
The decision was in favor of Symmaehus. The party
of Laurentius, which included the consul and a large
part of the senate, then accused Symmaehus of heinous
crimes. Theodoric referred the charges to a Council
— of Italian bishops, whom he summoned to meet in
Rome. The Council evaded an inquiry by deciding
that the Pope, as such, was free from human censure,
leaving the whole to the judgment of God. It provided,
however, that the clergy who had taken part against
Symmaehus should be pardoned on making satisfaction.

1 1 o Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Theodoric confirmed the decree, and restored to Sym
maehus the temporalities of the Church, which had
been sequestered pending the inquiry.
It was in connection with these events that Ennodius,
Bishop of Pavia, in a treatise defending the Council just
mentioned, advanced the proposition that the Bishop of
Rome was exempt from all earthly judgment, because
he was made holy by the possession of the see of St.
Peter. The moral ground of the assertion has been too
sadly negatived by the conduct of Popes in later ages ;
but as a proposition in Canon Law, as canon law was
understood at Rome, it had some plausibility. It was
a maxim of the same order as "the king can do no
wrong." It implied no personal infallibility, no moral
innocence ; it implied merely that there was no
canonical or legal tribunal before which the Pope
could be compelled to plead. It put, as Gelasius had
done, the Pope on an equality with the Emperor in
this respect. By the imperial and ecclesiastical laws,
interpreted as they were at Rome, the Bishop of Rome,
as the ultimate appellate authority in the Church, had
none to whom to appeal, and therefore none to do him
justice upon earth. Damasus had once, for a similar
reason, asked as a special privilege that he be permitted
to plead his cause before the Emperor in person ; but
fortunately for the Roman see, there was no record
that his request had been granted, and it was possible
to argue that there was no earthly tribunal to which
the Bishop of Rome was amenable. The Sixth General

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 1 1
Council, by the condemnation of Honorius as a Monoth
elite, supplied the omission ; but this was before the
time of Honorius. That such an argument as that of
Ennodius should be made at Rome was natural. It
was unfortunate, however, that it should need to be
supported by such documents as the legend of Pope
Marcellinus and the Council of Sinuessa, which, Dr.
Dollinger informs us, was forged, with other fables of
the same sort, at this time and in this connection.
Symmaehus, who died in 514, was succeeded by
Hormisdas, and in 518 Justin became Emperor in
place of Anastasius. He was severely orthodox ; the
Henoticon was repudiated, the eastern sees were placed
in the hands of those who had a right to them, the
demands of the Bishop of Rome were listened to, and
the name of Acacius was removed from the diptychs.
The Emperor seemed too desirous to please the
Catholics of Italy, and Theodoric took the alarm. He
had reason for uneasiness ; for within a few years,
Clovis, the only orthodox prince of the age, had led
his victorious Franks against the Visigoths of Gaul,
because "it grieved him that these Arians possessed
its fairest provinces." Justin, too, dismissed from the
service all heretics but the Gothic mercenaries, whom
he was not yet strong enough to proscribe ; and there
were dark rumors of conspiracies and uprisings in Italy
in favor of a restoration of the now Catholic and
orthodox empire. Theodoric determined to take the
initiative. He disarmed the whole Roman population ;

1 1 2 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
he arrested and put to death several of their principal
men ; and he sent John, Bishop of Rome, who had
succeeded Hormisdas, to Constantinople to demand
the same freedom of religion for the Arians in the
East, which he had accorded to the Catholics in the
West. It was the first time a Bishop of Rome had
ever visited Constantinople, and he was received with
unbounded honor ; but he was probably lukewarm,
and certainly unsuccessful in his mission, and on his
return Theodoric forgot the argument of Ennodius ; he
threw John into prison, and kept him there until he died.
Shortly after this Theodoric himself died. His king
dom speedily fell into disorder. Justinian became
Emperor, and his terrible general Belisarius was sent to
restore the empire in the West. He subdued first the
Vandal kingdom in Africa, and then turned his arms
against Italy. Theodatus, the Gothic king, sent
Agapetus, Bishop of Rome, to Constantinople to avert
the storm. Justinian deposed the Bishop of Constanti
nople at his request, and, as Agapetus died in that city,
he celebrated his funeral with great magnificence ; but
the war went on. In a year Justinian was master of
Rome, and in a few years of Italy. The Bishop of Rome
was a subject of the Eastern Empire ; and the theory
of Ennodius was to be put to the test under new condi
tions, by the behaviour of the nominee of the Empress
Theodora, the unhappy Vigilius.
It was a great fall from St. Leo to Vigilius. The
moral force of the Roman see deteriorated rapidly amid

From Constantine to the Reformation. 113
the political intrigues and strife of parties, Gothic and
Roman, from Symmaehus down. It kept pace with the
material decay of the city. Vigilius, who had repre
sented Rome at Constantinople, became bishop, it is
said, by an intrigue with the Empress, by which he
agreed to acknowledge the Eutychians. Silverius was
banished to make room for him ; Theodora demanded
the fulfilment of the contract and he obeyed. But
there was no one to mete out to him the measure his
predecessors had meted out to Acacius, and he is reck
oned among the legitimate Popes. His punishment
came in a different way. Justinian was bent upon
another of those schemes of concession which seemed
so promising and proved so abortive. He had been
persuaded that the Monophysites would return to the
Church, if certain writings of Theodoret and Ibas of
Edessa, and Theodore of Mopsuesta, all of whom were
long since dead, were repudiated. Ibas and Theodoret
had been admitted to the Council of Chalcedon, and
both Monophysites and Catholics understood that to
condemn them would be to condemn the Council of
Chalcedon ; but Justinian was determined to proceed.
The traditional policy of the Bishop of Rome was to
head the opposition, and Vigilius was disposed to follow
it. But he had to deal with Justinian, and he was not
St. Leo. He was summoned to Constantinople ; he
refused to condemn the Three Chapters, as they were
called ; he excommunicated the patriarch of Constan
tinople, and the patriarch of Constantinople excommu-

114 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
nicated him ; in a short time he changed his mind ; he
was reconciled to the patriarch, and pledged himself to
the Emperor to carry out his wishes. By his Judicatum
he condemned the Three Chapters " without prejudice
to the Council of Chalcedon," and the western bishops
at once withdrew from his communion. He then re
voked his Judicatum, and requested the Emperor to
summon a Council. The Emperor Summoned a Council
— the Fifth General — which condemned the Three
Chapters, without involving the Council of Chalcedon.
It was, as I said in the last lecture, a piece of diplomacy,
by which the bishops avoided a rupture with the
Emperor. The writings were worthy of censure ; but
Theodoret and Ibas had purged themselves at the
Council, and, as Dupin remarks, the Church was thrown
into confusion about a matter of small importance. But
our business is with Vigilius. He refused to attend the
Council, and fearing violence, he took sanctuary in a
church. When the Council condemned the Chapters,
he issued a Constitutum, censuring the writings, but
defending the authors. At length, some six months
after, having been exiled to the rock of Proconnesus,
he gave in his adhesion to its decrees, and was permitted
to return home, but died on the passage.
The behaviour of Vigilius, under the heavy hand of
Justinian, like that of Liberius under Constantius, while
it enables us to gauge more accurately the vaunted or
thodoxy of the bishops of Rome during this period,
shows us against what odds the Eastern Church had to

From Constantine to the Reformation. 115
contend for its autonomy and integrity, and cannot fail,
amid all the fatiguing study of controversy after con
troversy, to raise our esteem for that great and much
calumniated communion. Three years of the rapacity
and corruption of the imperial government in Italy was
enough to cure the Italians of their desire for the resto
ration of the empire ; and when Totila, at the head of
only five thousand Goths,* raised the standard of revolt,
the cities submitted at his approach ; with a continually
increasing army he subdued the country, and laid siege
to Rome, which he reduced by famine. It is with a
feeling of solemn interest that we read the two or three
lines of history which tell us that Totila in his wrath
expelled the whole population of the eternal city, and
that for forty days Rome lay desolate and forsaken, and
without inhabitants. t It was in the year 546. But the
Gothic rule had passed away. Belisarius, and after him
Narses, restored the supremacy of the empire, and the
Goths were literally exterminated. Their place, how
ever, was speedily supplied by the Lombards, who like
them were Arians and acknowledged allegiance neither
to the Emperor nor to the patriarch of the West.
Their frontier line ran between Padua and Ravenna,
and between Florence and Rome, and the country they
occupied was permanently sundered from the throne of
Constantinople. But Rome still continued to be a city
* Two hundred thousand Goths had been slaughtered in the wars with
Belisarius. — Gibbon, Ch.
f Gibbon, Ch. XLIII. note i6, referring to Marcel, in Chron. p. 54.

1 1 6 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
of the Eastern Empire ; it was subject to the exarchs ol
Ravenna, and its bishops, confirmed by the Emperor,
governed without influence and without opportunity,
until Gregory the Great discovered the Saxons in
England. The reign of Justinian, within which occurred the five
hundredth year from the crucifixion and resurrection of
our blessed Lord, seems to me to divide between ancient
and mediaeval history. In our next lecture we shall be
transferred to a new scene and new actors. If the con
jecture or calculation of Gibbon be allowed, there was
a tremendous clearing of the stage for the next drama
that was to be enacted ; for he estimates that in that
one reign, not less than a hundred millions of human
beings perished by war, by pestilence and by famine.
But the continuity of history was not broken. The old
world handed over to the new the great facts and prin
ciples which were gradually, amid many vicissitudes, to
transform the barbarian hordes into the Christian and
progressive nations of the modern world. The Empire
existed in the East, and was to be revived in the West
under Charlemagne and his successors. The Roman
law had been reduced to its final form, not only as the
instrument for the administration of justice and the
ascertaining of rights, but as the text-book of govern
ment, in which the imperial power asserted its suprem
acy in Church and in State, and as the principle of
resistance to the Papacy, when the Papal theory had
been fully formulated. And the Church, with its Divine

From Constantine to the Reformation. 117
faith, its conscious strength, its compact organization,
its moral and spiritual power, was none the less able to
deal with the new order, or rather the new disorder of
the coming ages, that it had been moulded into a
hierarchy which was a variation from its primitive sim
plicity, and had assumed a form in which we can
recognize much that belonged to the imperialist con
nection, and which is not to be imitated or reproduced
among ourselves. It was the Church of Christ as truly
in the darkness of the dark ages, as in the light of the
nineteenth century.

III.
THE CONVERSION OF THE FRANKS.

III.
THE CONVERSION OF THE FRANKS.

We must now pass over from Italy into Gaul and
Germany, and study the history of the Church in its
dealings with the new and barbarous races from whom
sprang modern Europe. The first thing which I must
ask you to remember — and I must ask you to remember
it all through this lecture — is, that when we speak of
the Church as dealing with barbarous races, we are not
to conceive of the members of the Church as one order
of beings, and of the barbarous races as another ; as if,
for example, we were speaking of the dealings of the
people of the United States with the Indian tribes of
our frontier ; but that, as time passed on, those barbar
ous tribes became the Church itself in its human aspect ;
they were themselves the laymen and the priests and
the bishops of the Church ; they were called to the
duties and responsibilities of the Christian profession
and the Christian priesthood in their state of barbarism ;
and therefore, if Christianity in the times succeeding
the overthrow of the empire by the barbarians, seems
to wear a barbaric aspect, it is because the Divine
grace and the Divine organization are working in and

122 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
among the barbarians by means of the barbarians
themselves. The period upon which we are now enter
ing is that commonly called the Dark Ages ; and I
need only refer you to Dr. Maitland's discursive but
masterly essays collected into the volume bearing that
title, to remind you that there was light in the dark
ages ; and that the popular notion of them, derived
from the time when Mosheim was our text-book of
Church History, and Daubignc's Reformation was
accepted as authentic and reliable, is wide of the truth,
and must, under the influence of the new school of
modern history, give way to a better knowledge.
In the year 486 Clovis defeated Syagrius, the last
representative of the Roman dominion in Gaul, and
founded the kingdom of the Franks. The events
which led up to that revolution require a few words.
After the Empire ceased to be aggressive, the defence
of the Gallic frontier against the inroads of the German
tribes was the care of the Western Emperors. It was
their task to maintain the line of the*Rhine, as it was
that of the Eastern Emperors to maintain the line of
the Danube. In this they were successful up to the
fifth century. The first serious invasions of the Empire
were those of the Goths in Eastern Europe, and it
might have appeared that the East, rather than the
West, would succumb to the attacks made upon it.
But an inspection of the map will show why the Goths
did not succeed in overrunning the eastern empire.
The East was deeply indented by the sea ; its cities

From Constantine to the Reformation. 125
were upon the shores and islands of the ^Egean, the.
Mediterranean and the Adriatic, and on the Bosphorus
and the Black Sea, and its maritime commerce could
not be destroyed by the barbarians. The Goths were
not a seafaring people, nor were they able to reduce
the cities which they could not blockade. Though
they could make incursions into the interior, and
obtain tracts of devastated and abandoned land for
settlements, they could not gain the supremacy ; they
became soldiers of the Empire, not its masters. In the
West it was different. Italy was protected in the same
way as Macedonia and Thrace, by its seaboard and
mountains, and the barbarians did not succeed for a
long time in making permanent settlements there, and
then only in the northern part. But the wide expanses
of open country in Gaul and Spain had not the same
natural means of defence against them, and as soon as
the legions were withdrawn for the defence of Italy,
the barbarians came to stay.
Gibbon dates the fall of the Western Empire from
the last day of the year 406. On that day the remains
of the vast host of Radagaisus, who had been driven by
Stilicho out of Italy with the loss of their leader, made
the passage of the Rhine, and poured in a devastating
torrent over the Gallic provinces, burning cities and
villages, and collecting plunder, until their march was
stopped by the ocean. They then turned southward
into Spain, where they founded the short-lived king
doms of the Vandals and the Sueves. Six years after,

124 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
the Visigoths made their way into Gaul under Athaulf,
and fixed themselves in Aquitaine, west of the Rhone,
whence they also passed into Spain. About the same
time the Burgundians obtained a settlement in the
district to which they have given their name, and the
Franks, as auxiliaries of the Empire, in what is now
Holland and Belgium. In 475, on the deposition of the
last Western Emperor, Odoacer ceded to Euric the
Visigoth all the country he possessed between the
Alps and the ocean, and in 486, as has been said, Clovis
defeated Syagrius. It is with Clovis and the Franks
that we have to do in this lecture.
M. Guizot, in his lectures on the history of civilization
in France, has pointed out the causes of the weakness
of Gaul at the time of the barbarian invasions. It was
the same there as everywhere else in the Empire.
Despotism at one end of the social scale, and slavery
at the other, fiscal oppression, and the jealousy which
excluded from the army both the cultivators of the
soil and the curiales of the city, had destroyed the
patriotism and military spirit of the population, and
left the country an easy prey to the invaders, when the
mercenary legions were withdrawn. There is no doubt
that after the first effects of the invasions had passed
away, the condition of the common people improved
under the barbarians, and that, notwithstanding the
horrid tale of crime, of violence and licentiousness,
which makes up the history of court and camp for the
succeeding centuries, the population, which had fallen

From Constantine to the Reformation. 125
back under imperial oppression, began to increase as
soon as that oppression was removed. There was no
vitality in the Empire, and the people were content
under their new masters.
But if there was no vitality in the Empire, there was
immense vitality in the Church of Gaul during this
period. In the fifth century, the Gallic Church — the
Church of Sts. Pothinus and St. Irenaeus, of St. Hilary
and St. Prosper, of Sts. Martin and Germanus and
Lupus, of Hilary of Aries, and Csesarius and Remigius
— had gathered into itself all the intellectual and moral
strength and earnestness which remained in the Gaul
of the decaying Empire. Of the ecclesiastical authors
of this century, a large proportion, perhaps a majority
of those who wrote in Latin, were natives or residents
of Gaul, and the subjects they discussed were both
theological and practical. The great lights of the age,
St. Augustine and St. Jerome, were consulted by Gallic
Christians upon the interpretation of Scripture and the
doctrines of the Church. The Augustinian doctrine of
grace found an able champion in Prosper of Aquitaine.
While Salvian of Marseilles was deploring the vices and
miseries of the world, and sternly admonishing to a
Christian life, Vincent of Lerins was writing his Com-
monitorium against heresy, and expounding the rule of
Catholic tradition, quod semper, ubique, et ab omnibus.
Sidonius Apollinaris, Mamertus Claudienus, and
Faustus of Riez were contemporaries, and while the
one cultivated literature, and wrote lively letters and

1 26 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
verses, the others discussed the nature of the soul;
and Faustus indulged those speculations which pro
duced the Semi-Pelagian controversy. At the begin
ning of the sixth century flourished Caesarius of Aries,
whose sermons show us what was the kind of preaching
at the time — direct, homely, practical, improving.
All the remains of the time bear witness to the activity
of the Church of Gaul, and to the spiritual life which
pervaded it. The Gallican Liturgy was an independent
offshoot of the Ephesine family, akin to that which
remains as the Mozarabic — a rich and varied service,
used by priests and people to edification, and offering
the public worship with solemnity and reverence. The
Councils of the age maintained discipline and good
morals ; the bishops and clergy attended zealously to
their ecclesiastical duties, and the people followed
them with loyal attachment and ready obedience.
To this Church was committed in the Divine order
the Christianizing of the Franks. While the bishops
of Rome were dealing with the Eastern Church and
Empire in pursuit of their scheme of a politico-ecclesi
astical supremacy, the Gallican Church was doing its
proper work among the people of the Gauls, and it did
not cease to do its work among them, when the
barbarians became their masters. To understand the
difficulty of the work, imagine, if you can, the United
States fallen into weakness, possessed of a decaying
civilization, and overrun and conquered by the Indian
tribes of the great West. Imagine those bands of un-

From Constantine to the Reformation. i2f
trained warriors, with their cruel dispositions, their
uncontrolled passions, their want of moral self-restraint,
first ravaging and burning and plundering, and then
exercising the supreme authority over our cities and
villages and farms, contemptuous of our weakness,
appropriating our wealth, fascinated by our civilization,
and tempted to the abuse of our luxury. And then
imagine our attempting, in our subjugation, to Chris
tianize them in their possession of irresponsible power.
The Franks were not Indians, it is true; they were
Germans — and, if Mr. Ruskin is to be believed, a very
chivalrous kind of Germans,* but the supposition en
ables us to understand something of the state of affairs
in Gaul at the moment of the conquest, and among the
descendants of Clovis after his death. One thing Gaul
had, which the United States has not — its religion
was concentrated in the one Church, and that Church
commanded the respect of the Franks, as our sect-rent
and divided Christianity would not, in the case sup
posed, command the respect of the Indians. It was of
the utmost importance for the time then being that
this should be so. It was of the utmost importance
that the Liturgy should be fixed, that the discipline
should be regulated by well-known canons, that the
authority of the bishops should be acknowledged, that
the necessity of the sacraments for salvation should be
appreciated, and that the reverence for sacred persons,

* " Our Fathers have told us." p. 37~'9'

128 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
places and things should be — exaggerated if you will.
It was a time of transition and revolution, in which
both the Roman society and the German society were
dissolved, and a new society was to emerge from their
elements ; and therefore it was a time in which the
Church must preserve her vitality and continuity that
she might influence the new order that was to be
established. You know the story of the conversion of Clovis —
how his wife Clotilda had her children baptized, and
pressed him to become a Christian ; how at the battle
of Tolbiac he called upon the God of Clotilda and won
the day ; and how he with three thousand of his
warriors was baptized by St. Remigius at Rheims.
You remember his comment upon the story of the
Crucifixion: "Had I been there with my Franks, I
would have avenged His wrongs." These words, how
ever justly subject to the criticism which has been
freely bestowed upon them, express accurately the
first devotion of a warrior band to Christ. It is
personal allegiance to the personal Lord, conceived
under the ideas of the warrior by calling and profession.
It is worship and homage to a real and living King of
Heaven. It is the spirit which animated all the
German tribes at their conversion ; * it flamed out in

* " The Heliand," composed among the Saxons after their forcible con
version by Charlemagne, is described as " that deep and glorious song in
honor of the Saviour, which introduced into their language— the old Low
German or Saxon— the story of the Gospels in a poetical form. This

From Constantine to the Reformation. 129
the knightly chivalry of the Crusades ; and it could
be perfectly sincere, although associated with very
defective ideas of civilized Christian morality. It is
very easy to say that the motives of Clovis were a
mixture of superstition and policy, and to hint that his
conversion was insincere. And it is very easy to say
that St. Remigius and his brethren, the bishops of the
Gallican Church, with as little sincerity, made their
gain of their converts by working upon their super
stition and their ignorance. Clovis was superstitious ;
his conversion, in a wordly point of view, was politic ;
his conduct after his conversion was crafty and cruel ;
admit all that — yet his adhesion to the Catholic faith
was real, and an event which, in the far-reaching order
of Divine Providence, led to the most important results.
Little as Christianity seems to have affected his conduct
as a ruler, his conversion, like that of Constantine, was
an event of great influence upon the future of Chris
tianity in Europe. For the Church of the vanquished
to obtain a recognized position of authority over the
victors, to be able to claim their allegiance in any
way, to bring the moral and spiritual force of religion,
however ill-understood, to bear upon their unruly wills,
their untamed passions, their untutored intellects, to
be an element of control where self-control was

memorable monument of a long silent tongue * * presents a picture of
Him [Christ] as a rich, mighty, and kind King of the German people,
whose followers are faithful unto death." — Lewis' History of Germany,
A 87.

I30 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
wanting, gave it the vantage ground for the effort to
make them a Christian people. But the process must
be, in the nature of things, tardy and protracted ; and
that because, as time went on, these barbarians them
selves became, as I said, the Church which was to
exercise its influence over them. Never admit, then,
that God was not with His Church in the darkest days
of Merovingian misrule. Never admit that in the midst
of the miseries of the times the Church was not doing
His work in ministering His mercy and grace to the
souls of men. Is it not strange, when we compare the
Goths and the Franks, as Gibbon paints them — the
alleged aptitude for civilization of the one, with the
asserted barbarism of the other, that the one race
should be swept away, and the other give birth to the
two mightiest nations of Europe ? The one that
perished held the Arian heresy ; that which endured
confessed the Nicene faith.
Perhaps it is because they confessed the Nicene faith
that such hard measure has been dealt out to the Franks
by the historians. It is taken for granted that they
deteriorated after their so-called conversion. I, myself,
do not believe it. We have no such records of their
conduct as pagans, as we have in Gregory of Tours of
their deeds as Christians ; but we may be sure that
incidents, such as those which are narrated of them as
so-called Christians, were not foreign to their experi
ence in their pagan state — only that as pagans they
were not subjected to the strain of ruling so wide an

From Constantine to the Reformation. 131
empire, nor to the temptations of its luxury. Chris
tianity entering as a leaven into the corporate life of a
race works slowly to work surely ; it finds its examples
of Christian virtue in individuals here and there, and only
gradually draws the mass within its sphere. This is true
in the United States to-day, after so many centuries of
Christian effort ; it was true also among the Franks.
Nor do I believe that the Goths were naturally superior
to the Franks in gentleness, justice, aud other Christian
virtues. Though they had been longer in contact with
civilization, we find them, when occasion called for it,
as treacherous and as cruel as the Franks. Theodoric
murdered Odoacer at a banquet ; and though he ruled
well in Italy while Italy was quiet, yet as soon as he
had reason to fear a Catholic uprising, he acted with
barbarian promptitude and ruthlessness against his
most faithful servants and trusted counsellors. The
Goths in Spain, as well as the Vandals in Africa,
showed themselves to be possessed of the genuine
barbarian temper, by the cruelties practised upon the
Catholics. And of the two women who cast such a
baleful light upon the third period of the Merovingian
history, Fredegonda was a low-born slave, and Brune-
haut a high-born Gothic princess.
Then again, much of the disorder and crime of the
age was due to the defective political system of the
Franks, and to the new circumstances in which they
were placed as the rulers of so vast an empire. The
kingdom of Clovis and his immediate successors was a

132 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
loosely compacted affair, without real organization, or
settled principles of government. Strictly speaking,
these first Merovingian kings did not govern the
country ; they were the chiefs of the army that held it.
In each city there resided a Count appointed by the
king to guard against insurrection ; but the Roman
population observed their own laws, administered by
their own magistrates, of whom the bishop was the
chief. The Franks appropriated the country, of which,
in the decay of the empire, extensive tracts had gone
out of cultivation, and reproduced their own institu
tions modified by the change in their circumstances.
The king differed from the lesser chiefs only by the
fact of his birthright and the extent of his possessions.
His wealth consisted in his share of the plunder and his
ample domains, out of which he supported the royal
establishment, visiting one palace or villa after another
and consuming the supplies stored up in each. The
chiefs appropriated to themselves large estates, culti
vated by the conquered rustics as serfs, upon which
they resided in rude plenty, surrounded by their
retainers, until they were summoned to join the army,
or engaged in war with their neighbors on their own
account. The freemen tilled their farms, or formed
village communities around their chiefs, and held their
district assemblies according to Frank custom. An
annual muster of the warriors at the field of Mars pre
served the unity of the nation, determined on war or
peace, and formed such resolves as might pass for

From Constantine to the Reformation. 133
legislation. The army on its march lived upon the
country through which it passed, and recompensed
itself for the toils of war by the plunder it secured when
victorious. It attached itself, therefore, to the suc
cessful leader ; and though it was uniformly loyal to
the royal family, it was indifferent to the individual,
and abandoned the weaker without compunction to
follow the stronger. Such, in general terms, was the
organization of the kingdom under Clovis and his suc
cessors. Two results inevitably followed from it ; the
first was unnecessary and causeless war, the second
licentiousness and turbulence in time of peace.
The worst results, however, followed from the appli
cation to the monarchy of the Frank law of inheritance,
which divided the lands and the wealth of a deceased
parent among all his sons. This wrought all manner
of confusion. When there were several sons, the
kingdom was divided, and then murder or war was
resorted to to restore it to unity. Clovis left four sons.
Theodoric, the eldest, took the east or German portion
of his father's kingdom, with his capital at Metz ; he
was a warrior like his father, and on one occasion led
a hundred thousand men into Italy to make what he
could out of the struggle between Narses and the Goths.
Chlodomir, the second son, took the south or Roman
portion, with his capital at Orleans ; Childebert had
the west, or Celtic portion, capital, Paris; and Clotaire,
the youngest, had the north or Frank portion, capital,
Soissons. Chlodomir died first, and Childebert and

134 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Clotaire murdered his children and appropriated his
domains. Theodoric died next, and was succeeded by
his son Theodebert, and he by his son Theodemir ; but
they were all dead in 553, when Clotaire succeeded to
their kingdom. Then Childebert died in 558 ; and so
the monarchy was reunited in Clotaire. Clotaire died
after a year's sole reign, leaving four sons. Sigebert
became king at Metz, Chilperic at Soissons, Gontran
at Orleans, Charibert at Paris. Charibert died first
without male heirs, and his dominions were divided
between his brothers. Henceforth we find the great
divisions of Austrasia, Neustria and Burgundy ; and
there is a struggle for the supremacy between those
regions where the Roman population is most numerous,
and those in which the German element predominated ;
and these conflicting tendencies necessarily led to civil
wars. And now began the struggle between Brune-
haut and Fredegonda for the mastery. Sigebert of
Austrasia married Brunehaut, a Visigothic princess, and
the wealth and honor she brought him excited his
brother Chilperic of Neustria to ask the hand of her
sister Galswintha, for whom he put away his mistress
Fredegonda. In a short time Galswintha was mur
dered, and Chilperic married Fredegonda, to whom the
murder was attributed. Brunehaut burned to avenge
her sister ; Sigebert drove out Chilperic, and was being
elected king of the Neustrian Franks, when he was
assassinated by emissaries of Fredegonda. Chilperic
recovered Neustria, and Childebert II. succeeded t9

From Constantine to the Reformation. 135
Austrasia. On the death of his uncle Gontran he
annexed Burgundy. Childebert died in 596, leaving
two sons ; Theodebert took Austrasia, and Theodoric
Burgundy. Brunehaut desired to remain with Theod
ebert, but the Austrasians, hating her because she
was Gothic and Roman, drove her out, and she
took refuge with Theodoric in Burgundy. She then,
to avenge herself upon the Austrasians, stirred up war
between Theodoric and Theodebert ; Theodebert was
worsted, and Austrasia was annexed to Burgundy.
Theodoric died in 613, at the age of 25, leaving four
young children, who were set aside, and Clotaire II.,
the son of Chilperic and Fredegonda, became sole
king, at the age of 29, having reigned over the Neu-
strians since he was two years old. The Austrasians
delivered Brunehaut to him, and she was barbarously
put to death, and so Fredegonda triumphed.
The peace and prosperity which came to the Franks
under the sole and united reigns of Clotaire II. and his
son Dagobert show that the vicious law of inheritance
of the monarchy was the principal cause of these dis
orders. There was another reason for the final degen
eracy of the Merovingians. The luxury and ceremonial
of the monarchy, as the kings at Paris adopted Roman
customs, acted unfavorably upon the occupant of the
throne, and more unfavorably upon his heirs. Just as
the line of a Roman emperor became imbecile and failed
by the third or fourth generation, so it was with the
Frankish kings. Though the Merovingian line did not

136 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
fail until it was set aside, it became imbecile ; because
the false dignity that surrounded it cut it off from all
practical education, and from the discipline that would
produce a robust manhood. Moreover the later kings
were feeble boys, beginning to reign in infancy, and
therefore necessarily under the tutelage of the mayors
of the palace, who kept them in effeminate seclusion,
under pretence of preserving their dignity. Allowing
for all these facts, we may see reason to mitigate the
harsh judgment of history upon the unfortunate Mero
vingians; and, what is more important, to avoid the error
of making them the measure of the virtue or vice of the
Franks in general, or of the influence of Christianity
among them.*
Still it must be admitted that in dealing with the
Franks the Church had a hard task set before it. A
nominally Christian, but essentially barbarous nation
must be dealt with as a whole, and as individuals as
well ; and it was most difficult to induce a proud and
high-spirited people to accept laws of morality from
their vassals. The Franks lived among the Romans as
a military aristocracy ; and although they professed the
Christian faith and reverenced the bishops, they thought
it a degradation for a Frank to become a clergyman,
until the Church came to have political influence. They
kept their own laws and customs, and refused to adopt
the Roman jurisprudence, or to yield lay obedience to

*One should by all means read Mr. Ruskin's little book, "Our Fathers
have told us," for a correction of the usual representation of the Franks.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 137
the canons ; and they would not permit the clergy to
judge of the justice or injustice of war, or of any affair
of State. I have no doubt that a great part of the im
morality and cruelty of the time appeared neither
immoral nor cruel to the Franks, and that the quarrels
in the royal family were thought politically useful by
the rude yet shrewd warriors who were satisfied with the
results of this "natural selection" and "survival of the
fittest," and who willingly transferred their allegiance
to the strongest, or to him who survived his relatives.
And the Romanized Gallic Churchmen had been
schooled in the doctrine of the Empire that it was trea
son to criticise the policy or conduct of the ruler, and
that the head -of the State was above all law, so long as
he was orthodox in the profession of his faith. So that
it was a long time before the Church was able to exert
an effective influence upon the morals of the Franks.
The clergy exerted themselves, in the meantime, to
preserve the property of the Church from spoliation, to
secure the right of asylum for the sacred precincts as a
mitigation of the horrors of war and a restraint upon
private vengeance, to assert the jurisdiction of the
bishop over the chaplains in the houses of the chiefs, to
put a stop to incestuous marriages (against which there
are many canons), and so to drive the entering wedge
into the body of corrupt custom which formed the
habits of the people, and through their habits, their
opinions of what was right and wrong. It was not until
a political system began to develop itself, and the bish-

138 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
ops were called to a share in the legislation and
administration of the kingdom, that they obtained an
authority over public morals that was at all respected.
And yet there are evidences during the first period of
barbarian rule of a real, if late repentance on the part of
some of the kings. Sigismund, King of the Burgundians,
having in 522, unjustly put his son to death, "afterwards
repented of it, and passed many days fasting and weep
ing at the [church in which was the] tomb of St. Maurice,
beseeching God to punish him in this world, and not in
the next." And of Clotaire I., of whom we are told by
every historian, that he murdered in cold blood the
children of his brother Clodomir, we are also told this,
which the historians forget to mention, that " in the last
year of his reign, he came to [the Church of] St. Martin
of Tours, and brought very rich gifts along with him.
He there enumerated all the sins of his past life, and
with deep groans besought the holy confessor to implore
God's mercy for him." * Doubtless it was very supersti
tious to make large offerings to the Church, and to ask
the intercession of the departed saint ; but the repent
ance that led him to make a public confession of his sins
was real, and I doubt not the mercy of God heard his
prayers for pardon.
The change in the affairs of Gaul under the Frank
dominion had a reactionary effect upon the Church.
And here again I must refer you to M. Guizot's discus-
* Fleury, B. XXXIV. Ch. I.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 139
sion of the results of the barbarian invasions, and quote
a few sentences : The invasions, he says, "destroyed
first, all regular, habitual and easy correspondence be
tween the various parts of the territory ; second, all
security, all sure prospect of the future ; they broke the
ties which bound together the inhabitants of the same
country, the moments of the same life ; they isolated
men, and the days of each man. * * * A town was
pillaged, a road rendered impassable, a bridge destroyed ;
such or such a communication ceased ; the culture of
the land became impossible in such or such a district ;
in a word, the organic hirmony, the general activity of
the social body were each day fettered and disturbed.
* * * The towns, the primitive elements of the
Roman world, survived almost alone amidst its ruin.
* * * Even within the towns the ancient society
was far from maintaining itself strong and entire ;
amidst the movements of the invasions the towns were
regarded above all as fortresses ; the population shut
themselves therein to escape from the hordes which
ravaged the country. When the barbarian immigration
was somewhat diminished, when the new people had
planted themselves upon the territory, the towns still
remained fortresses ; in place of having to defend them
selves against the wandering hordes, they had to defend
themselves against their neighbors, against the greedy
and turbulent possessors of the surrounding country.
There was therefore little security behind these weak
ramparts. * * * Such in the sixth century were the

140 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

general effects of the invasion and establishment of the
barbarians upon Roman society ; that was the condition
in which they placed it."
This state of affairs seriously affected the Church. It
involved a decay in general education, and in the large
interests of the world ; it cramped men's thoughts and
sympathies into their own narrow and precarious sur
roundings ; and therefore it involved a decay in theo
logical education and in the wider interests of the world
ecclesiastical ; it entangled the bishops and priests of
the Church in multiplied local cares, and stifled a
generous intellectual development. At the same time
it gave an impulse to earnest, practical, personal relig
ion. As the many were pressed with the cares of this
world the few were seized with an ardent desire either
to mitigate the evils of the time by the unbounded
exercise of charity, or to escape from the world alto
gether to serve God in the seclusion of monasticism.
And therefore we find, both in the first and in the second
period of the Frank kingdom, that although there was
a manifest decline in learning, as compared with the
previous age, yet there were a multitude of ecclesiastics
who obtained the unbounded love and confidence of the
laity for their leadership in zeal and devotion and char
ity ; and there were many others, both men and women,
whose personal purity, and voluntary self-denial, and
practice of austerities, which we in our superior enlight
enment think unnecessary, if not foolish, were at least an
appeal against sensuality, and whose example of volun-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 141
tary submission to hardship for the Kingdom of Heaven's
sake, was a great help to the common people in
enabling them to bear patiently the miseries of the
times. Whatever else may be said of it, the literature
of the period, so far as there was a literature, was dis
tinctively Christian — and Christian after a manner which
taught those who read it to appreciate and admire, and
invited them to practise the charity and purity of the
Gospel. And as was the literature, so were the people
of whom that literature was the record. The lives of
the saints of this age contain many things that are
childish, many that are imaginary and imaginative,
many that are exaggerated ; but they do aim to set
forth examples of real goodness, and they appeal to the
heart by the sincerity and simplicity that pervade them.
Another change came over the Church of the Franks,
as the nation developed a more regular political consti
tution, and the bishops were recognized as a political
power — as the representatives of the Roman or Gallic
population. In the year 614, when the Frankish Em
pire was reunited for the second time, under Clotaire
II., the bishops were called to the great assembly of
the Franks, and attended to the number of seventy-
nine. The event is remarkable as the beginning of the
immense political influence which the Church exercised
all through the Middle Ages. In that assembly an
edict was put forth for the general regulation of the
kingdom under the title of the " perpetual constitution."
This constitution marks three things : the growth of a

142 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
political system among the Franks, founded on written
law, the rise of a territorial aristocracy, and the
increased importance of the leaders of the Roman pop
ulation in the national organization. So much is said
of the ambition of Churchmen in grasping at political
power, that I must ask your attention particularly to
their advent into the political arena at this time, and
its meaning. Theycame because they were summoned;
and their presence in the national assembly of the Franks
means that it was no longer a mere concourse of armed
warriors, met to determine upon the next expedition of
war and plunder, but a proper legislature for the nation;
the chiefs of the Romanized Gauls were called to it as
well as the chiefs of the Franks, because all were
recognized as parts of the nation. From this time forth,
the bishops were, if we may so say, members of parlia
ment, and as a natural consequence they entered into
the political life of the age ; they were compelled to do
it ; the times demanded it, and they ought to do it ;
because the Church only had the education, the know
ledge of written law which was necessary for a kingdom
in which there was to be a settled administration. It
was about this time that the laws of the Franks were
reduced to writing, cleared of obsolete pagan customs,
and amended by incorporating into them some new
provisions inspired with a Christian spirit.
And now, before I go on to consider some bad effects
of this calling of the bishops to political influence, I
wish to show you some of the men who were bishops

From Constantine to the Reformation. 143
at this time, that you may see for yourselves that in a
superstitious and turbulent age they were true Chris
tians ; and I do this because neither in the secular
histories, nor in the manuals of Church history are the
facts given by which you can see their life as it actually
was. What I am about to read to you is from an old
English translation of several volumes of Fleury which
I picked up some time ago ; and I give it in the old
English, because it is one of the few books I own, * and
to which I am able to refer while writing these lectures,
and because I like the quaint old style. The first whom
I shall introduce to you is St. Arnulph of Metz, the
ancestor of Charlemagne.
" St. Arnoul [as Fleury calls him] was of French
[/. e., Frank] parentage, of a rich and noble family.
Having studied much in his youth, he was placed in the
court of King Theodebert, under the direction of
Giondulph, mayor of the palace, and acquired so great
knowledge in public affairs that he held the first rank
next the prince, and alone governed six towns, which
used to be governed by six officers, called domestics
\i. e., counts]. He was likewise a great soldier ; but
even at that time he applied himself to prayer, fasting,
and to relieve the poor. He married a very noble lady
called Doda, by whom he had two sons, Clodulph

* I have also the full edition of Fleury in French, in 25 volumes, 8vo.
At Nashotah we had a good library, and I was able to make use of
Baronius, Mabillon's Acta Sanctorum Ordinis Benedicti, Labbe's
Concilia, &c.

1 44 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
and Ansegisus ; * however, having contracted a great
friendship with another lord named Romaric, who was
also attached to the service of King Theodebert, they
resolved together to renounce the world, and to retire
to the monastery of Lerins, but God did not permit
them to execute this design. They both entered into
the service of King Clotaire (II.). In the first year of
his reigning alone in France, the see of Metz had been
vacant, * * * and the people with one voice de
manding St. Arnoul, he was constrained to accept the
bishopric, although he was only a layman. * * *
Doda, his wife, retired to Treves and took the monastic
veil. St. Arnoul, although a bishop, continued against
his inclinations in the court of King Clotaire, where he
held the first rank ; but he increased his alms so much
that the poor came to him in crowds, even from distant
countries." When Clotaire made his son Dagobert, at
the age of 15, King of Austrasia, "he sent Arnoul,
Bishop of Metz, and Pepin, mayor of the palace, to
assist him with their advice, which so long as he
followed, he reigned in glory and prosperity." t But
when Dagobert succeeded to the sole monarchy, on
the death of Clotaire, and removed his residence to
Paris, St. Arnulph left the court, resigned his see, and
retired to a hermitage in the Vosges, where he died
about the year 640. His body was carried to Metz,
and buried in the abbey which bears his name.
* From Ansegisus was descended Charlemagne.
\ Fleury, B. XXXIII. Ch. 15.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 145
St. Lupus, Archbishop of Sens, was born at Orleans,
of parents allied to the royal family. He was made
bishop in the year 609. He had supported the party
of young Sigebert to the utmost of his power after the
death of King Theodoric* " Afterwards King Clotaire
becoming master of Burgundy, sent Farulph thither to
take care of his affairs. When he drew near Sens he
was very angry that the archbishop did not come out
to meet him, and bring him presents ; and when he
arrived there did not look upon him with a favorable
countenance ; but St. Lupus said to him, the duty of a
bishop is to govern the people, and to teach the great
men of the world the commandments of God ; and
therefore it is rather their duty to come to him." Upon
the representations of Farulph, Clotaire " banished St.
Lupus to Ausene, a village in Vimen upon the river
Bresle, whither he was conducted by a pagan duke
named Landegesil. The holy bishop being come
thither, and finding profane temples, wherein the
people of the country worshipped false gods, believed
he was sent by God for their conversion, which was a
consolation to him in his banishment. At length,
having healed a blind man, he converted Landegesil
and baptized him, together with several of the army of the
Franks who were yet pagans." t He was subsequently
restored to his see, and died in 623.
?That is he had supported the interest of Theodoric's young son
Sigebert, as King of Burgundy, against the consolidation of the whole
monarchy under Clotaire II.
f Fleury. B. XXXIII. Ch. 15.

146 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
The next I wish to tell you of is St. Eligius, of whom
Dr. Maitland has so much to say. He was born of
Roman \i. e., Gallic] parents, and brought up to the
trade of a goldsmith, in which he showed so much skill
that he was taken into the service of Clotaire, and made
master of the mint. " St. Eloi being come to years of
maturity, resolved to clear his conscience, and for this
purpose confessing all his actions from his youth to a
priest, he inflicted a severe penance upon himself. ' ' This
is the first example," says Fleury, " that I find of a
general confession." After the death of Clotaire, he
grew into so great credit with King Dagobert, that he
drew upon himself the envy of wicked men whom he
opposed. In the meantime he continued to labor in
his calling for the King. * * * St. Eloi had always
a book open before him when he worked, that he might
at the same time instruct himself in the law of God.
There were several books fixed to the walls of his
chamber, especially the Holy Scriptures, which he read
after he had prayed and sung psalms ; and several of
his domestics sung the canonical office with him day
and night. * * * Eloi bestowed great sums in
alms,* giving to the poor all that he received from the
king's bounty. * * * He was more especially

* It ought to be superfluous, but it is not, after what the moderns have
said of St. Eligius, to remark that those ancients who speak of the special
charity, self-denial or devotion of the saints, assume, as a matter of course,
that their readers understand that such persons kept the ten commandments
and performed the ordinary duties of religion.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 147

zealous to redeem captives ; when he knew that a slave
was to be sold in anyplace, he made haste thither, and
sometimes ransomed fifty or a hundred at a time,
especially Saxons, who were sold in great companies.
* * * On the death of St. Acarius, Bishop of Noyon,
St. Eloi was elected to succeed him. * * * When
he found he could in no way avoid the Episcopal
dignity, he was resolved at least to observe the rules,
and would not be consecrated till he had some time
practised the clerical duties, t * * * His zeal
appeared chiefly in the conversion of the infidels ; he
carefully visited the cities of his large diocese, espe
cially such as had not yet received the Gospel, as the
Flemings, the inhabitants of Antwerp, the Frisons and
the Suevi who dwelt near Courtray, and the rest as far
as the sea shore, who seemed to be at the extremity of
the earth. At first these people were as fierce as wild
beasts, and would have pulled him in pieces ; but he
desired nothing more than martyrdom ; at length, con
sidering his goodness, meekness and frugal life, they
began to admire, and even to desire to imitate him.
Many were converted, the temples were destroyed,
and idol-worship abolished. The holy bishop by his
discourses raised the minds of these supine and slothful
barbarians to an affection for heavenly things, and
inspired them with a meek and peaceable temper.
Every year at Easter he baptized great numbers,
f That is, he remained some time deacon and priest before being made
bishop.

1 48 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
whom he had gained to the knowledge of God in the
space of the twelve preceding months. * * * He
exhorted such as were already Christians, as well as
the new converts, to frequent the churches, give alms,
set their slaves at liberty, and to practise all sorts of
good works ; and persuaded several of both sexes to
embrace a monastic life." *
Now of course it was very wrong in St. Eligius to
" persuade several of both sexes to embrace a monastic
life," but I do think hard measure has been dealt out
to him by Mosheim and Gieseler and their copyists, in
quoting his sermon as an evidence of the degraded
Christianity of the times. After reading what Dr.
Maitland gives of that sermon, I think ^ve should be
the better to have more such sermons preached to us
of the nineteenth century ; and, on the whole, my
unlearned judgment is, that if ever there was a true
Christian upon earth, St. Eligius was one.
The last example I shall bring before you is St. Leger
— of whom Dean Milman says, "Legend dwells with fond
pertinacity on the holiness of the saint ; sterner, but
more veracious hirtory cannot but detect the ambitious
and turbulent head of a great faction." I have not had
the opportunity, of which Dean Milman doubtless availed
himself, of reading the life of St. Leger in the Acta
Sanctorum of the Bollandists ; but I am content to
leave your judgment of this censure to rest on what I
* Fleury, B. XXXVII. Ch. 38.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 149
am about to give you from Fleury. St. Leger was
Bishop of Autun in Burgundy, at the time that Ebroin
was mayor of the palace to Clotaire III. and Theodoric
III. of Neustria ; and it is to be remembered that since
the " perpetual constitution," the bishops had their
political functions as the equals of the secular nobles.
St. Leger was opposed to the policy of Ebroin, and
acted with the others who were so opposed. On the
death of Clotaire III., Ebroin set up Theodoric III., a
boy about 15 years old, proposing to rule in his name.
St. Leger desired that Childeric II., who had been ten
years King of Austrasia, should be elected King of
Neustria and Burgundy, and so unite the three king
doms. I fail to see that he was wrong in exerting
himself to bring that about. He did bring it about,
and Childeric became king. I need not go through
the history ; suffice it to say that after Childeric's
death, Ebroin regained power as the minister of
Theodoric or Thierry III., and determined to be
revenged on St. Leger. And this is what Fleury tells
us of the way in which St. Leger acted when Autun
was besieged for his sake :
" They marched to Autun in order to apprehend St.
Leger, who was there endeavoring to restore his people
to their former tranquility, after the disorders which
had ensued upon his absence. His friends and his
clergy advised him to retire, and to carry with him the
treasure which he had, that so the enemy might be
diverted from coming thither, when they should have

1 50 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
lost the hopes of getting it into their possession. But
he replied, 'To what purpose should I to my shame
burden myself with that which I cannot carry with me
to heaven ? Is it not better to give it to the poor ? '
Accordingly he caused his silver plate to be brought
forth, of which he had a great quantity, and to be
beaten in pieces with hammers, that it might be dis
tributed by the hands of trusty persons, all of it but
what was dedicated to sacred uses ; and it being thus
distributed, great relief was thereby afforded to several
convents of both sexes. He afterwards ordered a fast
of three days, and a general procession, wherein they
carried the cross and the relics of the saints about the
walls of the city ; and at every one of the gates he
prostrated himself, and besought God with tears, that
if He did call him to martyrdom, He would not suffer his
flock to become captives. The people had flocked from
all parts, for fear of the enemy, into the city, the gates
of which were shut, and every place put into a posture
of defence, and the holy bishop called all the people
together into the church, and asked pardon of such
whom he might chance to have offended, by repre
hending them with too much severity. Soon after, the
enemy came up, and those within made a stout defence,
and continued fighting until the evening. But St.
Leger, seeing to what danger they exposed themselves,
said : ' Do not fight any longer; if it be upon my account
that they are come, I am ready to give them satis
faction : let us send one of our brethren to know what

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 5 1
they would have.' Whereupon an abbot named Mero-
alde went out to the enemy and applied himself to
Diddon ; who answered that they would not give over
storming the town till they had delivered Leger to them,
and taken an oath of fidelity to King Clovis, swearing
that King Theodoric was dead. St. Leger, being
informed of this answer, publicly declared that he
would sooner suffer death than fail in his fidelity to his
prince ; and the enemy pressing upon the city with fire
and sword, he took leave of all the brethren, and,
having first received the holy communion, marched
boldly towards the gates, which he ordered to be
opened, and offered himself to the enemy ; who pulled
out his eyes, which he endured without suffering his
hands to be tied, or venting the least groan, singing
psalms all the while." He was subsequently otherwise
mutilated, and afterwards put to death.
Now in reading the popular histories, you do not
find these facts and such as these brought forward. It
is the fashion to represent Christianity as at this time
entirely degraded and false to its high mission. You
may read of Fredegonda's priests, whom that wicked
woman employed to assassinate her enemies ; but they
do not tell you that the bishops had to struggle hard
to exercise jurisdiction over the domestic chaplains of
the grandees, and that it frequently happened that
these persons would procure the ordination of bad men
as chaplains, that they might be free from rebuke for
their lawless lives, and that many councils endeavored

152 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
to reform this abuse. Nor do they tell you of the
saintly lives, of which there are plenty of records, if
they would but take notice of them. St. Leger may
have been the ambitious and turbulent prelate that
Dean Milman represents him ; but I confess I sympa
thize with Mr. Ruskin in his sharp criticism of " the
mind that instinctively assumes the desire of place and
power not only to be universal in Priesthood, but to be
always purely selfish in the ground of it. The idea,"
he adds, " that power might possibly be desired for the
sake of its benevolent use, so far as I remember, does
not occur in the pages of any ecclesiastical historian of
recent date."* I think you will agree with me, that
when St. Leger delivered himself up to save his city
from assault and pillage, he acted as a good shepherd,
" who giveth his life for the sheep," and that his leave-
taking, asking their forgiveness, if he had offended any,
with prayers and litanies and the holy communion,
was both bishop-like and Christian — even if he did
carry the cross and the relics in procession about the
city ; and that he could not have given better evidence
of a truly Christian spirit in that particular, had he
been as saintly and self-denying and enlightened as
Dean Milman himself.
But what I want you to remember just now is, that
these men, and such as these were the political bishops
of their day ; they took part in the political affairs of
* " Our fathers have told us " p. 74.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 153
the kingdom because they were called to do so, and
very much to its advantage ; they were the heads and
chiefs of the old Roman and Gallic population, and in
the unifying of the kingdom that population needed to
be represented in the legislative assembly of the
Franks. Political power came into their hands be
cause it was to the interest of the nation that it should ;
and of course this conferring of political power upon
the bishops changed in a great degree their official
action and responsibilities. They became statesmen
according to the light of the times ; they took part in
the affairs of the government ; they were members of
the different political and national parties. Robertson
remarks, with apparent surprise, that several other
saints who are reverenced among the French were
opposed to St. Leger and sided with Ebroin. They
belonged to the party of Ebroin. But for all this there
is no need to asperse their religious character, or to
ignore the fact that they were canonized by the public
opinion of the people who knew them and reverenced
them for the purity, charity and self-denial of their
lives. Here I wish once more to repeat a remark of great
importance in the study of ecclesiastical institutions.
The history of the Church shows from time to time
various corruptions. But those corruptions were not
introduced consciously for the sake of making a gain of
them. Some of them were "survivals" of previous
habits and beliefs among nations imperfectly Chris-

1 54 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
tianized — as we may see in our own negro population
at the South at the present day. Or they were exag
gerations of a true sentiment, as in the reverence for
departed saints, of which I have just spoken — which
may be forgiven in a declining age, dwelling with hope
less regret upon departed glories. Or they were
inventions of doctrine to excuse or justify abnormal but
inveterate practice, as the doctrine of indulgences in its
later development, or the doctrine so popular at pres
ent, that the Church is made up of jarring sects. Or
they were the reaction of the State upon the Church,
or of the laity upon the clergy, under the conditions of
the times. Or they were the persistence in what were
once lawful and laudable adjustments of the variable
elements in the organization of the Church, after the
circumstances to which they were adjusted had passed
away. Now in the period of which I am speaking, we
see the origin of a good many things which fall under
each of these heads ; but what I wish to point out par
ticularly is the origin of some which fall under the last
head, and to show you that- at this period they were
beneficial adjustments, the laudable efforts of good men
to cope with the difficulties of the times, that they
operated for good, and that they only became "corrup
tions " by being continued beyond their time. The
Bishop of Michigan in a sermon preached some time
ago in Cleveland, and subsequently printed, laid down
the distinction, which is a very important one, between
order and organization ; he showed that while the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 155
orders of the Church are three and unchangeable,
bishops, priests, and deacons, the Church is able, pre
serving these orders, to adapt her organization to the
circumstances of the times and of the people among
whom she labors. In this period of transition, the
Gallican Church made this adaptation, and became the
Church of the Frankish Empire.
In the later Middle Ages, there was no abuse more
flagrant than those which resulted from what is called
the "benefit of clergy" — that is, the right which a
man who could read had, when put on trial for a crime
or misdemeanor, of pleading that the State Court had
no jurisdiction over him, because he was a clergyman.
And yet, if we look to the origin of that right in this
period, we shall see that it sprang from the condition
of all law at this time. It is the glory of modern law
that it is the " law of the land," and therefore that it
administers equal justice to all the inhabitants of the
land. Barbarian law, on the other hand, was the law
of the tribe. The Salian Frank had one law, the
Ripuarian Frank another, the Burgundian another, the
Visigoth another, the Romanized Gaul another ; and
the individual was judged by the law of his tribe or
race. Now all these laws were in their origin heathen
laws, and although they adopted Christian elements in
course of time, yet there was much in them that was
not applicable to the circumstances of the clergy and
monastic bodies, and many rules necessary for these,
that were not applicable to the layman. In the rude

156 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
idea of law, therefore, which prevailed, it was the
easiest and the best to decide that as the Frank was
judged by Frank law, and the Goth by Gothic law, and
the Roman by Roman law, so the Churchman should
be judged by canon law. Traditions inherited from the
Empire favored this claim. Constantius had ordered,
as early as 355, that bishops should be tried by bishops,
and other emperors gave the bishops jurisdiction over
the clergy in minor offences, and in civil causes — their
ecclesiastical jurisdiction over their morals and spiritual
duties being inherent in their office. As the Roman
law was admitted for the Roman population, these
exemptions were allowed for the clergy, and they
naturally wrought to create a civil and criminal juris
diction for the clergy, as a class, on the same principles
as the law of the tribe. It marks the honesty of those
who made this claim, that the penalties in the peni-
tentials were much more severe upon the clergyman
than upon the layman for the same offence. Where a
layman would have three years' penance, a clerk would
have ten years ; and when a deacon would have six, a
priest would have ten, and a bishop twelve.
Then again, the right of sanctuary — a right which
had belonged to the heathen temples — was naturally
conceded to the Christian churches, and served a most
useful purpose when the right of private war and per
sonal revenge existed. The very demand to surrender
a fugitive would give the Church the opportunity to
investigate the matter, to appeal to the conscience of

From Constantine to the Reformation. 157
the wrong-doer and bring him to repentance, to pro
tect the weak, and to preach the gospel of justice and
mercy to the pursuer. It was a most important right
for the Church to possess in those turbulent times.
And so, too, the attempt to secure immunity from the
devastations of war for the estates of the Church was
in the interests of the people even more than of the
clergy. It saved the inhabitants of the devastated lay
lands from famine, by enabling the Church to extend
charity to them ; it restricted the area of war and
plunder, and it taught the blessings of peace. And
therefore the possession of vast estates by the Church
was a good and not an evil in these times. Land was
of little value ; there was more of it than the popula
tion could make use of; vast areas which had been
under cultivation fell back into the wilderness ; the
Church was a good landlord, and under its fostering
care the tenants *oi its estates were enabled to reclaim
them and bring them into use, and the revenues de
rived from the rents paid in kind were used for the
support of divine worship, for the charities of life, and
for the good of the poor. The time had not yet come
for prince-bishops and their luxury, and the holders of
these vast estates were the most self-denying of men.
The union of Church and State, however, among the
Franks, as in the Empire, produced immense disorders
in the Church, and the change in the clergy was great
when the Austrasian influence became predominant.
The battle of Testry (A. D. 687) gave the Austrasians

158 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
under Pepin of Heristal the hegemony of the Franks,
and the kingdom became more German than it had
been. The Franks were a much larger proportion of
the population in Austrasia, than in Neustria, Burgundy
or Aquitaine, and the manners and customs were Ger
man rather than Roman. It was on this side that the
frontier of the kingdom needed to be defended against
the heathen tribes beyond the Rhine ; the Austrasians
therefore were more warlike, and their chiefs, as leaders
in war, and governors of the conquered people, had
larger opportunities than those settled in the other
divisions of the kingdom, and had become a military
aristocracy with vast territorial possessions. It seems
to have been in Austrasia that the peculiarly feudal idea
developed itself that government and ownership went
together, that government implied ownership, and
ownership implied government, and therefore that he
who was appointed governor of a district was in some
way vested with the ownership of the land and people —
not exactly as slaves, but as vassals — and must there
fore, if possible, make his dominion hereditary in his
family. In Neustria, the chief nobles were Counts, as
companions of the king ; in Austrasia, they took the
title of Dukes, as leaders of the host. They were more
independent of the central authority, and at the same
time less disposed to respect the rights of the freemen,
whom they gradually reduced to a state of vassalage.
Pepin of Heristal, although mayor of the palace to the
titular king (who from this time ceased to be of any

From Constantine to the Reformation. 159

importance), was only the first among the Austrasian
nobles, and his authority was precarious unless he could
keep them employed in national wars, while he was con
solidating the kingdom. He therefore convened the
national assembly of the Franks with greater regularity
than of late ; he employed the arms of those dukes who
attended it to reduce those who remained away, and to
extend the Frank influence beyond the Rhine ; he him
self made his residence at Cologne, rather than at Metz,
that he might be more in the midst of the Germans,
while he established his authority in Neustria by making
his son mayor of the palace of Neustria, and in Bur
gundy by making another son duke of Burgundy. But
the records of his government are too scanty to give a
complete view of his policy. It is evident, however,
that in his time, and in that of his more celebrated son,
Charles Martel, the ecclesiastical interest was quite
subordinate to the military, and that an increasing sec
ularly of the clergy was incident to the period. The
Church among the Austrasians was more Frank and
less Gallic than in the other kingdoms, and therefore
more easily fell into the shape of an aristocratic estab
lishment, the benefices of which were appanages of the
great families.
For just as soon as the bishops became possessed of
political influence by being admitted to the assembly of
the leudes, two things happened : first, the ruling au
thority in the State began to treat the estates of the
Church as benefices held of the crown, and to take the

1 60 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
appointment of the bishops to itself, notwithstanding
the canons providing for free elections ; and secondly,
the dignities of the Church began to be an object of
desire to those of the Franks who sought wealth and
influence, and whose names, it is remarked, begin to
appear in the lists of bishops in the seventh century.
Bishops therefore were now chosen because of their
political connections, and their relation to the aristoc
racy, rather than for their merit as ecclesiastics ; and
these bishops looked upon the wealth of the Church as
their own personal property, rather than as a trust for
the common good. At the same time the priests of the
parochial churches were seldom chosen from the Franks
— indeed there were laws against the ordination of those
who were liable to military service — but very frequently
from the serfs attached to the Church land, or from their
children, who were brought up to the service of the
Church, and educated in monasteries or in the priests'
houses. These clergy were in no condition to assert
themselves against the bishops, and they gradually fell
to an inferior place ; as the bishops became wealthy and
great, the priests became poor and mean. In propor
tion, too, as the bishops exercised political influence in
the national assemblies, where they met their metro
politans on terms of equality, the authority of the
metropolitans declined, and the Councils of the Church
became less frequent. In the sixth century, fifty-four
Councils were held in Gaul, while in the seventh there

From Constantine to the Reformation. 161

were only twenty,* and in the eighth, before Boniface
began the reform of the Frankish Church, none.
Finally, this class of ecclesiastics introduced into the
clerical order the ideas of the Franks in regard to the
right to bear arms. This right was the distinctive
attribute of the freeman, as the deprivation of it was the
mark of the serf ; and the member of a noble Frank
family would be loth to surrender it, even though it was
incompatible with the sacred calling. The disorder of
the Church reached its height when Charles Martel was
mayor of the palace and real ruler of the Franks. He
had been passed over by his father in his dispositions
for the future at the approach of death, because of his
illegitimacy, and he felt himself for that reason to be
under the ban of the Church, and resented it accord
ingly ; and therefore, when he had won his way by his
military skill to the leadership, he laid a heavy hand
upon the Church's possessions. He treated them as
military benefices, and bestowed them upon his captains,
who held them as bishops-elect upon receiving the
tonsure, but never proceeded to ordination, and per
formed no episcopal acts and were not really bishops,
though they bore the name.t The consequence was
that discipline fell entirely into abeyance ; for eighty
years, it is said, no Councils were held in Austrasia ;
the so-called bishops led the lives of secular nobles,
*Guizot, II. 269.
\ This must be remembered in justice to the Church of that age.
Sismondi, p. 191.
11

1 62 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
and the real bishops were worldly and affected by their
associations ; the priesthood sank into ignorance and
immorality ; and the Frankish Church ceased to exert
an influence upon the laity favorable to true religion.
But we cannot read the history of God's Church, even
in the darkest ages, believing that it is God's Church,
and that our blessed Lord is its Head and Life, without
tracing the lines of His Providence which run through
the tangled web of human affairs. Influences were
being prepared at this very time for a reformation of the
Church, and for the complicated history of the ages
which were to follow ; and some of those influences,
and they not the least effective for good under the cir
cumstances of succeeding periods, were born of this
very condition of the Church. The idea of the national
Church was kept alive, and enabled to resist the Papal
usurpation through this dependence of the benefices of
the Church upon the sovereign, although it was the
cause of corruption at this time ; and the contest of in
vestitures had its roots thus far back in the past. We
speak of the time of Luther and Calvin and Cranmer as
the period of the Reformation ; but in so speaking we
take too narrow a view. The period of the Reformation
extends from Charlemagne to the present day, and is
not yet completed — perhaps it never will be completed
while the Church is in her militant estate. The para
bles of the tares amid the wheat, and of the net enclos
ing the good fish and the bad, forbid us to expect the
perfect Church on earth. Let it be our consolation that

From Constantine to the Reformation. 163
the imperfect Church somehow does its work ; and that
the continually recurring fact of reformation is the
evidence of the Church's vitality. A teacher to whom
I look with reverence * used to say in my seminary days,
that there is no reformation which does not, after a
time, need to be reformed ; in other words, that the
Church, preserving its divine order and essentials, needs
to be adjusted in mutable things to the successive ages
through which it lives. View the period from Char
lemagne to that which we call the Reformation in this
light, and it will not seem the hopeless waste that
ordinary Protestantism thinks it. The great move
ments were attempts at reformation. There was first
the Imperialist Reformation — the new Imperialism of
Charlemagne. Then, as that failed, as fail it must, there
was the Papalist Reformation of Hildebrand. Then
there was the attempt to reform by Councils, at Con
stance, Basle, etc. Then there was the attempt to
reform by national and isolated action. And now in
this country, God is leading us on our path of reform,
separating the Church from the State, giving us to de
pend on His own institutions of the Apostolic Ministry,
the unmutilated Sacraments, and the Faith once deliv
ered to the saints, and enabling us to adapt ourselves
to the needs of the new world and the new race which
is to inhabit it.
These great movements for reform began with a
*The Rev. William Adams, D.D., of Nashotah.

1 64 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
member of our mother Church of England, the great
missionary, Winfred or St. Boniface.
The action and reaction of the several parts of the
Church upon each other while Catholic communion is
preserved, and the providential ordering of events dis
tant in time and place, as well as close at hand, to assist
in need, are among the facts which ecclesiastical history
sets before us as evidences of the Divine superintendence,
as well as of the Divine institution of the Church Cath
olic. While the Frankish Church was dealing in its
own way with its peculiar problems, and approaching
the condition in which it needed the infusion of new
blood, so to speak, and help from without, that help was
being provided for, and the principles which were to
dominate the next age were being formulated under
equally peculiar circumstances. I shall have occasion
in another lecture to consider the history of the English
Church, and need not dwell upon it at present. You
all know the story of Gregory the Great and his interest
in the Anglo-Saxons, of the mission of Augustine and
his monks, the conversion of King Ethelbert, and the
founding of the see of Canterbury. I do not think that
Ethelbert was quite as ignorant of Christianity as that
story supposes, seeing that he had had for twenty-five
years a bishop at his court as chaplain to his queen
Bertha ; and there is some evidence that he or Bertha
sent to Rome requesting missionaries, not wishing to
receive them from the neighboring Frank kingdom.
But what I want to point out to you now is, that these

From Constantine to the Reformation. 165

Roman missionaries carried to England the views of the
Western Patriarchate and the primacy of Rome which
were then current at Rome, the development of which
we traced in the last lecture. These views had by this
time ceased to influence the churches in the new nations
of the West. What they were, and their limitations in
the time of Gregory the Great, we know very well from
Gregory's own words in remonstrating against the
assumption of the title Ecumenical Patriarch by John
the Faster of Constantinople. Gregory not only did
not hold the papalist theory of later times, but he was
more humble than some of his predecessors in the
assertion of prerogatives which had been previously
claimed, and it is evident that the Roman see had suf
fered in the decay of the city, and its subjection to the
Eastern empire. But the views carried to England by
the Roman missionaries were the Roman views ; and so
it turned out that the newly-converted Anglo-Saxon
Church was the most Roman in Western Christendom.
It was not Papalist — because Rome itself was not Papa
list at this time — that must be distinctly understood ;
but it was devoted to Rome out of gratitude for its
missionary charity, and it willingly submitted to the
Roman primacy. There was another reason also, why
in the south of England the Roman ideas should prevail.
Conformity to the see of Rome in the observance of
Easter and other matters gave the Anglo-Saxons an
advantage in their controversies with the ancient British
Church, which represented a more ancient type of or-

1 66 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
ganization and usage ; and which, therefore, could be
faulted as schismatical, because not in accord with the
Church universal on those points in regard to which,
from its insular and isolated position.it had been cut off
from the general movement of Christendom. The Eng
lish Church, therefore, was led to insist on the Roman
connection, and its missionaries being imbued with the
principles in which they were educated, advanced the
credit of the Roman see in their different fields of labor.
The mission of Augustine to England, therefore, was
the most important event for Rome in this period ; it
was the direct cause of the revival of the Western
Patriarchate, and of the alliance between Pepin and
Charlemagne and the Roman see ; and it is satisfactory
to the candid mind to know that -it was the outgrowth
of true Christian zeal, and not of the ambition which is
usually attributed to the successors of St. Peter.
St. Boniface (Winfred was his Saxon name) was born
in the year 680, when Theodore of Tarsus was Arch
bishop of Canterbury. Among the benefits conferred
by the see of Rome upon the early English Church,
not the least was the sending that learned and vener
able Greek to be its primate. By his wise exertions,
the English Church was united, discipline was regu
lated, good schools were established, and learning was
in a better state than in any other part of Western
Christendom.* Not only Latin, but Greek was studied,
* Perhaps I ought to except Ireland. See Stokes, Ireland and the
Celtic Church, ch. xi. , and remember that John Scotus Erigena was an
Iiishman.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 167
and England produced some scholars like Bede and
Alcuin, who were the foremost of their age. Boniface
profited by this movement ; he had the best training
that could be given at the time ; and he had examples
to kindle his missionary zeal in men like Willibrord,
who devoted their lives to the propagation of the
Gospel among the heathen tribes of the continent who
were akin to the Saxons. After one or two attempts
(he labored for a time with Willibrord) Boniface paid
a visit to Rome, and received a commission from
Gregory II. (A. D. 718) to preach to the German tribes
who were still heathen. In a few years, having been
very successful, he was summoned again to Rome and
made a "regionary" or missionary bishop. The oath
of canonical obedience which he took at his ordination
has been made more of in controversial discussion than
there is occasion for. It is said to be the first ever
required by the Pope of a bishop who was not properly
subject to him as metropolitan, and it was made the
precedent for requiring the same oath of other bishops ;
but at the time it had not the significance which was
afterwards attached to it. It was the usual oath of
canonical obedience taken by a bishop to the Metro
politan ordaining him, with the necessary changes
adapting it to a missionary bishop, who would other
wise be autonomous and irresponsible. Returning to
Germany, he prosecuted his work with still greater
vigor and success, and by 738 he had baptized a hun
dred thousand converts. Gregory III. gave him the

1 68 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
pall of an archbishop, and authorized him to organize
the Church in his missionary field, which he did by
founding four Episcopal sees.
By this means there was a German Church east of
the Austrasian, free from its traditions, and with a
tradition of its own — as, I think, the Austrasian Church
had a character different in some respects from that
in the older part of Gaul. By that German Church,
Boniface was able to act on the Frankish Church for its
reformation ; he had imbued it with that reverence for
Rome which he had learned in England, and he was
able to use the authority of Rome in dealing with the
abuses which had reduced the Austrasian Church to
such a deplorable condition. On the death of Charles
Martel, Pope Zachary made him Vicar Apostolic for
the kingdom of the Franks, and he secured the" co
operation of Carloman and Pepin, who had succeeded
to the power of their father, the one as Mayor of
Austrasia, and the other as Mayor of Neustria. In 742
he held a Council, which is said to be the first held in
Austrasia for 80 years, and from that time there was an
improvement in the Frankish Church. The see of
Mentz or Mayence becoming vacant he was made
Archbishop and Primate of the German Church. But
the missionary spirit was still strong within him ; he
resigned his see, and lost his life among the heathen of
Frisia. Now whatever may have been the ideas of the Roman
primacy which remained in the Gallic Church from the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 169
time of the Empire and the edict of Valentinian III.,
there can be no doubt that they were hazy and indefi
nite, and had no effect upon the Church of the Franks
until Boniface reintroduced them and made them prac
tical. Once introduced they bore fruit. Pepin saw in
them a means of furthering his political designs. In
747 his brother Carloman, Mayor of Austrasia, retired
from active life and became a monk, and Pepin, who had
been Mayor of Neustria, ruling in the name of Childeric
III., became sole chief of all the Franks. The time had
come when the puppets of the Merovingian line might
be laid aside ; but it must be done prudently. The
Austrasians had lost their respect for them, but the
Neustrians were still attached to them ; and as the
political influence of the Church was greater among the
Roman population of Neustria than among the Germans
of Austrasia, it was desirable that the primate of the
whole Church should declare the expediency of the
change that was to be made. I have here again to
caution you against importing into this transaction the
ideas of a later time. Pepin knew well the situation of
the Bishop of Rome. The Lombards were pressing hard
upon him. The Eastern Empire was unable to defend
its Italian provinces against them. Gregory II. had
made an effort to organize an Italian Republic by the
union of the cities against the invader and had failed.
Application had been made to Charles Martel for
assistance, but he had been unable or unwilling to make
war upon the Lombards. The Bishop of Rome stood

1 70 Christendom Ecclesiastical ana Political
in need of a powerful friend. Pepin was sure of his
ground ; and the Bishop of Rome's answer to his ques
tion in political casuistry would be of authority with the
Neustrian and German Churchmen. He therefore sent
to Rome the chief ecclesiastics of his palace " to con
sult Pope Zachary concerning the kings of the Franks,
who for a considerable time had borne the name with
out any authority, viz : Whether it was convenient
that affairs should continue in this state ? The Pope
replied that for the better maintaining of order, it
would be best to give the name of king to him who had
the power." * The answer was satisfactory ; the
phantom king was tonsured and consigned to a mon
astery ; Pepin was lifted on the shield according to
Frank usage, (A. D., 752,) and anointed and crowned
King of the Franks by Archbishop Boniface, t as the
Eastern Emperors were anointed and crowned by the
Bishop of Constantinople. In two years the Bishop of
Rome received his reward. He made a journey into
France (Stephen III. in A. D., 754) to solicit aid against
the Lombards. He was received with honor ; he
crowned the king a second time ; and Pepin led his
* Fleury, B. XLIII, Ch. i.
\ Robertson doubts that Boniface had anything to do with this affair ;
others, as Guizot, positively assert that he did. The difficulty that Rob
ertson finds may be explained by the relation of Pepin to the Neustrian
Church, where the influence of Boniface Was less than in Germany and
Austrasia. I think we mistake when we speak of the Frank Church as a
whole, and attribute to all what is true of a part. It seems to me that
the Neustrian Church was different in character from the Austrasian, and
perhaps not in so much disorder.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 7 1

Franks into Lombardy, and compelled the King of the
Lombards to cede to the Pope all the territories of
which he had deprived the Empire in late years.*
Pepin died in 768, and was succeeded by his two sons
Carloman and Charles. Carloman died in 771, and
Charles set aside his young children, and became sole
king. The influence of that extraordinary man upon
the subsequent history of Europe — of the man whose
greatness has been recognized by the unique honor of
incorporating the term " the Great " into his very name,
"Charlemagne" — will come before us in the next
lecture. *On the forged donation of Constantine, and the forgeries connected
with the donation of Pepin, see Dollinger, Fables of the Popes.

IV.
THE NEW IMPERIALISM.

IV.
THE NEW IMPERIALISM.

Charlemagne was, take him all in all, incomparably
the greatest man that Europe has seen since the years
were counted by the Christian era. Not only by his
wonderful physical activity, his tremendous energy in
war, his extension of the area of the Frankish dominion,
his making himself Emperor ; but by his administrative
ability, his intellectual vigor, his untiring efforts to
elevate and benefit his people, his unceasing attention
to all details of government, his success in securing the
obedience of his subjects, his sense of the value of edu
cation and learning and his endeavors to promote them,
his determination to reform the Church, and his author
ity over the hierarchy, including the Bishop of Rome
himself — by the Tightness of his aims, the conscientious
ness of his efforts, and the real religiousness of his spirit,
as well as the grandeur of his personality, and the im
mensity of his capacity for work, he merits the title
bestowed upon him, without any abatement for the age
in which he lived, or the people over whom he ruled.
I know, of course, the blots upon his fame. He uncere
moniously set aside the children of his brother ; he put

1 76 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
to death four thousand five hundred Saxon prisoners in
cold blood ; his matrimonial relations were those of a
Frank king. But no man is perfect. The probability
is that his age and his people were with him in all these
matters. Charlemagne was a born ruler of men. Gov
ernment was as much an instinct to him as poetry with
Shakespeare. He held the ascendancy over other men
by the greatness of his genius, the genuineness of his
moral nature, the strength of his purpose, and the sin
cerity of his efforts to give order to the body politic.
He was too great to be selfish, too great to be jealous,
and men obeyed him spontaneously, and loved him not
a little. The parallel has been drawn between him and
David the great King of Israel, and it would seem that
he himself was conscious of the resemblance, and took
David for his model. He had strong affections as well
as a stern will, a shrewd practical insight as well as
great ideas, he could manage an empire as well as a
farm, and attend to the details of a farm in the midst of
the cares of an empire. A German of the Germans, a
Frank through and through, he governed his people
through their own institutions without jealousy, and
converted them into the institutions of the Empire
without revolution. He called his bishops and nobles
and freemen to the National Assembly twice a year, in
May and August, and in their presence and with their
counsel, he surveyed the state of his vast dominions,
determined what legislation was needed for Church and
State, and what warlike expedition was necessary to

From Contsantine to the Reformation. 177
keep the enemies of the Empire in check, or to reduce
the rebellious. His wars with the heathen Saxons on
the north, the Huns and Avars on the east, the Lom
bards in Italy, and the Saracens in Spain, though
aggressive in their conduct, were defensive in purpose,
and his fifty-three campaigns, ruthlessly as they were
carried on, were in the interest of order against lawless
ness, of civilization against barbarism, of Christianity
against heathenism and Mohammedanism. In the
work of administration and government he was equally
untiring. When we turn to the vast collection of his
capitularies, and note the multitude of matters to which
he gave personal attention, the wonder is, that a man
who seems to have spent his whole life in war could do
more than a life's work in endeavoring to reform and
advance his people. He evidently had no cut and dried
theory; but he obeyed the mandate of Scripture :
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might." He set himself to strengthen the existing
institutions in Church and State ; he was urgent in
requiring that schools should be opened in every parish,
where the children of the poor, as well as those of the
rich, could learn what there was to learn at the time ;
he established a school in the palace as a model, in
which he was himself a scholar, and he took into his
service the learned men whom he could find and induce
to come to him, that they might advance learning in
his dominions. He sent his mis si dominici (the origi
nals of our Circuit Courts and Circuit Judges) upon

1 78 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
regular circuits to inspect the conduct of his officers,
and to administer justice in his name; and when he took
to himself the title and state of Emperor, I have no
doubt whatever that his object was less personal am
bition than the good of his people. What was wanted
in that turbulent age was a central authority strong
enough to keep in order the military aristocracy, and
to blend into one the various nationalities over which
the rule of the Franks extended, and that central
authority Charlemagne thought he found in the impe
rial prerogative.
The influence of Charlemagne upon Christendom and
the Church is our present inquiry. The first and great
est element of that influence was his assumption of the
Empire. It was supposed to be the " Holy Roman
Empire," but it was in reality the German Empire ; for
though it suffered eclipse in the age succeeding Char
lemagne, the idea did not die ; it took root and revived,
and was, with the Papacy, the chief factor in the history
of the Middle Ages. I speak of Charlemagne's assump
tion of the Empire, and I do so advisedly. It is true
that Pope Leo surprised him on that memorable
Christmas Day of the year 800, by suddenly placing
upon his head during Divine Service the imperial crown,
and that Charles afterwards expressed his disapproval
of the act. There is no reason for accusing him of dis
simulation or collusion in so doing ; but unless he had
had the idea of making himself Emperor, he would not
have been forced into it by the unauthorized act of the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 79

Roman pontiff. My own opinion is that Charles was
really offended at the Bishop of Rome's intermeddling,
and that for the very reason that he intended the
Empire to come to him in a different way.* There is
evidence that his intimates expected him to become
emperor at this time (Alcuin's Bible is well-known),
to show that it was in his mind ; and it is of great sig
nificance that when he associated his son Louis with
himself, as he felt age and infirmity growing upon him,
he made Louis take the crown himself from the altar,
and put it upon his own head. That act shows Charle
magne's idea of the imperial authority, and his determi
nation that it should not vest in the Roman pontiff to
bestow it. It seems as if he had a prescience of
claims that were afterwards to be set up, and was re
solved to guard against them.
The time was propitious, and the motives sufficient
for the assumption of the title. In the long line of
succession of the emperors of the East — those sover
eigns whose dignity had been up to this time unap
proachable — there had been no real break since

* See the cAapter on " The Empire and Policy of Charles" in Bryce's
"Holy Roman Empire." In the discussion (pp. 58-60) of the question
"Was the coronation a surprise?" Mr. Bryce overlooks the fact that Charles
had reason to be suspicious of the Pope, since he had been imposed upon
by forged documents in relation to the donation of Pepin. See Dollinger's
Fables of the Popes. Nor does he seem to see the significance of Charle
magne's action in making his son Louis crown himself when he makes
him his successor.

180 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Constantine until now ; and now there was a break.
Just at this moment the sceptre was in the hands of a
woman — that Irene whose crimes towards her son have
been offset, in the minds of eastern monks and Romish
historians, by her devotion to image worship. To a
Frank, an Empress was no sovereign, and there was no
Emperor. Charles took the dignity, because it was
vacant for him, and he had the right to it ; because he
was master of the City from which the title and author
ity originated. It is probable that he thought to unite
the East and the West, and so to restore the imperial
authority over the whole of Christendom ; for he
negotiated or pretended to negotiate a marriage with
Irene ; but that was not to be, and in a short time Irene
was dethroned, and Nicephorus was reigning at Con
stantinople. As regards the West there was motive
enough in the situation. Charlemagne ruled over
many peoples, each with its own customs, and he need
ed an authority which would enable him to reform those
customs as occasion required. The imperial authority
was well defined by the Roman traditions and Roman
law, and the Emperor was not subject to the limitations
of the King of the Franks ; particularly he was the
unquestioned superior of the Bishop of Rome, and
through him of all the ecclesiastical hierarchy. But
there was a still further reason. By introducing into
the Frank polity an office and a title which were not
subject to the Frank traditions, there was given, so it
might seem, the means of averting the disorders which

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 8 1
in the past had followed the partition of the kingdom,
according to the Frank law of inheritance, among the
sons of a deceased king. That law of inheritance had
been at the root of the civil wars which disgraced their
history ; and it was necessary that there should be an
escape from it, if the government was to be stable and
enduring. The right of primogeniture was not yet
thought of; it was a later invention belonging to
Feudalism. The traditions of the Empire seemed to
offer the safeguard needed, and the possession of Italy
and Rome authorized the assumption of the imperial
title. In passing over to the Germans, under such a man
as Charlemagne, the Empire necessarily changed its
character. The German institutions easily lent them
selves to it. The annual assembly became a court and a
legislative body such as the Eastern Emperors lacked ;
the governors who ruled their dukedoms and lordships
were required to be present at it to give an account of
their governments ; they came to do homage and
render obedience, as well as to assist in making the
capitularies ; the chief ecclesiastics were there to report
upon the state of the Church, and to advise the enact
ment of canons or laws for its regulation ; all orders in
the State had the right to be present and to take part,
each in its place ; the Emperor was not jealous of his
subordinates ; high as they might be, he was higher.
The imperial title therefore, furnished, or seemed
able to furnish the means by which the division of the

1 82 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
kingdom into kingdoms might consist with the unity of
the whole. The Emperor made his three sons kings,
but he was their superior as Emperor, and he may have
thought that such would be the order for time to come.
In this new phase — and the idea passed into the Middle
Ages — the Emperor was " king of kings and lord of
lords," and being so he looked upon himself as the
"vicar of Christ,"* in as full a sense as the Roman
bishop thought himself to be in later times.+
* " The Emperor Joseph II., at the end of the eighteenth century
was 'Advocate of the Christian Church, ' 'Vicar of Christ,' 'Imperial
Head of the Faithful,' 'Leader of the Christian Army,' 'Protector of
Palestine, ' of general councils, of the Catholic faith." — Bryce, Holy Roman
Empire, p. 202. The Bishop of Rome, in the time of Charlemagne and
for ages after, arrogated to himself no higher title than that of ' ' Vicar
of St. Peter."
f The idea was worked out for the temporal ruler in the Spanish
Church, by Isidore of Seville, early in the seventh century. In the acts
of the Council of Aix, held by Louis the Pious, in 816, there is a long
quotation from Isidore, in which the parallel between the Christian
ministry and that of the Old Testament dispensation is drawn. It con
tains the following passage and more of the same sort : " Sed forsitan
quaeritur et hoc : cujus figuram faciebat Moses ? Si enim filii Aaron
presbyterorum figuram faciebant, et Aaron summi sacerdotis, id est
Episcopi ; Moses cujus ? Indubitanter Christi, et vere per omnia Christi;
quoniam fuit Similitudo Mediatoris Dei, qui est inter Deum et hominem
Jesus Christus, qui est verus Dux populorum, vents Princeps Sacer-
dotum, et Dominus Poniificum, cui est honor et gloria in saecula saecu-
lorum. Amen.'' The calling our Saviour, Duke, Prince and Lord,
would necessarily imply what is said in the text. The following is from
the same passage: "In novo antem testamento post Christum sacer-
dotalis ordo a Petro ccepit. Ipsi enim primum datus est Pontificatus
in Ecclesia Christi. * * * Siquidem et cceteri Apostoli cum Petro par
consortium honoris et potestatis acceperunt. Qui etiam in toto orbe
dispersi Evangelium praedicaverunt ; quibusque decedentibus succes-
serunt Episcopi, qui sunt constituti per totum mundum in sedibus Apos-
tolorum." Concilia Germanica, Vol. I., p. 439. I have studied only those
capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis which are in the Concilia Germanica.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 183

Now this explains the relation of Charlemagne to
the Bishop of Rome. It has been much disputed what
was the nature of his donations of territory to the
Roman see — whether they were absolute or merely in
usufruct — whether the Bishop of Rome received them
as sovereign, or merely as proprietor. The answer is
that in that and subsequent ages proprietorship and
government were identical ; proprietorship implied
government and government implied proprietorship ;
but that, except in the case of the supreme ruler him
self, neither the lordship nor the proprietorship was
absolute, but always dependent upon the sovereign.
The Bishop of Rome held of the Emperor in the same way
as the possessors of fiefs held of their lords under the feud
al system when that was in operation ; he was both ruler
and subject, as regards his temporal dominions, just as
all other lords of the empire were, spiritual and tem
poral. The weakness as well as the strength of the
empire consisted in this confusion of ownership with
government. The division of functions which Con
stantine introduced into the Roman administration,
and which modern governments find it to their advan
tage to provide for, was too complex a notion for the
times. A man was put in place over a lordship, and was
responsible for all under him — that was the simple idea.
The lord was owner of the land, as well as governor of
the people ; but he was both owner and governor in
subordination to the Emperor ; and therefore on the
one hand when he was deprived of his government, he

184 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
was deprived also of his estate ; and, on the other hand,
it was his interest when made duke or count, to
strengthen himself in possession, and to make his
dukedom or county hereditary in his family. The
weakness was that, when he became powerful enough to
rebel, the central authority had no check upon him
except by raising up against him his compeers, who
might, if they also were discontented, make common
cause with him. This was the cause of the disorders in
the Empire under the descendants of Charlemagne.
But while the great Emperor lived, the danger was not
apparent. He was strong enough to compel obedience
and to count on loyalty, and therefore he neither saw
the danger nor cared to make the nice distinctions by
which it was to be avoided. In the same way the
ecclesiastical powers became lords and temporal
governors over the inhabitants of their estates. It was
the general rule, with this advantage in favor of
the Church, that no questions of forfeiture or hereditary
right came in to complicate the relation. The bishop
or abbot, being a celibate, could have no legal offspring
to take his lordship, and therefore it descended without
question to the next incumbent ; in all other respects
he was not only an ecclesiastical dignitary, but a tem
poral lord as well. The Bishop of Rome under Char
lemagne and his successors, although he was respected
as primate of the whole Church, and endowed with
larger possessions than the others, was in precisely the
same relation to the Emperor as all other governors,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 185
lay or ecclesiastical. He was both lord and subject.
He was lord of the Roman dominion, but subject of the
Emperor — chief bishop of the Church, but subject to
the imperial confirmation and visitation. In one respect,
Charles distinctly set aside the Roman bishop's claim
to jurisdiction. In publishing the ancient canons for
the information of the Frankish Church, he erased the
canons of Sardica, and made himself the court of appeal
of last resort.
In establishing this relation, Charles introduced the
new imperialism into Western Europe, as his con
tribution to the solution of the questions involved in the
union of Church and State. It cannot be said that he
invented any new thing ; the Pope had been a subject
of the Eastern Emperor, he now became a subject of
the Western Emperor. But it is the peculiar character
istic of Charlemagne's influence upon his times, that
without originating any new principles, he gave a new
character to the traditional institutions by the force of
his own personality. It was assuredly no new idea,
that the monarch was to be head of both Church and
State ; but it took a new form after Charlemagne ; it
worked differently in the West from what it did in the
East ; and the reason is that it was incorporated into
the western imperial system, in connection with the
institutions of the German race. The prelates of the
Church having temporal as well as spiritual rule, be
came the political equals of the military aristocracy,
and were able in some degree to hold them in check.

1 86 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
The sovereign being accustomed to take counsel with his
people in the great national assembly, met there, in the
ecclesiastics, a class of men who looked at matters
from a different point of view from the mere laymen,
who brought Christian principles to bear upon the
discussion of affairs of State ; and thus there was a
compensation in some degree for the secularizing influ
ence of the situation upon the clergy themselves. The
Church was undoubtedly strengthened by this reform.
It held together through all the troublous times of
Charlemagne's descendants. It made great mistakes
and suffered for them ; but the particular disorders of
the time of Charles Martel did not reappear. The
change is seen in the great statesmen-prelates of the
subsequent ages such as Hincmar, in the pomp and
splendor which attended Divine service in the Mediaeval
Church, in the personal grandeur and princely surround
ings of the hierarchy. as lords spiritual of the Christian
Empire, in the more compact organization and moral
elevation of the priesthood through the enforcement of
the rules of the canonical life, and in the attempt to
deal with the laity through the penitential discipline,
in the form given to it by Theodore of Canterbury.
The rude barons who tore the empire to pieces, came
in contact with men as powerful as themselves, who
were able to oppose an intellectual supremacy to their
brute force, to awe them by their spiritual authority, to
teach them, in some degree at least, needed lessons of

From Constantine to the Reformation. 187
humanity, and in some cases at least, to bring them to
a true repentance.
And if, in consequence of their political importance
there was among the higher clergy, in the ages succeed
ing, something too much of secular feeling, there was in
another direction some compensation for this. The
Mediaeval Church was a very complex and highly organ
ized body, in which there were many members, none of
which could say to the other, " I have no need of you."
In our modern Church in which, by the simple ex
pedient of shutting out from religion all the secular
business of life, we have brought everything down to a
dead level, and get along with priests whose duty it is
to write two sermons a week, and bishops whose
business is to travel from village to village to confirm,
we cannot comprehend the grandeur and completeness
of the idea of the Christian commonwealth which was
both Church and State, as it must have presented itself
to a mind like that of Charlemagne, who felt himself in
his imperial office to be the vicegerent of Christ the
King, who therefore endeavored to make all his in
stitutions Christian, who did not fear to call his clergy,
as well as his laity, to the work of government and
administration, and to whom the work of every man in
his calling, whether ploughman, soldier or priest, was
sacred and Christian.* In such a Church and State, the
* " In a great assembly held at Aachen, A.D. 802, the lately crowned
Emperor revised the laws of all the races that obeyed him, endeavoring
to harmonize and correct them, and issued a capitulary singular in sub-

1 88 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
action and interaction of influences flowed in channels
with which we are not familiar, and produced results
which we do not appreciate. In this way the monastic
institutions were the corrective of the secularizing
tendency to which their political responsibilities ex
posed the clergy. They were the home of a real
spiritual life which diffused itself over the whole Church.
Monasticism had been reformed by St. Benedict of
Nursia, a long time before, and his rule made it a life of
practical benefit to the monk himself, and to the com
munity at large. The obligation to work as well as to
pray was of incalculable advantage in the rude ages we
ject and tone. All persons within his dominions, as well ecclesiastical
as civil, who have already sworn allegiance to him as king, are thereby
commanded to swear to him afresh as Caesar ; and all who have never yet
sworn, down to the age of twelve, shall now take the same oath. 'At the
same time it shall be publicly explained to all what is the force and mean
ing of this oath, and how much more it includes than a mere promise of
fidelity to the monarch's person. Firstly, it binds those who swear it to
live, each and every one of them, according to his strength and know
ledge, in the holy service of God ; since the Lord Emperor cannot ex
tend over all his care and discipline. Secondly, it binds them neither by
force nor fraud to seize or molest any of the goods or servants of his
crown. Thirdly, to do no violence nor treason towards the holy Church
or to widows, or orphans or strangers, seeing that the Lord Emperor has
been appointed after the Lord and His Saints, the protector and defender
of all such.' Then in similar fashion purity of life is prescribed to the
monks ; homicide, the neglect of hospitality and other offences are
denounced, the notions of sin and crime being intermingled and almost
identified in a way to which no parallel can be found, unless it be in the
Mosaic Code. There God, the invisible object of worship, is also, though
almost incidentally, the judge and political ruler of Israel ; here the
whole cycle of social and moral duty is deduced from the obligation
of obedience to the visible autocratic head of the Christian State."—
Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, pp. 65-6.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 189
are dealing with. It made agriculture honorable, and
assisted in reclaiming vast tracts of land from the
desert into which they had relapsed. The monks
planting themselves in the recesses of the forests, by a
flowing brook, began clearing the land, and in a short
time " the wilderness and the solitary place were made
glad for them," a village would grow up around the
monastery, and a new centre of civilization was estab
lished. As the monastic estates became valuable, some
laxity and disorder crept in under, the mayors of the
palace ; but Charlemagne endeavored to correct them,
and within a few years after his death a comprehensive
reform was undertaken by Benedict of Aniane under
authority from Louis the Pious. In the troublous
times that followed, the monasteries offered a retreat
from the world to such as desired to forsake it, an
opportunity for a life of devotion and worship to those
who longed for it, a seclusion for repentance to the
burdened conscience, an example to the outside world
of self-denial for Christ's sake, and last, but not least, a
quiet corner for study and meditation for those who
desired to advance in the learning that the age
possessed. It was found that the obligation to work
was met, not only by manual labor, but by the culti
vation of the useful and fine arts (such as they were),
by the multiplication of books, and the devotion to
study. The impulse given by Charlemagne to education
bore its most abundant fruit in the monasteries. He re
quired that each parish priest, should teach the children

1 90 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
of his parish, and that each Cathedral should sustain a
school of higher learning ; but it was naturally in the
monasteries that study would be taken upas a life-work,
and followed with a real love for it for its own sake, and
doubtless there were in the cloisters of Western Europe,
many guileless souls, who like the Venerable Bede were
happy with their books, and useful to their age as
students and teachers and copyists of manuscripts, al
most all of which were written in the monastic Scrip
toria. In such ways as these, as well as by calling
eminent monks to the high places of the Church, an
influence spread from the monasteries over the whole
Church, keeping up the spiritual and intellectual life,
not only of the monks, but also of the priests and people.
The capitularies of Charlemagne contained many
admonitions to the monks to observe the " regular "
and to the clergy to observe the " canonical " life. The
term " canonical life " may apply to that obedience to
the canons in general which was incumbent upon the
clergy ; but it also contemplated the extension to the
clergy of a semi-monastic rule instituted about 76b by
Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz. This rule was made for
the clergy of Cathedral and collegiate chapters,
and was the origin of the mediaeval development of
those bodies. Where a church had numerous clergy,
they were assembled in a common home with cloisters
like a monastery, and subjected to a rule which differed
from the monastic rule by certain more free regulations
suitable to the calling and duties of the clergy — among

From Constantine to the Reformation. 191
others in allowing absence from the cloister for the per
formance of Divine service in the country churches, in
the permission to retain private property, and in making
certain distinctions in the distribution of the stipends.
The clergy of Cathedrals came to be called canons by
reason of their obligation to this rule, which was
speedily adopted by other bishops, and was made gen
eral by Louis the Pious in his capitulary of Aix. The
advantages of the brotherhood idea for a body of men
who were pledged to celibacy were manifest, and the
improvement in their moral and religious condition
resulting from it raised their credit with the people, and
contributed to increase the influence they exercised
and the respect in which they were held. Whether
Charlemagne's substitution of the Roman Liturgy for
the Gallican was an improvement or not may be ques
tioned ; it is at least matter for regret that because of
it the Gallican Liturgy has perished. Perhaps it had
become too complicated and the copies of it were in a
bad state, and it probably appeared to the Emperor that
one Liturgy for all his dominions was the best. At any
rate, by the means mentioned, and by attention to de
tails in other directions, without any extensive theo
retical innovations, the institutions of the Church were
strengthened immensely under Charlemagne and his
influence was felt throughout the whole mediaeval
period. And now, for a more personal interest in Charlemagne
himself, I wish to read you, again from my old copy

192 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
of Fleury, the account of the closing scenes of his life :
" Louis being arrived at Aix-la-Chapelle, the Em
peror his father convened a great assembly of the bishops,
abbots, dukes, counts and all the French [Franks]. He
exhorted them to be faithful to his son, and demanded
whether they were willing that he should give him the title
of Emperor. They answered, this was a thought inspired
of God. On the Sunday following, Charles in his royal
robes, with the crown on his head, walked to the church,
and advancing to the high altar, caused another crown
to be placed thereon. And after he and his son had
prayed for a long time, he spoke to him in presence
of the whole assembly of prelates and lords ; admonish
ing him in the first place to love and fear God and to
keep all His commandments, to protect the churches,
to be affectionate and kind to his sisters and young
brothers, to be loving to his nephews and all his rela
tions. ' Honor,' added he, ' the bishops as your fathers;
love the people as your children ; make choice of faith
ful and upright officers, such as fear God, and do not dis
place them without cause ; and show yourself always
blameless before God and man.' Charles gave his son
much more advice, and asked him if he was resolved to
obey his counsel. Louis replied that with the help of
God he would obey it with all his heart. Then Charles
bid him take the crown from off the altar with his own
hands, and place it on his head, giving him to under
stand thereby, that he had his empire only from God.
Louis put the crown on his head, and the people

From Constantine to the Reformation. 193
shouted, crying 'Long live the Emperor Louis!' and sol
emnized the day with great rejoicings. Charles returned
thanks to God, saying with David, ' Blessed be Thou, O
Lord, who hast set my son on my throne this day, mine
eyes even seeing it.' * * * The Emperor Charles con
tinued at Aix-la-Chapelle, spending his time in devotion,
almsgiving, and amendment of the sacred writings. For
he employed the latter part of his life in correcting the
texts of the four Gospels, taking great pains therein,
with the assistance of Greeks and Syrians. He showed
all his life long a fervent zeal for religion and a sincere
piety; he never failed, when his health would permit, to
frequent the church morning and evening, and to assist
at the Nocturns and the Mass; at which he took care
that the whole service should be performed with all
possible decency, and often gave directions to the over
seers of the church not to suffer any disorder in this
respect. * * * In January 814 [he] was taken with a
fever at his coming out of the bath. He thought to be
cured by his usual measure of abstinence, taking no
nourishment but a little water ; but being seized with
a pleurisy at the same time, on the seventh day of his
sickness he sent for the Archbishop Hildebald, his
chief chaplain, who in company with other bishops,
gave him the extreme unction, and the viaticum, that
is, the Body and Blood of our Lord ; and two days after,
finding himself ready to expire, he made the sign of the
cross upon his forehead, his breast, and all over his
body; and died repeating, ' Into Thy hands O Lord, I

T94 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
commend my spirit.' He was buried the same day,
which was the 28th of January, 814, being seventy-two
years of age, whereof he had reigned forty-five as King
of France [i. e. of the Franks], and thirteen as Em
peror." *
Louis the Pious was made co-emperor, as we have
seen, in 813. On the death of his father he came into
full possession of the supreme dignity. The histories
usually read, represent him as a weak prince, because
of whose imbecility the Empire went to pieces. They
unite also in representing his successors as more imbe
cile than himself, and attribute the calamities of the age
that followed to their incapacity. One great historian,
however, Sir Francis Palgrave, dissents from this ver
dict ; he affirms that the race of Charlemagne to the
last displayed an ability equal or superior to that of the
average public men of their time, and finds in moral
causes the explanation of that catastrophe. Others, as
Sir James Stephen in his lectures on the history of
France, return the brief and compendious answer, " Bar
barism" to the question, Why did not the Empire of
Charlemagne endure ? This answer is a true one as
far as it goes ; but it is not a complete answer. Many
causes co-operated, some retrogressive, others progress
ive, and the study of them merits more attention than
is usually given to it. The defects of the system of
government were grave, the relation of the Church to

* Fleury, B. 46, Ch. 7, 8.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 195
the State was unsatisfactory to some influential parties,
the successors of Charlemagne, though not imbecile,
were unequal to their task, the nobles were selfish and
turbulent, the people were politically weak, the age
was one of transition, and the divergent tendencies of
the Romance and German elements compelled a divi
sion into the nations of modern Europe. But one of the
chief causes of the disruption of the Empire was the
attempt of the clergy to acquire a preponderance in
the direction of civil affairs, and so to go beyond their
province — an attempt which reacted with terrible effect
upon the Church itself, and for which it suffered in the
order of Providence a severe punishment.
The Empire would work smoothly as long as it had
for its head a man of the genius and power of Charle
magne ; but no provision had been made for the con
tingency of a weaker ruler. I have pointed out how the
administrative system of Constantine sustained the
government of the East under a feeble Emperor by the
division of responsibility among subordinates. No such
expedient was known to the Franks or thought of by
Charlemagne. As long as he was at the head it was
unnecessary ; but as soon as he was taken away, the
defect became apparent. A strong central authority
was necessary to keep the turbulent element in order,
and that central authority must be either a man of sur
passing greatness or a corporation of officials interested
in the integrity of the government, when the nominal
head of it is weak. The days of mayors of the palace

1 96 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
were past, the feudal age had not begun, the adminis
trative system of the East was incompatible with the
time and place, and the expectation that each person
would be good enough to do his duty in that state to
which God had called him, was a poor foundation on
which to construct the fabric of an earthly government.
Under these circumstances it was the duty of the
Church, having acquired during the previous age a
political status, to strengthen the imperial authority by
a conscientious and enlightened loyalty; and it was
because it failed in this, that it fell into the disorder of
the tenth century.
Louis had been made King of Aquitaine by his father
when he was but five years old, and had been sent into
that region to grow up among his people under the
tutorship of William Curt-nez,* Count of Toulouse, or
Duke of Septimania, a devout man who, after distin
guishing himself both in war and in the government of
his country, became a monk, and was reverenced as a
saint after his death. Louis grew up a man of singular
ly pure personal character, with some firmness and
much kindness of heart, an accomplished gentleman, a
brave soldier, a conscientious — perhaps we might say a
morbidly conscientious ruler, and an earnestly and sin
cerely religious and devout Christian. His devotion
was more severely ecclesiastical than his father's ; he
had from time to time the desire to become a monk ;
* Sismondi, 257.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 197
his manners and tastes as well as his religious ideas were
more Aquitanian than German ; and it seems to me
that his chief troubles arose from his real or supposed
partiality at first for the Romance rather than the Ger
man element in his dominions. This would raise hopes
on the part of the Romance or French element, which
was represented by the high ecclesiastics, of a prepon
derance in the Empire, and correspondingly displease
the Germans. It was probably the fear of this, which
made Adelhard, Bernard and Wala, three brothers of
great ability, who stood high in the counsels of Charle
magne, recommend him to make Bernard King of
Italy, his grandson, Emperor instead of Louis. Bernard
was the son of Charlemagne's eldest son Pepin, who
died before his father, and had the laws of succession
which hold at the present day prevailed then, he would
have been the heir. For this offence or something
similar, when Louis came to the throne, he banished
the three brothers from the court, together with many
others who had been about his father, and took for his
chief adviser an Aquitanian Goth, a monk who under
the name of Benedict of Aniane became famous for his
own austerities, and for his extensive reform of monas
ticism as the minister of Louis. Wala and his brothers
thereupon became the bitter enemies of Louis, and con
tributed materially to the disorders of his reign. They
stirred up King Bernard ofltalytorebelagainsthim; but
Louis soon put down the insurrection, and Bernard
lost his life through the severity with which the sen-

1 98 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
tence that condemned him to the loss of his eyes was
executed. On the other hand, when on the death of Benedict,
Louis found out that he had made a political mistake,*
and drew towards the Germans, pardoning the partisans
of Bernard and giving them his confidence (he sent
Wala to Italy as counsellor to his son Lothair, whom
he appointed to succeed Bernard), the French hierarchy
were perhaps disappointed. They had had much
influence in the ecclesiastical legislation of 816 and 817,
by which Louis carried through a great scheme for the
permanent settlement, as he thought, of the Church and
the Empire. The capitularies of those years dealt
principally with ecclesiastical affairs ; they aimed to
bring all the clergy under the canonical rule of Chro-
degang of Metz ; they republished the Benedictine
rule for monks, with the additions of Benedict of Ani
ane ; they made a rule for canonesses, who wished to
serve God in celibate communities without becoming
nuns ; they regulated the support of the parochial
clergy and their relation to the bishops, improving
their condition ; and they made many other pro
visions for the good order of the Church. The bish
ops and abbots who were summoned to the diet
doubtless assisted in shaping this legislation ; they
were consulted also in the arrangement made to secure
* It was a political mistake, and Louis' sensitive conscience made it
into a sin for which he did public penance at the diet of Attigny (822),
which was a still greater mistake.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 1 99
the succession by which Lothair, King of Italy, became
co-emperor, and Pepin and Louis, the other sons,
became kings respectively of Aquitaine and Bavaria
on the Spanish and eastern frontiers ; and they doubt
less expected, as I said, to have the chief influence in
directing the policy of the Empire. They had also
taken the measure of Louis at the time of the penance
of Attigny, and when he adopted a more German policy
their disappointment made them disloyal, and they
were ready to assist in humbling him when occasion
served. The Bishop of Rome, too, had his policy, if not his
grievance. Louis had a high sense of the imperial
prerogative ; he was firm in asserting his authority over
the people and Church of Rome ; and the Pope was
interested in weakening it so as to emancipate him
self from it. It is to be remarked that the Pope was not
consulted in the extensive reforms of 816 and 817 ; they
were the act of the Frank Empire and Church, and
were put forth as such, depending therefore upon the
Emperor and not upon the Pope for their validity. The
Pope was a subject of the empire, the chief ecclesiastic
but nothing more. That subject-condition was galling.
There is no doubt that when the Popes first appealed
to the Franks for aid against the Lombards, they had
no thought that the Franks would conquer Italy and
incorporate it with their dominions. They wanted
them for protectors because they were on the other
side of the Lombards, and too distant to oppress them

200 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
as the Lombards threatened to do. They looked upon
them too, as barbarians, and hoped to make the family
of Pepin feel that they owed the crown to the Bishop of
Rome. The Empire of Charlemagne, therefore, was a
great disappointment to them. They could not trifle
with the great Emperor himself; but when his sceptre
passed to feebler hands they could throw off the yoke
and perhaps reduce the Emperor himself to subjection.
At least, if the Empire was to be, they might take the
credit of it to themselves and bide their time. Leo III.,
anticipating the designs of Charles, crowned him by
surprise. Charlemagne understood ; and when Louis
was declared Emperor, he made him take the crown
himself from the altar, and put it upon his own head.
But Stephen IV. managed to get the opportunity to
repeat the coronation. Then in 823, Lothair, making
a visit to Rome to keep Easter, was crowned by Pas
chal I. And so the tradition was established that the
Emperor must be crowned by the Pope. Concurrent
with this design there was another ; the authority of
the Emperor over the papal possessions and the Church
of Rome must be shaken off. The enemies of Leo III.
had been so violent that he had been obliged to have
recourse to Charles, and Charles acted as judge in
investigating the truth of the charges and counter
charges. That act fixed the imperial authority in
Rome. The coronation followed, and Leo was secure
as long as Charlemagne lived. At his death the enmity
broke out again ; Leo arrested and inflicted capital

From Constantine to the Reformation. 201
punishment upon the chiefs of the party opposed to him.
Intelligence was sent to Louis ; he was highly offended
at Leo's action as in derogation of his sovereignty, and
commanded King Bernard to go to Rome and do justice
as his deputy. Then Leo died, and Stephen IV. was
consecrated in haste, but sent an excuse to the Emper
or for not waiting for the presence of his legates because
of the disturbed state of the city; his excuse was
accepted as he had made the Romans swear fealty to
the Emperor. In less than a year he died and Paschal
I. was elected and consecrated in the same way ; he too
apologized, but this time the Romans received an ad
monition not to offend again. In 823, as I said, Paschal
crowned Lothair. But immediately after that, certain
officials who had held high place at the coronation were
put to death. Imperial commissioners were sent to
investigate the affair. Paschal took oath that he was
clear of offence, but refused to surrender the murderers
or executioners and justified the act. Then Paschal
died and there was a contested election. Eugenius was
made Pope by the management of Wala, but the city
was turbulent, and Lothair himself came to Rome. He
demanded of the Pope why the friends of the Franks
were insulted and offered violence. He made a consti
tution regulating the election of the Pope, and con
firmed the statute which had been in force under the
eastern emperors, that no Pope should be consecrated
until his election had been ratified by the imperial
authority. He also issued other decrees providing for

202 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
the imperial supremacy in the civil government and the
administration of justice. Then Eugenius died, and
Gregory IV. was made Pope with the sanction of
Lothair. But his successor Sergius II. was consecrated
without waiting for the imperial commissioners ; and
his successor Leo IV. found in the exigencies of the
times reason for the same omission.
This carries us beyond the life of Louis the Pious,
but it shows the policy of the Roman people and their
bishops. There was thus in three directions, a disloyal
and discontented spirit in the Church — Wala and his
party in Germany, the French hierarchy, and the Bish
op of Rome. And so it was that the Church failed in
its duty at this particular time. Its duty was, in the
interest of law and order, to uphold the central author
ity, to rectify mistakes by constitutional means, and to
exert its influence to preserve peace. It was a grand
idea, that of an Emperor over the confederated com
monwealth of nations, preserving peace between the
states by his authority, while each nationality was
enabled to pursue its own course of development under
its own king. It was an idea that did not seem impos
sible of realization. Sustained by the moral and spiritual
power of the Church, the Empire might seem to have
in it the elements of stability and endurance. The
secular nobles might be expected to be turbulent and
unruly, but that the Church should labor to overthrow
it was not to be thought beforehand. And that it
should do so under so religious a king as Louis is

From Constantine to the Reformation. 203
almost beyond belief. And yet it was the very re
ligiousness of the Emperor that betrayed it into the
attempt. In this failure of duty is to be found the
cause under the retributive justice of Divine Providence,
of the affliction of the Church of France by the North
men in the ninth century, and of the degradation of the
see of Rome in the tenth. Had there been a strong
government and a united Empire, neither of these
results would have happened.
The turning points of the history of the ninth century
are : the treachery of the Field of Lies in 833, the battle
of Fontenailles in 841, and the Treaty of Verdun in 843.
By the first a mortal wound was given to the Empire
of Charlemagne; by the second the military power of
the Franks was destroyed ; and by the third, modern
Europe came into existence.
For sixteen years Louis the Pious governed on the
whole well and prosperously. The rebellion of Bernard
was put down without any trouble, the power of the
Empire was respected without its borders, and its
authority within them. But in 829, Louis made the son
of his second marriage (Charles was then six years old),
Duke of Germany. This offended his half-brothers,
Lothair, Louis and Pepin, who looked upon what was
given to him as taken from them. They fomented dis
content throughout the Empire, for which there were
plausible pretexts in some inroads of the barbarians and
Saracens, which had not been successfully resisted, in
some bestowals of ecclesiastical fiefs upon laymen, and

204 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
in the public distress through bad harvests and pesti
lential diseases. An army which Louis raised for an
expedition into Brittany refused to follow him, and a
time of confusion ensued in which Louis was for a while
the prisoner of his sons, and in which he deposed his
son Pepin and gave his kingdom to Charles. Then the
sons of Hermengarda rebelled in earnest. The winter
of 832 was spent in organizing a wide-spread conspiracy.
The bishops of France entered into it, and so did the
Bishop of Rome. In the spring the insurgents assembled
at the Rothfeld, nearColmar, in Alsace. The Emperor
Louis encamped near them ; in his army were the
Bishops of Austrasia and Germany. The Pope was with
Lothair. He professed that he had come to make
peace, and neither side was in haste to shed blood.
The Pope was permitted to pass to and fro be
tween the camps ; the nature of his negotiations is not
understood ; but the result of them was that on the
night of June 24th, 833, the battalions of Louis passed
over to the camp of his sons, and Louis being defence
less was taken prisoner. The armies then disbanded,
leaving him in the custody of Lothair. Posterity has
marked its sense of the infamy of this desertion of
Louis, by giving to the place where it was effected, the
name of the Field of Lies.
It is the part which the bishops took in this affair
and its sequel, which creates the most surprise. It is
evident that the different parties to this conspiracy
were swayed by different motives, and pursuing

From Constantine to the Reformation. 205

different objects. The three kings, Lothair, Pepin
and Louis, were actuated by pure selfishness. What
Gregory's motives were it is impossible to say;
the account says that he returned to Rome in
much grief. The German ^onspirators, Wala and the
rest, were disgusted by the turn of affairs after the sur
render of Louis, and like Gregory, went home as
quickly as possible. But the French bishops had an
object of their own. They were bent on making a
demonstration of the superiority of the spiritual to the
temporal power. They were not papalists ; they were
not desirous to aggrandize the Roman see; they wished
to obtain the power for themselves. It seems to me
that one cause of the "grief" of Gregory, and the
sudden withdrawal of Wala, was this independence of
the French bishops.* They had no such idea of the
Roman authority as had been infused into the Ger
man Church by Boniface of Mentz ; they had the
ancient traditions of the Gallican Church to fall back
on ; and they had the idea of making the Neustrian side
of the Frank kingdom superior to the Austrasian, and
the Frankish Church, as a national Church, superior to
the lay element in the national councils. All this comes
out in the later history of Charles the Bald, and Hinc
mar of Rheims, and the same principles were at work
now. The French bishops therefore seized upon this
opportunity to make a demonstration — an unwise and un-
* Some of them told the Pope that if he came to excommunicate he
should return excommunicated.

206 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
rightous demonstration of their spiritual authority,taking
advantage of the morbid conscientiousness of the broken
Emperor. They put Louis the Pious to public penance
for his crimes against the State, crimes which were
made out by attributing to him the disorders of which
his sons had been the cause. The effect of that penance
was intended to be, according to old canons, a per
manent disqualification for bearing arms, and therefore
a deposition from the Empire, since none but a soldier
could be Emperor. But the effect was the reverse of
what was intended. Public sympathy was aroused, Pepin
and Louis returned to their allegiance, Lothair was
compelled to set his father at liberty, the Austrasian
bishops reconciled him to the Church and restored his
arms, the Archbishops of Rheims, Lyons and Vienne,
the chief metropolitans of the French Church, were
deposed for their part in this unseemly proceeding,
and Louis was again Emperor in fact, as well as in
name. But nothing could restore the strength and unity
of the Empire. Louis lived a few years longer in strife
with his children ; he died June 20th, 840. On the
Field of Lies, says Palgrave, the faith and honor of the
Frankish nation perished forever.
On the death of Louis, disputes broke out more fiercely
than ever between his sons. To punish their recurring
rebellions, Louis had in successive diets made no less
than ten different partitions of the Empire, in each of
which he augmented the portion of Charles at the ex
pense of the others. The last partition had reduced

From Constantine to the Reformation. 207
Louis the German (as he is known in history) to
Bavaria alone, and divided the rest between Lothair
and Charles. Louis advanced his authority as far as
the Rhine ; a son of Pepin disputed Aquitaine with
Charles, and Lothair claimed imperial authority over
all his brothers according to the original settlement.
In some way an understanding was arrived at between
Louis and Charles, and they combined against Lothair.
In June, 841, the armies of the three brothers met, and
appealed to the judgment of God at the battle of
Fontenailles. That battle, it is said, was the most
desperate and bloody of any which had been fought by
the Franks, since Charles Martel defeated the Saracens.
It destroyed their military power, and laid the Empire
open to the incursions of its Saracen and barbarian
enemies. Lothair was beaten, but his brothers were so
badly crippled that they were unable to follow up their
victory. All the same the battle of Fontenailles was
one of the decisive battles of the world. It settled the
fate of the Empire of Charlemagne, and handed
Europe over to a century of lawlessness and misery,
which is perhaps the darkest in its history.
The immediate result was the Treaty of Verdun two
years later. Lothair retreated to Aachen and gathered
a new army of Saxons, Germans and Austrasians, with
which he intended to attack Charles. But an over
flow of the Seine prevented, and Charles made another
junction with Louis, where they and their respective
peoples took those memorable oaths, which give us the

208 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
most ancient examples of the vernacular speech both of
the French and German. But there was no more dis
position to fight on either side ; the partisans of
Lothair began to desert him, and the people demanded
a peaceful settlement of the contending claims. Lothair
proposed a treaty of peace in which the first article was
to be the independence of the kingdoms of Louis and
Charles. Lothair was to have Italy, Louis Bavaria, and
Charles Aquitaine. The rest of the Empire was to be
divided into three equal portions, of which Lothair was
to have the first choice. Each chose forty of his nobles
as commissioners to make the division ; but when they
came together they found that they were unacquainted
with the extent and relative value of the various prov
inces, and it was determined to make a survey of the
whole Empire. The number of commissioners was
increased to three hundred, and by August of the fol
lowing year the report was made to the three kings.
Upon that report a division was made by the Treaty of
Verdun. What we may call France was given to
Charles the Bald, Germany to Louis, and Italy, with a
strip of territory between the Rhine and the Meuse,
extending north and south from the confines of the
Empire to Italy, to Lothair. The modern name of
Lorraine is a memorial of this division. It has always
been a debateable land between France and Germany.
"All the subsequent history of Europe" says Sir
Francis Palgrave " is an exposition of the Treaty of
Verdun."

From Constantine to the Reformation. 209
But it was to be a long time before France and Ger
many were consolidated into the powerful nations of
the Middle Ages and of modern times. The immediate
consequence of the Treaty of Verdun was to reduce the
imperial name to a mere titular designation of the
sovereign who had possession of Italy, and to hand over
the kingdoms carved out of the Empire to a period of
anarchy and confusion. And now the Church was
called upon by the righteous retribution of Providence
to pay the penalty of its attempt to control the civil
government, and of its participation in the events
which destroyed the Empire. We are never to forget
that there are three Divine institutions, to each of
which is committed its definite authority over the indi
vidual, and to each of which is given its distinct sphere
of influence in the government and training of man
kind — the family, the nation and the Church. Destroy
or cripple either of these institutions, the effect is dis
astrous to society. Let either of them interfere, as such,
within the sphere of the others, the result is confusion
and weakness. At the present day the tendency is to
ignore the Divine authority of the Church, even within
its own spiritual sphere, and the consequence is an
increasing laxity in the family relation, and a dimin
ishing respect for law and authority in the State. I
hold that in the ninth century it was a more pardon
able mistake to suppose that the Church might rightly
and beneficially undertake to direct the public as well
as the private conduct of princes and the policy of the

210 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
State. But still a mistake it was. When the ecclesias
tical authorities felt themselves called upon, not merely
to take part in the common deliberations for the welfare
of the State in which they were equally citizens with
their laymen, but to decide ex cathedra upon the policy
to be pursued, one of two results must follow: either
the public policy would be directed from an ecclesias
tical and monastic standpoint, and those interests be
neglected which it requires the lay mind to appreciate
and the military arm to uphold ; or else the ecclesias
tic, to be a capable and efficient governor and states
man must become assimilated to the layman in habits
of mind and action, more than is seemly in view of his
professed devotion to the sacred ministry. Out of the
union of Church and State at this period, both of these
results emerged. In Germany the prelates became
great lay-lords so to speak ; although they were in holy
orders their habits and modes of thought and life were
very much those of the lay nobles to whose families
they belonged ; and I must confess that while I see the
manifold evils of the system that required it, and which
I am endeavoring to explain, I do not join in the indis
criminate condemnation of these apparently worldly
statesmen and soldier-bishops of the dark ages. They
had at least a better appreciation of the requirements
of the times than the more ecclesiastical French prel
ates who humiliated Louis the Pious and ruled Charles
the Bald. These French prelates, though they make a
much better appearance in ecclesiastical history,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 211
brought the kingdom of France to the lowest depths
of anarchy and weakness. There is no grander figure
in the Church history of this period than Hincmar the
great Archbishop of Rheims ; he was the equal of Pope
Nicholas I., and the superior of Adrian II.; he success
fully asserted the liberties of the Gallican Church
against papal aggression ; he directed the policy of
Charles the Bald, and secured the throne upon his
death to Louis the Stammerer, his son ; and yet in his
last year (882) he was driven out of his see in the
interior of France by the Northmen, and died at a
distance from it. The great preponderance of the
ecclesiastical over the lay or military aristocracy in
France at this time, and the direction of affairs from
the standpoint of ecclesiastical politics were the
causes of the defencelessness of France against the
Northmen ; and the tremendous desolation of the
country for the half-century succeeding the " Field of
Lies " was the temporal punishment of their disloyalty
on that occasion.
The ravages of the Northmen on the sea-coast and
along the great rivers which gave them access by boats
into the interior, although they were felt severely in
Germany, and form a large part of the history of Eng
land for this period, spent their most destructive fury
upon France. It seems almost incredible that Charles
the Bald and his ecclesiastical counsellors, while they
were active in endeavoring to extend his power at the
expense of his brothers and nephews in Germany and

212 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Italy, should have made no attempts to protect the
kingdom they already possessed from these devastating
inroads. Yet so it was. The vision of an ecclesiastical
empire infatuated them ; they aimed to reconstruct
Charlemagne's scheme with the Church predominant,
and they were more intent upon this than upon the
national defence. They even prohibited the building of
castles as a protection against the Northmen, and razed
to the ground some that had been begun by the barons
themselves on their own lands, fearing more the revival
of a military spirit than careful of the true interests of
France. And so for three-quarters of a century France
was exposed, virtually defenceless, to the attacks of
these barbarian and pagan hordes, whose rage was
especially directed against the churches and mon
asteries, and whose appetite for plunder was whetted
rather than satiated by the treasures of which they
despoiled them. These piratical incursions began to
be of importance at the very time of the Field of Lies.
Just after that dishonorable transaction, the Northmen
appear burning churches and monasteries at the mouth of
the Scheldt, and threatening the cities of the Rhine.
In 841, a month before the battle of Fontenailles, they
entered the Seine, plundered and burned Rouen, and
destroyed towns and monasteries as they made their
way back to the sea. In 843, the year of the Treaty of
Verdun, they passed up the Loire and sacked the city
of Nantes ; they massacred the bishop and priests with
the people who had taken refuge in the Cathedral.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 213
Two years after that they plundered Paris, where they
hanged a hundred and eleven persons in front of the
royal camp, Charles lying there afraid to attack them.
After they had plundered the city, Charles paid them
seven thousand pounds of silver to go away, and so
ensured their speedy return.
These devastations continued through the rest of the
century. The mere enumeration of the places plunder
ed by the Northmen, as given by Robertson, conveys
the most vivid idea of the misery of the times : " They
repeatedly plundered the more exposed cities; such as
Hamburg, Dorstadt and Bordeaux ; they ascended the
Rhine to Mentz, and even to Worms ; the Moselle to
Treves ; the Somme to Amiens ; the Seine to Rouen
and to Paris, once the Merovingian capital, and still
the chief city of Neustria, rich in churches and in
treasures, and having the royal monastery of St. Denys
in its immediate neighborhood. From Paris they made
their way up the Marne to Meaux and Chalons, up the
Yonne to Sens and Auxerre. The Loire gave them a
passage to Tours, the city of St. Martin, and to
Orleans ; the Vienne to Limoges ; the Charente to
Saintes and Angouleme ; the Garonne to Toulouse.
* * * After a time, growing bolder through im
punity, they would leave their vessels on the great
rivers and strike across the unresisting country to pil
lage inland places of noted wealth, such as Ghent,
Beauvais, Chartres, Bourges, Rheims, Laon, and Charle-

214 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
magne's own city of Aix, where they stabled their horses
in the imperial palace."*
" Thus," says Michelet, " was proved the inability of
the episcopal power to defend and govern France."
I believe that these tremendous devastations were, as I
have said, Divine judgments upon the Church of France
for its share in breaking up the Empire. In those bar
barous times, the possessors of such civilization as re
mained (and they were the clergy and the monks) ought
to have known that to keep the Empire intact was the
only way to secure peace upon its borders, surrounded
as it was with active enemies and untamed barbarians.
To be at peace it must be strong enough to compel
peace. The political vice of the Frank system was the
division of the sovereignty among all the surviving sons
of a deceased monarch ; the remedy was as Charle
magne and Louis the Pious foresaw and provided, the
imperial prerogative, keeping the supreme rule in a
single hand, and governing as subordinates the kings
who inherited by Frank custom their separate portions
of the common territory. Without this, western
Christendom must suffer disintegration, and its diminish
ing fragments would be weak to resist invasion from
without or anarchy within. The supreme duty of the
clergy, as a political power, was to sustain the Empire
by unswerving loyalty to the central authority ; and
because they failed in that duty, their sanctuaries were

* Robertson, Ch. History, B. IV., Ch. II., p. 294. 8vo edition.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 2 1 5
profaned, their monasteries devastated, and their estates
turned into deserts or appropriated by laymen.
This disintegration, proceeding as long as there were
heirs to a deceased king, and only fortuitously arrested
by the failure of one or another branch of the family
tree, was the great cause of the moral and political
decay of Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. By
the Treaty of Verdun, the Empire was divided into three
independent sovereignties, under Lothair, who bore the
title of Emperor, Louis the Germanic, and Charles the
Bald. In the next generation seven kingdoms were made
for the two sons of Lothair, the three of Louis, and the
two of Charles. But these were not all contempo
raneous. Lothair and his two sons died before Louis
and Charles, and they divided their dominions, Charles
becoming Emperor for two years. Louis and Charles
died within a year of each other (876-7) and then there
were five or six contemporaneous kingdoms. In a few
years more five of the kings were dead without heirs,
and the remaining son of Louis the Germanic, known
in history as Charles the Fat, succeeded to the whole,
and for a short time it seemed as if the Empire were
reunited. But Charles the Fat had so little real power
and showed so little ability that his people deposed him ;
and France reverted to a grandson of Charles the Bald,
known as Charles the Simple, while the Germans set up
Arnulph, an illegitimate son of Carloman, of Bavaria. At
the same time a Kingdom of Provence was formed in
the South of France, and a noble named Boson, who

2 1 6 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
was connected with the Carlovingians only by marriage
was made king ; and Italy and the imperial title were
disputed by two powerful Italian nobles, Guido and
Berengar. At the end of the ninth century there were
seven kingdoms in what had been the Empire. But the
disintegration went farther. In the attempts to possess
themselves of the governments that fell vacant by the
lapse of heirs, the surviving kings weakened the royal
authority by conferring privileges and benefices upon
their partisans, and making concessions to them.
Charles the Bald, in his eagerness to obtain the title of
Emperor, acknowledged not only the Empire, but the
kingdoms of France and Italy to be elective, while he
conceded not only fiefs but counties and lordships to be
hereditary — thus strengthening the inferior while he
weakened the superior. The revenues of the great
abbeys were assigned to lords whose interest it was
important to gain, while all benefices which enriched
the vassal were so much taken away from the estates
and revenues of the king. In a short time there were
nobles who, although entitled only dukes or counts,
were in reality independent sovereigns, more powerful
and more wealthy than the king to whom they owed
allegiance but did not obey. M. Guizot enumerates
twenty-nine of these fiefs in France, at the end of the
ninth century ; by the end of the tenth they had in
creased to fifty-five.
In the decay of the Empire of Charlemagne, Western
Christendom was exposed on all its sides to the devas-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 217
tations of heathen or Mohammedan enemies. Not only
the Northmen on the west and north, but the Slavs and
Hungarians on the east and the Saracens on the south
made their predatory inroads with impunity, and carried
devastation and misery into all the exposed provinces.
Under these circumstances the first step towards the
regeneration of Germany, as well as of France was
necessarily the revival of its military power. On the
lapse of the direct Carlovingian line, Arnulph, an illegit
imate son of Carloman (Emperor before Charles the Fat) ,
became King of Germany and titular Emperor. He
was an able man, and checked the ravages of the North
men on the German rivers. His line ended with his son
Louis the Child. The Germans then elected Conrad of
Franconia, and on his death Henry of Saxony (Henry
the Fowler), A.D. 919. At the accession of Henry the
Germans were so depressed that they paid tribute to
the Hungarians as the price for a truce of ten years.
During this ten years Henry devoted himself to the
training of his people in the use of arms ; the nobles
were taught by tournaments to fight on horseback, and
the men of lower rank were assembled near their villages
every third day for military exercises. Henry also
built walled towns as places of refuge and defence,
and required that provisions should be stored, and
markets and fairs held in them. When his prepara
tions were complete, he refused further tribute to the
Magyars, and defeated them in battle. His son Otho
the Great completed the deliverance of Germany, and

2 1 8 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
in a few years the Hungarians themselves professed
Christianity under their King St. Stephen.
In France, the national revival took the same course.
I have mentioned that Charles the Bald prohibited the
building of castles by the holders of fiefs, notwithstand
ing the need of fortifications upon the navigable rivers,
and his own culpable negligence in not erecting them.
In spite of that prohibition castles were built, and more
and more in the following reigns. The owners of these
castles while they were oppressive to the people, and
given to plunder on occasion, and free to wage war
against each other on their own account, yet felt the
necessity of protecting their own vassals as far as they
were able ; and under their leadership the military
spirit of the French nation began to revive. Some of
the nobles like Robert the Strong, of Paris, and his son
Eudes, were able to defeat the Normans and to drive
them back. The Normans themselves having reduced
much of the country to a desert, found less to plunder,
and began to make settlements upon the waste lands
which they had ruined. In 91 1 Charles the Simple
granted to Rollo, the Norman chief, the great fief which
was afterwards known as Normandy, the duke of which
became the first peer of the realm. The Norman, thus
admitted within the pale of civilized and Christian
Europe, speedily advanced in culture and increased in
power, and played a prominent part in history. In these
ways a military aristocracy was formed, balancing the
political influence of the Churchmen ; and the result wag

From Constantine to the Reformation. 219
ultimately beneficial to the State and to the Church,
although fatal to the Carlovingian princes. In 987,
Hugh Capet, a descendant of Robert the Strong, the
first of these nobles in rank and power, was crowned
King of France, and the last Carlovingian was treated
as a rebel against him. But many years were yet to
pass, before the French monarchy extended its rule
over the whole of France.
Connected with this revival of the power to cope
with foreign enemies, there was the restoration of some
sort of internal order by the development of the feudal
system under which, through the due subordination of
fiefs, the legal and moral authority of the sovereign was
admitted in theory, and, as the physical power attended
the moral authority, was gradually established in fact.
At the same time there appear during this period indi
cations of reviving municipal life ; the cities, particularly
in Italy, thrown upon themselves for defence, rebuilt
their walls, their magistrates received an accession of
authority to meet the responsibility thrown upon them,
industry revived and the population began to increase.
In Germany also, the Emperors favored the urban
population, and the free imperial cities and the towns
founded and sustained by the policy of Henry the
Fowler and his successors, became important factors in
the body politic.
Now what I want to point out particularly is, that
with this revival of the military and political spirit in
the new nations of Europe, there proceeded with equal

2 2 o Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

steps a revival of the religious spirit ; showing that
whatever may have been the difficulties of the times,
and whatever truth there maybe in the accusation that
the great prelates, clerical and monastic, were secular
ized by their connection with political events, the
heart of the Church was still sound, and in despite of
the superstition and ignorance and violence of the age,
it was doing Christ's work among the people. And it is
important to note, in view of subsequent developments,
that this revival was independent of Rome, and most ap
parent to the north of the Alps. The religious reforms of
Charlemagne and Louis the Pious bore their fruits in
obscurity it may be, but they did bear them, and we
may not doubt when we find an earnest religious
movement spreading everywhere in the eleventh
century, that its roots were taking hold in the
tenth. In the first place, the habits of study
introduced into the monasteries and cathedrals by
the enlightened policy of Charlemagne did not die
out in the succeeding period. Such men as Hincmar,
Scotus Erigena, Gottschalk and others, and the con
troversies in which they were engaged, show a mental
activity for which we look in vain under the later Mero
vingians, or the mayors of the palace ; and the fact
that the libraries, composed of manuscripts written with
difficulty, and therefore costly and precious, were
made up chiefly of the Holy Scriptures, the commen
taries of the Fathers, and the lives of the saints,
brought the studiously inclined much nearer the pure

From Constantine to the Reformation. 221
Word of God, than we might be at first inclined to sup
pose from what is popularly believed concerning the
dark ages. And whatever may be said of the ignorance
of the parochial clergy, those of them who could read at
all (and they had to be able to do that to perform their
office), would find in the office-books of the Church and
the extracts from Holy Scripture which they contained,
the sum of Christian doctrine, and the Word of God, to
guide them in such instruction as they gave their people.
Then again, the changes in the penitential system of the
Church, faulted by rigorous canonists at the time, as
well as in later ages, as corruptions, nevertheless bear
witness to the sense of sin, and the need of repentance,
and were a practical attempt to bring it home to the
conscience of the sinner. The ritual of the Church was
on the whole pure and uncorrupt, and brought the
worshipper into the presence of God with reverence and
devotion, and instructed him in the faith of Christ by
the round of fast and festival and the course of the
Christian year. The successful prosecution of exten
sive missions in the tenth century, not only by the
Greek Church in Russia, but by the German Church in
Denmark and Sweden, in Bohemia and Hungary, shows
the spiritual vitality of the German Church. The
Saxon Emperors, Henry the Fowler, and the Othos
were profoundly and sincerely religious men ; the last
of the line, Henry II., is a saint as well as an Emperor,
and a saint of the kind it befits a devout layman, and a
vigorous and wise Emperor to be. Henry III., the son

222 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
of Conrad the head of the Franconian line, under whom
the Hildebrandine movement began, was one of the
most devout, as well as one of the greatest sovereigns
of the Middle Ages. The Church which had such sons,
and in whose bosom were nourished the German Popes
who preceded Hildebrand and restored the moral and
religious tone of the papacy after its disgraceful history
of the tenth century, had not been unfaithful to its
trust. In France, likewise, just as soon as the kingdom be
gan to settle down, as well as in Northern Italy when
the imperial power was restored, there is evidence of
like survival of real religious influence through these
disorderly times. The extensive monastic reforms of
Clugny, of Camaldoli, of Vallombrosa, with their allied
orders, which belong to this period, revived the life of
the great Benedictine family, and affected the whole
Church of these regions. In Normandy, we find
immense religious activity — not perhaps always of the
kind we should like to see, but real in this, that it is
founded distinctly on the faith in Christ as the Saviour
of mankind and the ruler of the world. The Truce of
God, originating in Aquitaine in the early part of
the eleventh century, was an attempt of the Church to
mitigate the miseries of private warfare, and it spread
thence through other regions, bearing witness to the
desire of the Church to obtain the beatitude of the
peacemakers. In fact, through all this period it is
true, what M. Guizot says of the Middle Ages in general

From Constantine to the Reformation. 223
that they contrast with the early history of Greek and
Roman society by the presence of a lofty ideal in the
midst of a conduct which fells far short of it. " In
these middle ages which we are studying," he says,
" facts are habitually detestable ; crimes, disorders o
all kinds abound ; and still men have in their minds,
in their imaginations, pure, elevated instincts and
desires ; their notions of virtue are far more developed,
their ideas of justice incomparably better than what
is practised around them, than what they often practise
themselves. A certain moral idea hovers over their
rude, tempestuous society, and attracts the regard,
obtains the respect of men whose life scarcely ever
reflects its image. Christianity must doubtless be
ranked among the number of the principal causes of this
fact ; its precise characteristic is to inspire men with a
great moral ambition, to hold constantly before their
eyes a type infinitely superior to human reality, and to
excite them to reproduce it." The "precise character
istic" of Christianity is something much higher than
this, but let that pass. The facts noted in this extract
show themselves in the period of which I am speaking.
Just as soon as the central governments of the several
nations gathered strength again, the strength of the
religious influence shows itself in various directions, and
proves that the national churches were healthy and
sound.

V.
PAPALISM.

PAPALISM.

We have now to consider the great movement which
exalted the Papacy to the head of Western Christen
dom. We have seen in the last lecture the collapse
of the imperialist scheme of Charlemagne, in which the
head of the State was also head of the Church ; the
natural reaction was to the opposite extreme, to a
theory by which it was assumed that there is an earthly
head of the visible Church, and that this head of the
Church is, by virtue of his spiritual authority, also head
of the State. This theory was fully worked out and
reduced to practice by the monk Hildebrand, who
became Pope by the name of Gregory VII., and it is
therefore conveniently called the Hildebrandine theory,
and the period in which it flourished the Hildebrandine
period. The Hildebrandine period of the Papacy lasted
from the accession of Leo IX., A.D. 1048, to the death of
Boniface VIII., A.D. 1303, a term of 255 years. The pow
er of the Roman pontiff then suffered a collapse as com
plete and disastrous as ever befel human monarchy. It
will be the object of the next lecture to trace the causes
of that collapse ; in the present lecture, I purpose to

228 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
set forth the rise and progress of the Papal idea, and
its workings during the period of its supremacy.
We are under no need of refusing to admit that the
Papal theory, as held by its promoters, was a theory of
Reformation. I have before remarked that it is an
error to speak of the great crisis of the sixteenth cen
tury as if it were the only reform or attempted reform
of the Church. The whole history of the Church
is a constant struggle with the evil of the world ;
and therefore any period of great religious ac
tivity is a period of reformation. The imperialist
movement of Charlemagne was a reformation ; so was
the Papalist movement of Hildebrand ; so was the
movement for reformation by councils in the fifteenth
century. In fact the Church is always endeavoring to
reform itself — that is, to adapt itself to the changes in
human society, and to remove those abuses which have
grown up through want of adaptation to the altered
circumstances of advancing time. There is an un
changeable order in the divine constitution of the
Church, and there is a changeable order ; to tamper
with the one is a corruption of the order of the Church,
to crystallize or fossilize the other is likewise a corrup
tion ; there are therefore corruptions of innovation and
corruptions of conservatism; and it is our duty as faith
ful and wise stewards, in bringing out of our treasures
things new and old, to judge wisely and rightly con
cerning that which is new and that which is old. The
Catholic Church is adapted to all states and conditions

From Constantine to the Reformation. 229
of human life and human society ; it works equally in
an empire and in a republic, among rude, illiterate
peoples, and among the most polished and cultured.
And it will adapt itself to its field of work by rightly
arranging the changeable elements of its organization,
while preserving immutable the unchangeable elements
of its divine order. The feudal Church would not
work well in the nineteenth century; but neither would
the nineteenth century Church have worked well in
feudal times ; and yet both in the feudal ages and in
the nineteenth century the bishops of the Church are
true bishops, its worship a true worship, and its sacra
ments food for the faithful and the penitent. Take it
as a guiding principle in your study of ecclesiastical
history, that — the essentials of the divine order being
preserved, the threefold Ministry, the Creeds, the Holy
Scriptures and the Sacraments necessary to salvation —
the other arrangements are subject to revision accord
ing to the changes of times and men's manners ; and
that the conservative and the progressive may honestly
differ as to the expediency or the necessity of any pro
posed change, and may earnestly contend each for his
own side ; you will then have the key to the expla
nation of the movements you are studying, without the
necessity of thinking every difference from our system
of the present day to be a corruption, or of attributing
every seeming corruption to the immorality of the
priesthood, and every project of reform to their unhal
lowed ambition. A too stubborn conservatism may

230 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
make the laudable expedient of one age the corruption
of the next; a too sanguine progressivism may intro
duce a corruption in the theory intended to justify a
practical effort at reform.
But while we admit that the promoters of the Hilde
brandine theory desired and intended that it should be
the means of a reformation of manifest evils in the
imperialist system, we must not blind our eyes to the
facts of history, which show its real nature and opera
tion. Our objection to the Papacy is not that it was
a powerful factor in politics and religion in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries — its influence, great as it was,
has been much overrated — but that it claims to be a
divine and unchangeable institution, essential to the
Church; when its history in its rise, culmination and
decline shows it to be no such thing. And therefore
we are under no obligation to asperse the character of
the great Popes of this period, because we see them to
have been working on a false theory of their power and
its responsibilities. Our objections to the Papacy do
not lie against this or that Pope, but against the Papal
theory itself; the men who believed in it and endeav
ored to administer it honestly were honest men ; but
their theory was none the less false ; their assumptions
were not facts ; the divine right of the Papacy to
supreme rule over Church and State is not a fact ; and
the proof that it is not a fact lies in the history of the
Papacy itself — in the various steps by which its usurpa
tion was established, in the failure to make good its

From Constantine to the Reformation. 231
claim when its power was at its height, in the woful
collapse of the fourteenth, and the dreadful moral
degradation of the fifteenth centuries.
The germ of the Hildebrandine theory of the Papacy
is to be found in that remarkable collection published
some time in the first half of the ninth century, known
as the False Decretals. While the visions of ecclesias
tical supremacy of which I spoke in the last lecture
were misleading the chiefs of the Neustrian or French
Church, and ruining the Neustrian Kingdom, other
visions of the relation of Church and State were work
ing in the brain of some unknown dreamer or dreamers
in that part of Germany or Austrasia which had been
the scene of the labors of St. Boniface. I have before
remarked on the peculiar relation of St. Boniface to the
see of Rome, and also upon the condition of the Aus
trasian Episcopate in his day. St. Boniface had been
acknowledged as primate of the German and Austra
sian Church by reason of his "apostolic vicariate," and
had endeavored to revive the authority of the metro
politans, which had fallen into abeyance, and to bring
them into subordination to the see of Rome, by per
suading them to accept the pallium. But the bishops,
who had, in the political changes of the preceding
period, thrown off the metropolitan government, were
unwilling to have it restored as a substantive power,
especially as in the new relation to the Empire the
metropolitans were more closely related to the princes,
and were the means by which they exercised their

232 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
authority over the Church. Out of these apparently
contradictory elements there was formulated a theory
of the Church constitution, and of its relation to the
State, which were set forth in the False Decretals.
That it was not the primitive theory is evident from
the necessity of supporting it by forged documents ;
neither was it the fully developed theory of Gregory
VII. and his successors, for it does not seem to assert
the Papal supremacy over the secular government. It
evidently grew out of the circumstances of the time,
and the desire to emancipate the ecclesiastical body
from that control by the lay power which had been the
principle of the reforms of Charlemagne. In the opinion
of careful students, the False Decretals were not forged
in the interest of Rome, although Rome ultimately
reaped the benefit of them ; their object rather was to
make the bishops independent of all immediate author
ity, whether lay or ecclesiastical, by subordinating them
to the distant and therefore less intrusive juris
diction of the Bishop of Rome. The pretext for their
publication is stated with naive simplicity in the preface
to the completed collection. It appears that the
administration of justice was so improved since the bar
barian codes had been reduced to writing, that the
judges were accustomed to demand the written text as
the basis of their decisions, and therefore the authors of
the False Decretals set themselves to supply a code of
ecclesiastical law which should meet this requirement.
"Many good Christians," say they, "are reduced to

From Constantine to the Reformation. 233
silence, and compelled to bear the sins of others
against their own better knowledge, because they are
unprovided with documents by which they might con
vince ecclesiastical judges of the truth of what they
know to be the law; seeing that though what they
allege may be altogether right, yet it is not heeded by
the judges unless it be confirmed by written documents,
or by recorded decisions, or made to appear in the
course of some known judicial proceeding." They
therefore added to the genuine code as compiled by
Isidore of Seville, "the decretal epistles of certain apos
tolic men, * * as many," they say, "as we have been
enabled to find, down to Pope Sylvester ; after these
we have annexed the rest of the decretals of the Roman
prelates down to St. Gregory [the Great], together
with certain epistles of that pontiff; in all which, by
virtue of the dignity of the Apostolic See, resideth
authority equal to that of the Councils : so that the
discipline of the ecclesiastical order being thus by our
labors reduced and digested into one body of law. the
holy bishops may be instructed in the entire rules of
the fathers ; and thus obedient ministers and people
may be imbued with spiritual precedents, and be no
longer deceived by the practices of the wicked." * The
collection, therefore, which goes by the name of the

* I take the above from Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, Vol. III., pages
182-4. At Nashotah I had the use of Hinschius' edition of the False
Decretals, and made myself, in a general way, familiar with its contents;
but am not now able to refer to it.

234 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
False Decretals, purported to be the complete body of
canon and decretal law then existing ; it contains
many genuine though garbled documents, and the
forgeries of preceding ages, such as the "Donation of
Constantine," as well as those which the compilers
forged for the occasion. It was intended to be cited in
the ecclesiastical courts as the law for the clergy, just as
Salic law was cited for the Franks, or Gothic law for the
Goths, or Roman law for the Romans. And as so
cited, it was intended, as I said, to secure immunity to
the clergy, absolutely from all secular jurisdiction, and
proximately from the immediate jurisdiction of the
metropolitans. It attained this last result by allowing
an appeal to Rome before the trial of a case ; thus
transferring it to a distant tribunal, where witnesses
could not appear, and therefore where an accusation
would naturally fall to the ground. The ultimate object
seems to have been to weld the hierarchy into a com
pact body, centred in the see of Rome, self-governed
and independent of all other power whatsoever.
Now of course it is a great blot upon ecclesiastical
history that the False Decretals exist. They are un
deniable forgeries, touching the most sacred of all
matters, the Constitution of the Church of Christ. But
I must point out to you in passing, that the moral
responsibility for them rests, not upon the Church of
the ninth century at large, but upon the individuals
who composed them, and upon the see of Rome which
adopted and enforced them. As a matter of fact they

From Constantine to the Reformation. 235
were not generally received and acted upon, until the
political force of the Hildebrandine movement gave
them vitality, and they were incorporated in the Decre-
tum of Gratian. At the same time the condition of
learning was such, in the absence of the printing-press,
that one who possessed a genuine code of the canons in
his cathedral library, could not be sure that that was
all of the canon law then in existence. Manuscripts
were fragmentary ; one was better than another ; and
the presumption was that the one which contained the
most was the best. We need not wonder, therefore, at
the hesitation of men who felt that the system of the
decretals was not the system of the Church, and yet
were not sure that the documents were forgeries,
because they had not seen them before ; nor need we
deny the sincerity of men who accepted them when
they were published, being without the critical knowl
edge to detect their falsehood. Such an apology,
however, can scarcely be made for the Bishops of Rome
who first adopted them. They must have known that
they were not genuine.*
While this dream of ecclesiastical immunity was
being indulged north of the Alps, what was the actual
state of the Roman see ? When the False Decretals
first saw the light, there sat in the chair of St. Peter

* Disingenuously, Nicholas I. replied to Hincmar, who threw doubts
upon the authroity of some citations: That the Church of Rome could
not be ignorant of documents which were in its own archives. See the
letter in Labbe Concilia, Vol. X., Col. 282.

236 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
one of its great bishops, Nicholas I. I need only allude
to his three great causes, the affairs of Photius and
Ignatius of Constantinople, the divorce of King Lothair,
and the controversies with Hincmar of Rheims to bring
his personality before you. What it is important to
remark is, that he was chosen by the direct influence of
the Emperor Louis (grandson of Louis the Pious), the
last of the Carlovingians who had any real power in
Italy. Nicholas was succeeded by Hadrian II., a re
spectable and able Pope, and he by John VIH., still in
the reign of Louis, But Louis died in 876, and then,
although Charles the Bald and others after him of the
Carlovingian line bore the name of Emperor, the real
power of the imperial office was in abeyance, as we
have seen, for nearly a century. The title passed to
that potentate who was most powerful in Italy, and was
given to or usurped by several Italian nobles. It was
not until Otho the Great was crowned at Rome in 962,
that there was a real Emperor, in power as well as in
name ; and it was not until 1045 (with the exception of
a short period (circa 1000) under Otho III., who made
the illustrious Gerbert Pope under the name of Sylves
ter II.) that the Emperor intervened directly in the
affairs of the Papacy. Now through all this period —
that is, from the latter part of the ninth to the middle
of the eleventh century, the Papacy was in a state of
the most abject degradation. Italy was filled with dis
orders by the turbulent barons who quarreled over its
dismembered carcase ; the Saracens enacted in the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 237
Mediterranean the part that the Northmen did in
France ; and Rome and its bishopric were the prey of
the lawless aristocracy who held the rule over it for the
time. During the first half of the tenth century the
Papal chair was occupied by the creatures, paramours
and connections of those infamous women, the two
Theodoras and Marozia ; then, after Otho had deposed
the last and worst of them, John XII., there was a time
in which Popes were set up and put down, banished or
murdered, as one faction or another came into power ;
then Otho III. made two respectable Popes, one a Ger
man, Gregory V., the other a Frenchman, Sylvester II.;*
but the united reigns of these were only seven years (A.
D. 996-1003); and then there came in the line of Tus-
culan Popes, creatures of the Counts of Tusculum, for
forty years — the last of whom, Benedict IX., was so vile
that his archpresbyter, who took the name of Gregory
VI., thought he was doing a meritorious act in pur*
chasing his right to the Papal chair for a sum of
money. Baronius in narrating the history of the Papacy dur
ing this period, is saved from the temptation to palliate
its enormities by the thought that its regeneration from
such a moral sepulchre in the succeeding age is a mani
fest proof of its divine origin and indefeasible authority.
* " With the substitution of these men for the profligate priests of
Italy, began that Teutonic reform of the Papacy which raised it from the
abyss of the tenth century to the point where Hildebrand found it. The
Emperors were working the ruin of their power by their most disinterested
acts." — Bryce's Holy Roman Empire, 146.

238 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
The argument is a neat one in the hands of a Papal
controversialist, but it will not bear examination. If
the Papacy, as such — if the Bishop of Rome, simply
as bishop of his own city according to the primitive
system — had that inherent sanctity which the Papal
theory requires, he should have appeared, at this time
especially, when all the other foundations of the earth
were out of course, as the conservator of religion and
morality. He should not have succumbed to the evil
of the times ; he should have shown himself the pre
server of order, the supporter of good government ; the
influence which regenerated society should have flowed
forth from Rome, instead of flowing in towards Rome
from the restored Empire. What was the fact ? Is it
not plain upon the surface that the revival of religion
to the north of the Alps preceded and effected the
moral restoration of the Roman see ? — that the ag
grandizement of the Papacy in the last half of the
eleventh century depended upon, as it followed after,
the revival of the Empire and of the Kingdom of
France in the latter half of the tenth century ? — that
the new blood of its infused vitality was German blood
and French blood ? The purely political character of
the Papacy is manifest, not only in the previous history
of its relation to the Byzantine Empire, but in its abey
ance at this time, when it could find no great political
antagonist. I spoke at the close of the last lecture of the indica
tions of a healthy religious condition which attended the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 239
restoration of political order, and which are so plainly
manifest in France and Germany while the Papacy was
thus wallowing in the mire. One of the principal sources
of religious influence at that time was the monastery
of Clugny. This celebrated monastery, of which so
much that is delightful reading is told us by Dr. Mait
land, was founded as far back as the year 912 by
William, Duke of Auvergne, by whose charter it was to
be free "from all interference of the founder and his
family, of the king's majesty, and of every earthly
power." Clugny was situated in the diocese of Macon
in Burgundy, which was at that time a part of the
Empire. Its influence spread far and wide ; it adopted
a system of lay affiliation which drew persons in secu
lar life within its circle ; the Emperor Henry II. was a
confrater of Clugny. Clugny began to be a power in
the religious world under Odo, the second abbot, who
succeeded to the government in 927. He had beea
devoted by his father, while in the cradle, to the service
of God in the Church of St. Martin at Tours, and was
brought up by Count Fulk the Good, who was a canon
of that church. At the age of seventeen his father
withdrew him, and placed him in the military service
of the Duke of Auvergne ; but an inveterate headache
from which he suffered was taken as a judgment upon
him for deserting the Church, and he returned to Tours,
where he became schoolmaster and precentor. Later
he studied at Paris under Remigius of Auxerre, and in 909
joined himself to Berno to lead the monastic life, bring-

240 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
ing with him his library of one hundred volumes. He
was with Berno when he became the first abbot of
Clugny, and was chosen to succeed him. Clugny was
fortunate in its abbots. In two hundred years it had
but six. Under Odo it became a home of learning as
well as piety. Odo was succeeded by Aymar, and he,
becoming blind, by Maiolus, who refused the earnest
solicitations of Otho II. to accept the Papacy. Maiolus
governed the monastery forty-six years ; he was suc
ceeded by Odilo, who was abbot fifty-five years, and
he by Hugh, who held that office sixty years, entering
upon it in the year after Leo IX. became Pope (1049).
Under these saintly and experienced rulers, Clugny
promoted a reformation of the monastic life, not merely
within its own walls, but among many affiliated founda
tions. The Cluniac monks were the first "order" in the
proper technical sense. The Benedictine was the
¦general rule of the monks, but the Benedictine monas
teries were not organized into an order ; each was
independent of the others, and they were connected
together in a common interest only by the common
rule. Under Odilo the practice of affiliating other
monasteries to Clugny began, and the organization of
the "Congregation" was completed by Hugh, who is
said to have ruled over ten thousand monks. By the
end of the twelfth century, Robertson tells us, the
number of monasteries connected with Clugny, in
France, in Germany, in Italy, in England and in Spain,
amounted to two thousand.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 241
Now Hildebrand, though an Italian, was a monk of
Clugny, and you can readily see how, when he became
the power behind the Papal throne, and ultimately the
Pope himself, the whole Cluniac order became the
compactly organized and disciplined spiritual army
of the Papacy. By its means the entire monastic
interest was enlisted on the side of the Popes against
the secular ecclesiastics who were to be reduced to
subjection to the Papal despotism. It ramified, as has
been seen, into every country, its credit with the people
was great, its power therefore to organize public opinion
in favor of the Papal designs was immense. I have
heard it said that the secret of the successful assertion
of the Papal supremacy was that the monks appro
priated the Papacy ; and as the monks were looked
upon as the true exponents of religion, obedience to the
Papacy, when supported by them, would seem to the
people to be the safeguard of religion in all men. The
contest of the Papacy with the national Churches was
the contest of the abbot with the bishop, of the monk
with the priest ; and this accounts for many things, and
among others for the ruthlessness with which at the
Reformation Henry VIII. swept the monks out of
England. There was another influence, I think, working upon
Hildebrand at Clugny, which had much to do with
shaping his ideas of the Papacy, and his policy as its
moving spirit. Odilo, who was abbot of Clugny while
Hildebrand was a monk there, was one of the great

242 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
promoters of that attempt to put a stop to the miseries
entailed by the right of private war, which was called
"the Truce of God." There are one or two facts con
nected with that movement which have not received
the attention they deserve. One is the distinction
between "the Peace" and "the Truce." The first
object which the Councils which legislated on this sub
ject had in view was to secure to the unarmed classes,
such as clerks, monks, peasants, women, and unarmed
tradesmen and their possessions, perpetual immunity
from the rapine of war; the other was to secure among
those who bore arms, a truce for limited periods, as
from Thursday to Monday of each week, and during the
more sacred seasons of the Church year, as Advent and
Christmas, and Lent and Easter. Another fact is that
it was in this connection that the interdict was put in
operation by the local authorities, before it became a
weapon of the Popes — as at a Council of Limoges,
A.D. 103 1 , under Aymon, Archbishop of Bourges, where
the bishops, we are told, on the advice of Odolric,
Abbot of St. Martial, determined, in case the nobles
refused to observe the peace, to lay a general excom
munication — that is an interdict — upon their whole
territory.* A third and very important fact is, that
the principle of outlawry was applied to the of-
* Fleury, B. 59, Ch. 25. Robertson says that Baronius is very angry
with the Councils for presuming to undertake such business without the
Pope's sanction. My idea is that the Popes learnt this from these Coun
cils.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 243
fenders against the public peace, and that the commons
or communes first answered to a levy en masse against
them. About the year 1000, William, Duke of Aqui
taine, assembled a Council at Poitiers, which pledged
the bishops and lords not only to keep trie peace and
to do justice to those who complained to them, but
also to unite the community in making reprisals upon
any one who should break his pledge or violate the
public peace.* This compact led to the formation of
associations for this purpose ; and the editor of Orderi-
cus Vitalis mentions an author who has traced thp
history of such an association in the province of Berri
for three centuries. He tells us also, that Aymon of
Bourges, mentioned above, about the year 1038 "sum
moned the bishops of his province, and with the con
currence and support of his suffragans, promulgated a
decree binding all persons of the age of fifteen years
and upwards heartily to resist all violators of the
common compact, and so far from submitting to have
their property plundered to rise in arms, if occasion
required, against the marauders. Not even the minis
ters of religion were exempted, but taking the banners
from the sanctuary of the Lord, they were to join the
rest of the population and have them borne against the
violators of the sworn peace. "t The editor of Orderi-
cus remarking that his author on several occasions

* Fleury, B. 58, Ch. 14.
fOrdericus Vitalis, Vol. IV., p. 52, Bohn's Edition.

244 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
speaks of levies en masse of the population, summoned
to arms by the cure's, and marching to battle under the
banners of their respective parishes, points out that
these movements were in truth crusades directed by
the clergy against the disturbers of the public peace,
and the natural results of the enactment of what was
called The Truce of God. Their importance increased
so that King Louis the Fat about 1108 summoned them
to aid him against the rebellious nobles ; and it is from
this movement that the influence of the people in the
body politic takes its rise.*
* Ordericus Vitalis, B. XL, Ch. 34. Several forms of the enactment
of the Truce of God in the time of Odilo of Clugny and Hildebrand are
given by Peter De Marca, De Concordia Sacerdotii et Imperii, at the end
of B. IV., Ch. 14; but its nature can be most conveniently illustrated by
the following from a Council of Rouen, A.D. 1096, after Urban II. had
made it universal at the Council of Clermont:
"I. — The holy synod (of Rouen) has decreed that the truce of God
shall be strictly observed from the Sunday before the beginning of Lent
to sunrise on Monday after the octave of Whitsuntide: also from Wednes
day before Advent at sunset to the octave of the Epiphany, as well as
every week in the year from sunset on Wednesday to sunrise on Monday ;
also on all feasts of St. Mary and their vigils, and all feasts of the apos
tles and their vigils; so that no one shall assault, or wound, or slay
another, or take pledge or booty.
"2. — It is also decreed that all churches and churchyards, monks and
nuns as well as females, pilgrims and merchants, with their servants, oxen
and horses at plough, and men driving carts, or harrowing, and horses
harrowing, and men flying for refuge to carts, and all the lands of the
saints and the money of the clergy shall be forever unmolested, so that no
one shall presume to assault, take, rob or injure them in any manner or
at any time whatever.
" 3- — It is also decreed that all persons, from the age of twelve years
and upwards, shall. swear to observe faithfully this institution of the truce
of God as it is here appointed, by the oath following : You N. hear this :
I swear that henceforth I will faithfully observe this appointment of the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 245

Now remembering that from the year 1041, Odilo of
Clugny, with the others, was much interested in pro
moting the observance of the Truce of God, and so cur
tailing the license of the military power, and that we
have documents which show that he was recommend
ing it in Italy, as well as in France, I think, as I said,
that this movement influenced Hildebrand's theory of
the Papacy, and gave him the idea of subjecting the
military power altogether to the Church. In fact it is
not improbable that ideas of a reformation of the Pa
pacy on the Hildebrandine lines had begun to form
themselves in the monasteries, before Henry III. took
the matter in hand, and that Gregory VI. was put for-
warc in that interest. A recent and voluminous biogra-
phe of Hildebrand has the theory that Gregory VI.
was used as an instrument by the association formed by
William of Aquitaine, above mentioned, with which
Odilo was connected, and was supplied by them with
the funds to buy off Benedict IX.* I confess that in
view of all the circumstances this looks to me very
likely. Certain it is that the monastic party took great
interest in Gregory VI., and that Hildebrand, after
being a monk at Clugny, became chaplain to Gregory,
truce of God as it is here expressed, and will aid my bishop or archdeacon
against all persons who shall neglect to take this oath or fail to observe
this decree : so that if I am summoned by them against the offenders, I
will neither abscond nor conceal myself, but will attend them armed, and
support them in all things to the utmost of my power, in good faith, with
out subterfuge and according to my conscience."
*See Robertson Ch. History, Vol. II. (8vo), p. 445 margin, note S.

246 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
and adhered to him till his death ; and it is not impos
sible that he had been sent to Rome to guide his sim
plicity. When we remember the part that the charge
of simony played in the policy of Hildebrand, as a
weapon of offence against the clergy of the national
Churches, it is hard to see how he could have attached
himself so firmly to Gregory VI., who notoriously
bought the Papacy, unless there had been some con
nection of that sort. But Hildebrand, being a profound
politician, was not over scrupulous in availing himself
of the means to carry out his designs.
The moral regeneration of the Papacy is not to be
credited to Hildebrand. The credit of it belongs right
ly to the Emperor Henry III., who in the year 1046
deposed both Benedict IX. and Gregory VI., and put
Clement II. in their place. Henry was a deeply relig
ious and conscientious man, honestly determined to
root out simony from the Church, and using his power
to promote the best men he could find to the ecclesi
astical dignities of the Empire. When he went to Rome
after the deposition of Gregory, and inquired who among
the Roman clergy was fit to be Pope, he was answered,
"not one." He therefore advanced Suidger, Bishop of
Bamberg, to the Papal chair. Between Gregory VI.
and Gregory VII., seven Popes intervened, six of whom
were Germans. The seventh was a Lombard, and so
the Papacy returned to Italy. The first of these Popes,
Clement II. (Suidger), died in about a year ; the second,
Damasus II., a few days after his election. The third,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 247
Leo IX., reigned seven years, and with him the Hilde
brandine period properly begins.
Bruno, Bishop of Toul, who became Pope as Leo IX.,
was a man of noble birth, of liberal culture, and of
fervent piety, and was chosen by Henry for these
reasons. On his way to Rome, it is said, he was met
at Besancon by the abbot of Clugny, in company with
Hildebrand, who persuaded him to lay aside the charac
ter of Pope-elect, and to appear in Rome as a pilgrim,
taking his right to the Papacy from the election of the
Roman Church, and not from the imperial nomination.
Hildebrand now returned to Rome, and entered again
into the service of the Pope. Leo magnified his office
by making journeys into Germany and France, and
holding councils against simony and the "concubinage"
of the clergy, and conferring privileges and immunities
upon the influential monasteries. At his death the
foundation was laid for the Hildebrandine superstruct
ure. He was succeeded by Gebhard, Bishop of Eich-
stedt, who was nominated by the Emperor at the
suggestion of Hildebrand, taking the name of Victor II.
He introduced the practice of sending legates to hold
councils in the various countries. Then Frederick of
Lorraine became Pope as Stephen IX. After him came
Gerard, Bishop of Florence, who was a Burgundian by
birth, as Nicholas II. Then Anselm of Lucca was
elected Pope as Alexander II. And then Hildebrand
(1073) ascended the Papal throne as Gregory VII.
What is to be noted is, that these Germans of high

248 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
moral and religious character, although, when advanced
to the Papacy, they adopted the Hildebrandine prin
ciples, were the product of the German Church ; they
had been trained in it, and not in the school of the
Papacy ; they are therefore evidences of the spiritual
life that was in the German Church while the Papacy
was sunk so low. The Cluniac influence, again, was
German or French ; and it was this new infusion of
blood from the north of the Alps, which started the
Papacy on its way to the supremacy it attained in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The political event which accrued most to the benefit
of the see of Rome at this time was the establishment
of the Normans in southern Italy. From the time that
Rollo became the "man" of Charles the Simple, and
received the investiture of Normandy, the Normans had
made rapid progress in the civilization of the age, and
by this time had developed into the most hardy, war
like, astute and unscrupulous race in Europe. The
Duchy of Normandy was the most powerful and pros
perous fief of the French Kingdom. In the early part
of the eleventh century some Norman pilgrims found
their way into southern Italy. Being asked to take
part in a petty war between a lord and his vassals they
engaged some of their countrymen to join them ; others
followed, and by the time of Leo IX. they had made
themselves masters of so much territory that Leo, after
losing a battle against them and being taken prisoner,
granted them investiture of Apulia and Calabria. As

From Constantine to the Reformation. 249
the monks were the ecclesiastical army of the Papacy,
so these Normans became its military allies. The
territory in the south of Italy which they acquired was
won from the Greek Empire and the Saracens, but Leo
claimed the sovereignty over it by virtue of the forged
donation of Constantine, and the Normans cared little
whose it was, so long as they had a plausible title and
the power to make it respected. They readily, there
fore, became the "men" of the Papacy; and in this way
the Popes obtained an army to put down the barons in
the vicinity of Rome, who had tyrannized over their
predecessors, and upon which they could count in any
future contest with the Emperor. Their Norman vas
sals, however, were unruly and unscrupulous allies, who
consulted their own interests in affording help to the
Popes, and were a very uncertain dependence in an
exigency in which there was nothing to be gained for
themselves. The dependence of the Popes upon these
Italian Normans was doubtless a strong inducement to
Alexander II. and Gregory VII. to be complaisant to
the French Norman, William the Conqueror, in abet
ting his usurpation of the English crown.
With these powers at his back, and with a high sense
of the supreme authority of the see of St. Peter over all
other earthly powers, spiritual and temporal, the monk
Hildebrand, first as a servant of the Papacy, and then
as Pope himself, set himself with a vigor, a persistency,
an ability and a pitilessness almost unexampled, to
reduce the Church and the world to the Papal obedi-

250 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

ence. The narrative of events may be read in any of
the histories, and it is not necessary for me to summa
rize it. The line of Hildebrandine Popes lasted ,as I
said, from Leo IX. (acceded 1048) to Boniface VIII.
(died 1303), a period of two centuries and a half. It
includes, besides Leo IX., Alexander II. and Gregory
VII., Urban II., the organizer of the first Crusade;
Paschal II., who offered to renounce all the temporal
estates of the Church, rather than permit homage to
the sovereign ; Calixtus II., who brought the contest
about investitures to a close by a reasonable compro
mise ; Innocent II. and Eugenius III., the friends of
St. Bernard, the latter the organizer of the second
Crusade ; Hadrian IV., the only Englishman who
became Pope, who gave Ireland to Henry II. of
England ; Alexander III., who compelled Henry to do
penance at the shrine of Thomas a Becket, and who
triumphed over Frederick Barbarossa ; Innocent III.,
who received the homage of the base King John of
England, who compelled Philip Augustus of France to
submit to his sentence, and who promoted the Albigen-
sian crusades ; and Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., the
implacable adversaries of the Emperor Frederick II.
The great typical event and picture of the period is
Henry IV., Emperor of Germany, standing barefoot in
the snow before the closed doors of Gregory's
apartments in the castle of Canossa, praying for
release from his excommunication. The great Emper
or Henry III. was too powerful for Hildebrand to attack

From Constantine to the Reformation. 251

him openly ; but when he left his crown and sceptre to
the young child who became Henry IV., and that young
child, under unfaithful tutorship grew up to be a
pleasure-loving, headstrong and wayward youth, bur
dened with the responsibilities of the Empire before
maturity, experience and misfortune developed the
strength of character which showed itself in his later
years, Gregory's time came, and he assumed the Papacy
himself. It was very easy to foment dissatisfaction
among a turbulent and rapacious nobility, eager to
throw off the imperial yoke, at the mistakes of the
young king, who had not strength to keep them in
order, and whose private life was sinful enough to
expose him to the censure of the Church. When Greg
ory thundered his excommunication against Henry, and
absolved his subjects from their allegiance, he invited
the rebellion of every discontented element, he con
sciously threw the Empire into greater disorder, and he
intentionally weakened the central authority, the sup
port and strengthening of which was the prime necessi
ty of the time for the progress of society. It was an
easy victory of the stern, relentless, ecclesiastical
politician over a king whose advisers were treacher
ous and whose character was as yet unformed. Henry
was excommunicated; his subjects rebelled; they were
successful against him and declared him deposed unless
his excommunication were removed within the year.
And therefore Henry went to Canossa.

252 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
Let us do justice to Hildebrand's motives. The
magnificent idea of the imperial prerogative, as the vice-
gerency of Christ in the rule of the world — the idea
acted upon by Charlemagne, and formulated anew by
Frederick Barbarossa at a later period, the idea which
took hold of the soul of Dante, and made him the stern
Ghibelline he was — that idea had utterly broken down
in practice by the time of Hildebrand. Instead of there
being one Emperor, "lord of the world," the superior
of all other powers, and so the representative of the
divine dominion upon earth, there had been two
Emperors, one at Constantinople, and one in Germany,
and numerous kings entirely independent of either of
them. If, therefore, there was to be one ruler, he must
be the spiritual and not the temporal head of Church
and State. The False Decretals, again, which were
accepted as authentic canon law in all the monastic
schools, whatever else they had done, had robbed the
temporal government of that sacredness with which
the mind of Charlemagne had invested it, and prepared
the way for the usurpation of the spiritual power as
residing in the Pope. And as the secular government
lost its sacredness, there was danger under the existing
system — in the intimate union of Church and State in
the subordination of the Church to the State and
the double character of the hierarchy as lords temporal
as well as lords spiritual — that the spiritual vitality of
the Church might be stifled, and Christendom become
altogether worldly. There was danger, that is, so far

From Constantine to the Reformation. 253
as man was concerned. Let us concede that Hilde
brand saw this danger, and resolved to do his utmost to
avert it. It did not occur to him that if the spirit
ual potentate assumed the supreme temporal gov
ernment, and administered it by means of his spirit
ual vassals the hierarchy of the Church, the same
secularizing influence as before would be at work upon
them, and perhaps with worse results. Let us admit
that he thoroughly believed in his own theory of the
Papal supremacy. It was natural for those who be
lieved in the special grace of the see of St. Peter, to
attribute its degradation in the preceding age to its
subjection to the secular power (that power being the
brigand Counts of Tusculum), to forget that that
degradation was clearly due to the want of the supreme
secular power, the Empire, working in its own sphere,
and to suppose that the normal action of the Papacy
required an inversion of the previous order. As the
feudal system with its graded ranks and subordinations
developed itself, and it became more and more plain
that the Emperor was not the feudal superior of all
men, it was easy to dream of the supremacy of the
spiritual over the temporal power — under a different
system, New England Congregational pastors have had
the same dream. The mind of Gregory VII. took in
the idea in all its vastness. He saw the Bishop of
Rome at the summit of the ascending grades of
temporal lordships, as well as of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. The vicegerent of Christ upon earth must,

254 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
if he be free and supreme, be endowed with grace to
discharge the immense responsibility; that he had not
discharged it in the past was due to the fact that he
was not free, and was not supreme. That was the
theory, and Hildebrand would make it fact. The
Hildebrandine movement, therefore, was intended as a
reformation ; and we may admit with justice that those
who worked upon that theory desired to reform the
Church, and sought to accumulate power in their hands
that they might reform it.
But, admitting this, it is for us to read the history of
these times by the light of the ages that followed.
The theory of the Hildebrandine reform was not that
of the primitive constitution of the Church ; and there
fore the reformation was not permanent ; it was a
failure almost from the beginning, and, as time went
on, a corruption infecting the whole Church. The
Papacy was compelled, from its entrance on this phase
of its existence, to make use of force and diplo
macy, and to depend upon them rather than upon
ascertained and admitted right ; it was therefore
tainted with sinister methods, and these methods
reacted upon the men who used them — lowered their
moral tone, so that when the power was gained, the
men were not worthy to wield it. It is a great mistake
to attribute the progress of Europe, from the twelfth
century on, to the influence of the Papacy. It is a
great mistake to lump the Churches of the Middle Ages
under the one title of the Roman Catholic, or Romish

From Constantine to the Reformation. 253
Church. The Romish Church is almost the newest of
the sects of Christendom ; it dates from the Council of
Trent. The Churches of the nations were, it is true,
in communion with the see of Rome, and in the Roman
obedience ; but they were the national Churches still,
and they had their part as national Churches in the
movements of the times.
And if we do justice to Hildebrand and his associates,
let us do justice also to the clergy of these national
Churches. They were not the corrupt and unclean
wretches which modern Protestantism, wrongly read
ing the Hildebrandine manifestoes against them,
declares them to have been. The purposes of Hilde
brand required him to accuse the clergy of grievous
sins, that he might put them at a disadvantage in
resisting the denationalization of the Churches. But
when a charge of moral corruption is brought against
the established order by a revolutionist or reformer,
we need to ask what is his object ; we also need to ask
what is his standard of judgment — what the terms he uses
actually mean in this relation — what are the facts which
they represent. Now the programme of Gregory VII.
was a political programme. It proposed to reduce the
State as well as the Church to absolute subjection to
the Papacy — to make the Pope supreme lord of every
earthly power, as well as the fountain of all ecclesi
astical jurisdiction. And this has been the claim of all
his successors — a claim which has never been aban
doned. Innocent III. declared that God had ordained

256 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

the Pope, as Christ's vicar, "to have power over all
nations and kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, and
to destroy, and to throw down, and to build and to plant,"
appropriating to the Papacy the text in the first chap
ter of Jeremiah. " We declare, affirm, define and pro
nounce," said Boniface VIII., the last of the Hildebran
dine Popes, in the famous bull, "Unam Sanctam" "that
it is altogether necessary for salvation, that every
human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."
To obtain that power was the object of the Hilde
brandine revolution. The attack was made upon three
lines, and directed :
First, to withdraw the ecclesiastics of the national
Churches from all social sympathies, from all allegiance
to the nation and interest in the national life — to
denationalize them, and bind them, as the Jesuits
are bound to-day, only to the Church and to the
Papacy. Secondly, to take the estates of the Church virtually
out of the nation, by releasing them from all contribu
tions to the national treasury, and by freeing their
holders from the obligations to which the holders of
fiefs were bound as vassals of the sovereign.
And thirdly, to weaken the temporal governments,
so that the internal order and external security of the
nations should be dependent upon the will of the pon
tiff, and he should be able to use rebellion or war as
the means of coercing a monarch whose obedience

From Constantine to the Reformation. 257
was halting, or whose sins, real or imputed, called for
the censure of the pontiff.
The instruments upon which Gregory relied to ac
complish the denationalization of the clergy and their
estates were the charges of simony and concubinage
which make so great a figure in the councils of this
period. Now as these charges are the foundation of
the allegation, made by modern Protestant and secular
historians and controversialists, that the clergy were
morally corrupt and depraved at this time, I must ask
your indulgence in speaking of them at greater length
than seems proportionate to the scale of these lectures.
I think I have shown you evidences of spiritual vitality
in the national Churches when the Papacy itself was
under a cloud, and that that vitality infused new life
into the see of Rome. Now the real religious earnest
ness of the priests and people, as well as of the rulers
of the nations, while it is consistent with a great deal of
superstition, with a great deal of moral inconsistency
and instability, is not consistent with conscious, wilful,
persistent immorality on the part of the spiritual guides
of the nation and the people. On the other hand, the
charge of moral corruption made by the reformer or
revolutionist is apt to be colored by his prejudices, and
is viewed from his stand-point. We need, therefore, to
ask, as I said, what the terms used actually mean, and
what are the facts which they represent.
I assert then, that the modern writer who makes this
charge against the clergy of this age, though he may

258 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
quote his authorities with exactness, though he will find
it in the contemporary documents repeated again and
again, may be entirely mistaken in understanding it.
For what is the fact ? Those who were engaged in
this crusade of the Papacy against the national Churches
and the clergy, simply took the monastic view of cleri
cal marriage, and branded the married clergymen —
would brand those of us who to-day are living in the
holy estate of matrimony — with the opprobrious epithet
of concubinary priests. I am aware that it is supposed
to have been the law of the Church, throughout the
West, as it was not in the Greek Church, that the clergy
should not marry; but as a matter of fact, in this age
public opinion held these canons, if there were any
such, in abeyance, and accepted clerical marriage as a
general and lawful fact, where the clergy were not
monks. The public opinion on this matter cannot be
better illustrated than by the story, as the good monk
Ordericus Vitalis tells it, of the treatment of the canons
of Rouen Cathedral by their bishop, after the Council
of Rheims in 11 19, and his evident sympathy, though
he was a monk, with the married clergy. The arch
bishop, provoked at the reception which the decree of
separation met with, sent in his retainers to drive the
clergy out of the Cathedral, and I want to read you a
sentence or two from Ordericus' narrative of the affair :
" Then Hugh of Longueville and Ansquetil of Cropus,
and some other ecclesiastics of advanced age and great
piety happened to be in the Church [while the tumult

From Constantine to the Reformation. 259
was going on], conversing together on confession and
other profitable subjects, or reciting, as was their duty,
the service of the hours to the praise of God. The
archbishop's domestics were mad enough to fall on
these priests, and treated them shamefully, and so out
rageously that they hardly restrained themselves from
taking their lives, though they asked for mercy on their
bended knees. These old priests, being at length dis
missed, made their escape from the city as soon as they
could, together with their friends who had before fled,
without stopping to receive the bishop's license and
benediction. They carried the sorrowful tidings to
their parishioners and" — Ordericus says "concubines,"
I take the liberty to read wives — " and to prove the
truth of these reports exhibited the wounds and livid
bruises on their persons. The archdeacons and canons
and all quiet citizens were afflicted at this cruel
onslaught, and compassionated with the servants of
God, who had suffered such unheard of insults,"* etc.
It is the tone of this passage, remembering that it was
written by a monk, that I think remarkable. It is
evident that neither he, nor the archdeacons, nor the
citizens, nor the parishioners, thought the clergy who
were thus shamefully treated to be the immoral, licen
tious men, that the readers of Gregory's decrees or
Peter Damiani's diatribes would infer, if they took them
literally. Take Robertson's account of the married
?Ordericus Vitalis, IV., 29. Bohn's Ed.

260 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
clergy of Milan,* whose excellence is vouched for in a
proverb of the time, and of their persecution by Lan-
dulph, Ariald, Herlembald and the others, as the
evidence of the spirit of these charges and of those who
made them ; and again, consider Lanfranc's refusal to
promulgate Gregory's decree of 1076 against the English
parish priests, and other facts of this character ; t and
the conclusion is that the great bulk of the clergy were
not amenable to the charge as it is generally under
stood. Why then were Gregory and his successors so deter
mined to make the rule of celibacy for the clergy
universal ? Not merely because they viewed the
relation of the sexes from the purely monastic stand
point. Hildebrand was not a fanatical reformer of the
school of Peter Damiani, though he used Peter as his
tool, and though the monastic orders, with their repu
tation for sanctity and their immense influence, were
his great reliance in the war upon clerical marriage.
The reason was, that the married clergy as a class
were the most interested in preserving the relation of
the Church to the nation as a national Church. Pro
fessor (now Bishop) Stubbs, in his little work on the
early Plantagenets, points out that there were in the
Middle Ages, as in other times, three classes of the
clergy : those whom the kings employed in the busi-
* Robertson's Church History, B. V., Ch. I., Vol. II., p. 599 .octavo ed.
t See the long note in Gieseler, Div. III., Ch. II., Sec. 65, note 4. Vol.
II. of Harper's Edition, p. 395.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 261
ness of the State ; those who were above all things
Churchmen, among whom would be found at this time,
the staunchest adherents of the see of Rome ; and those
who were real saints, like Anselm. Of the first class,
he speaks thus: "The kings," he says, "had taken
prelates to be their ministers, and had promoted their
ministers to be prelates. Bishop Roger, of Salisbury,*
[for example] was not only a powerful ecclesiastic, but
the royal justiciar, the head of all the courts, and the
treasurer of all the money of the king. Under him
was a set of clerks, who would set the fashion for one
school of the clergy, secular in mind and aim and
manners ; often married men, so far as their right to
marry can be accounted valid, canons of cathedrals,
where they provided for their children and made
estates for themselves ; worthy men, most of them, the
predecessors of the clerical magistrates of this day, far
greater in quarter sessions and county meetings than
in convocation and missionary work."t Now these
may not have been the highest type of clergy — I am
not concerned to argue that they were ; but I do deny
that they were the immoral, irreligious men, which
the popular Protestant reading of this period of history
assumes them to be. In a Church organized as the
"one body" of which St. Paul speaks, in which "the
eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee,
nor again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you,"

* In the reign of King Stephen, about 1 140.
\ Stubbs, Early Plantagenets, p. 64.

262 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
these men were useful and valuable members ; and it is
an illustration of the way in which an abnormal situa
tion may work good under peculiar circumstances, that
the national life was assisted in its resistance to the
Papal usurpations by a class of clergy like these, whose
usefulness and merit is not to be measured by the
purely ecclesiastical standard.
From the time of Charlemagne, when the clergy
were almost the only persons to whom the use of the
pen was easy, it had been the custom to employ the
king's chaplains and the clerks of his household in
those offices of the government which required accounts
and records to be kept, and laws enrolled and tran
scribed. These clerks, it is to be remembered, though
they were thus employed in secular business, were kept
to their clerical character by the rule of their order
requiring them to say their office daily, and to attend
daily the services of the Church. Now it was natural,
when an able and trusty man had earned his promotion
by fidelity and ability in this service, and was allowed
to retire from it, or was seen to be worthy of a higher
place, that he should be given an ecclesiastical prefer
ment more suitable to his clerical calling ; and there
was this advantage in it, that having been occupied
with the laws of the realm and the affairs of the gov
ernment, he would take with him into his new station,
the results of that training in the national laws, tradi
tions and customs, which made him loyal to the
national life. The advantage would be the same as

From Constantine to the Reformation. 263
when, at the present day, a man who has been bred to
the law, feels himself called upon to take Holy Orders ;
his legal training is a help, not only to himself, but to
the diocese of which he is a member. In this way there
was raised up in the Church a national party which was,
by habit, by inclination, and by education, able to sus
tain the national side in the disputes with the Papacy
when they arose. Little as they might be accounted
of by the stricter Churchmen of the day, from their
more secular habits of life, they were of great use to
the nation and the national Church ; and therefore it
was that Hildebrand tried to crush them out by his
double charge against them of simony and concubinage.
And even if the married clergyman had not been thus
closely connected with the court, there was the same
motive for putting him down. Lord Bacon somewhere
remarks that " he who hath a wife and children hath
given hostages unto fortune." The man who has a
family is interested, not only in his own material wel
fare, and in the support of his family, but in the good
order of society, in the well-being of his country, in all
those interests which secure stability for the future, as
well as peace in the present. He desires that his
children shall live after him, and that they shall enjoy
such prosperity as may come to them, in the order of
Divine Providence, through the laws of society pre
serving to them the material results of their energy,
intelligence and industry. He endeavors to take
security for their welfare by such provision as he him-

264 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
self can make for them ; and with this in view, if he be
a wise and thoughtful man, he acts in the political
sphere with a wise conservatism, endeavoring to keep
the course of affairs in its natural channel ; he is
patriotic by instinct and forethought both ; he is
devoted to his country, because it is the defender and
safeguard of his hearth and home. Now this was
precisely what Hildebrand did not want the priest of
the Church to be. He desired to break all these ties
of family and country which would interfere with an
absolute devotion to the Papacy. The priest must
have no secular interests but those of the Church ; he
must have no associations but those of his own order ;
the clergy must be a body apart from all sympathies,
affections, duties, except those which appertained to
their profession ; they must be united in solid phalanx
with each other, and separate from all other ties what
soever. The offence was that the Churches of the
nations were national Churches, and they must be de
nationalized, if they were to be subjected to the Papacy,
and instruments in its hands to enforce its decrees.
The second object of Gregory's policy, therefore, was
to withdraw the estates and property of the Church
from all obligations to the secular government. The
charge of simony went hand in hand with the charge
of licentiousness, and with the same motive. It was
intended to weaken the national Church by involving
its rulers in the guilt of an imputed sin, to weaken the
national government by breaking the allegiance of the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 265

clerical subject to his sovereign, and to reduce both
Church and State to subjection to the Bishop of Rome.
Simony is the sin of endeavoring to purchase the gifts
of the Holy Spirit for material considerations. That is
its technical meaning. But the imputation of the guilt
of this sin at this time by the Papal revolutionists, and
its subsequent passing into the contest of investitures,
is not of itself sufficient evidence that the national
Churches of Europe were tainted with it to the extent
that the contemporary documents, if not duly con
sidered, would imply. Here again I say, as I said about
clerical marriage, the modern Protestant writer may
quote his authorities correctly, and yet be mistaken.
Many considerations must be taken into account to
have an appreciative sense of the mission and work of
the Mediaeval Churches and of their faithfulness to their
trust. If any prelate were guilty of simony in the real
sense, one would think it was Gregory VI., and yet
with ostentatious indifference to the charge in this case,
Hildebrand, by assuming the title of Gregory VII.,
asserted his legitimacy, as well as proclaimed his hos
tility to the Emperor by whom he had been deposed.
Undoubtedly there was corrupt bargaining for the
emoluments of sacerdotal office at this period, and before
as well as after ; but the scope of the charge, as made
by the Hildebrandines included more than this, and
mixed up with what was corrupt, that which was right
and lawful and necessary in those times. The prelates
of the Church were temporal rulers over their estates,

266 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

as well as spiritual shepherds of the flock ; they had
come into this responsibility, as I have shown, through
the natural changes in society ; they stood in this
respect on the same footing with the secular nobles.
To strengthen the central authority, and to preserve
order, it was the policy as well as the piety of the
Emperors, to balance the power of the military nobles
by interposing among them the ecclesiastical princi
palities, " to break the impulse of aggressive warfare,
to serve as models of good order, and to maintain a
direct hold in the imperial hands on territories which
could not become hereditary in a succession of priests."*
There is no doubt whatever that the people of the eccle
siastical lordships were at this time better governed
and more mercifully dealt with than the inhabitants of
the lay fiefs ; and therefore, however foreign to our
usage under changed conditions, may be this union of
sacred and secular authority, it was at that time to the
great advantage of all concerned. But this being so, it
was of the greatest importance, not only to the Emperor
but to the Empire, not only to the King but to the
Kingdom, that the administrator of this vast trust,
spiritual as well as temporal, should be a man who was
loyal to the supreme temporal authority, and one upon
whom it could rely as wise in counsel, energetic in
action, and well versed in the administration of affairs.
In his temporal character, therefore, as lord of the
*Stubbs, Early Plantagenets, p. 7.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 267
episcopal or abbatial domains, the bishop or abbot was
a feudatory of the Empire or Kingdom, and as such must
do homage for his fief, must promise loyalty to his su
perior, must pledge the customary aids which are now
provided for by universal taxation. His obligation of
loyalty depending upon the oath of allegiance, without
which he was not the " man " of his lord — his homage
being necessary to bind him to the obligation — the
Emperor or King must require that homage and oath of
allegiance ; and he must also exercise that right of
investiture by which his authority over the fief and its
holder was witnessed and kept valid. And all this
being so, the right of nomination to such a fief, the
right of choice to whom so great a trust was to be
committed, would naturally be felt to be the royal or
imperial prerogative. The Emperor or King, therefore,
acquired in this way the nomination of the bishops and
great abbots, and although, as we have seen, in earlier
times they bestowed the fiefs sometimes upon laymen
who performed the spiritual duties by proxy, yet at the
time we are speaking of, that was a thing of the
past, and ecclesiastics who had their confidence were
appointed. Now it was to be said with truth, that the
sovereign was interested to appoint good men and able
men, rather than bad or weak men, to high ecclesiasti
cal office, and that the appointing power was safer in
his hands than in any other,* for the reason that the

?After the right of election had been secured to the Chapters by the
Concordat of Worms " Frederick Barbarossa had probably good reason

268 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

appointment of a bishop or great abbot was an affair of
State ; it would not be made without advice ; the King's
counsellors would have a part in the decision ; it would
be pondered and considered, and the effort would be to
make a wise and creditable choice.*
for declaring in a well-known speech that the bishops appointed by the
imperial power had been better than those the clergy chose for them
selves." — Robertson, III., 218.
*Take the following example from Maitland, Dark Ages,-p- 128 sq.
The see of Paderborn became vacant in 1009. Nine years before, the
city, monastery and cathedral had been destroyed by fire, and the see
was reduced to such wretched poverty, that it was difficult to know
how to fill the vacancy. "The Emperor, having, however, convened
such bishops and princes as attended him at Geslar, consulted with them
as to the appointment of a bishop wh.) should be most suited to the cir
cumstances of time and place. After long deliberation, and canvassing
the merits of a good many persons, all agreed that Meinwerc was the
fittest man. * * * The Emperor (faventibus et congratulantibus
omnibus) sent for the chaplain; and, when he came, smiling with his
usual kindness, he held out a glove, and said — 'Take this.' Mein
werc, who can hardly be supposed to have been ignorant of what was
going on, and who understood the nature of the symbol, inquired what
he was to take. 'The see of Paderborn,' replied the Emperor. The
chaplain, with all the freedom of a kinsman and old schoolfellow, asked
his royal master how he could suppose that he wished for such a bishopric,
when he had property enough of his own to endow a better. The Em
peror, with equal frankness, replied that that was just the very thing he
was thinking of, that his reason for selecting him was that he might take
pity on that desolate Church, and help it in its need. ' Well then,'
said Meinwerc heartily, ' I will take it on these terms.' * * * *
' Being therefore,' says his biographer, ' raised to the episcopal office, he
constantly watched over the flock committed to him; and fearing lest he
should incur the reproach of the slothful servant, who hid his lord's
money in a napkin, he did nothing remissly. * * * ' He immediate
ly made over his hereditary property to the see; and on the third day
after his arrival he pulled down the mean beginnings of a cathedral,
which his predecessors had built up, and erected one at great expense and
with singular magnificence. His personal attention to the work, and his

From Constantine to the Reformation. 269

At the same time there was this difficulty, that the
wretched fiscal system of the Middle Ages left the
sovereign always without adequate means to meet the
expenditure necessary for the royal state and the needs
of the kingdom ; and therefore there was the tempta
tion to make terms with the nominee for as large a
share of the revenues of the ecclesiastical domain as
could be reserved by the crown. I do not understand
the royal finance of this period, but it is plain that the
sovereign, considering his needs, was always poor;
every fief granted was so much taken away from the
royal domain, which therefore constantly suffered di
lapidation, while the estates of the Church suffered
none ; the prince, therefore, must make the ecclesiasti
cal domain assist in his relief, which was for the public
and national service. There was, then, occasion for
the charge of simony, as made by the Hildebrandine
party, and sufficient plausibility in it to make the con
test of investitures a bitter one. But Gregory and his
successors not only mixed up these two things which
are distinct, but they struck a blow at the very life of
the nations. By denying the right of the sovereign to
require homage and to grant investiture of the tempo
ralities on the oath of allegiance, subjecting the eccle
siastic thereby to the performance of his duties to the

kindness to the workmen, made the building go on rapidly; and he did
not fail to call upon the Emperor, who frequently came to Paderborn,
and took great interest in its proceedings, for his full share of the
expense."

2 70 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
State, they would have destroyed one-half the effec
tive force of the nation, because the release of the lord
implied the release also of his vassals. But that
was not all. Had the demand been complied with, the
Pope would have become the feudal superior of the
denationalized clergy ; the dues and service of which
the State had been deprived would have been claimed
by him ; and the danger of an ecclesiastical crusade
as against an insubordinate sovereign would have been
very real. The sovereign, therefore, could not abandon
this right, except upon the terms agreed upon by Pas
chal II. and Henry V., that the clergy should renounce
all their temporal possessions; an agreement which the
clergy, as the party to be despoiled, naturally refused
to ratify. The contest lasted for fifty years, and was
finally settled by the Concordat of Worms, between
Calixtus II. and Henry V. (A.D. 1122); the substantial
victory remaining with the Emperor, who yielded the
use of the pastoral ring and staff as symbols of investi
ture, but retained the right itself, and received the
homage of the bishop-elect, and held him to the per
formance of his duties to the Empire as well as to the
Church. In endeavoring to secure the universal celibacy of the
clergy, and their freedom from the service of the State,
it might appear that the Papal party were actuated by
the high moral principle which demanded a stricter
and more severe life on the part of the ecclesiastical
body. As a matter of fact, the clergy, and the Popes

From Constantine to the Reformation. 271
themselves were more engaged in secular matters than
before. It could not be otherwise, when the third ob
ject on the Hildebrandine programme was the sub
jection of the temporal government itself to the Papacy
— the reduction of the Empire or Kingdom itself to the
condition of a fief held by the Holy See. That might
seem to the zealous Churchmen to be also for the
interest of religion and morality; but it was not the
divine order — in which the Church and the State have
each in its sphere co-ordinate authority, received
directly from God ; and we shall see in the next lecture
how the national spirit was roused to prevent it. You
remember Gregory's demand of William the Conqueror
that he should do fealty for his new Kingdom of Eng
land, and William's stern reply : " I refused to do
fealty, nor will I do it, because neither have I promised
it, nor have my predecessors done it to yours." William
was as great and strong a man as Gregory VII., and
Gregory was afraid of him, and let him take his own
way. But if a sovereign were in difficulties the Papacy
immediately became aggressive. The doctrine was
now advanced that the excommunication of a sovereign
by the Pope absolved all his subjects from their alle
giance — or that it authorized the Pope to declare them
absolved from their allegiance. The excommunicated
sovereign was to be shunned by all his vassals, all his
retainers, all his servants. They who remained faith
ful to him were held to be involved in his guilt and
liable to the same sentence. If he were contumacious,

272 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
it was the duty of his vassals to make war upon him, to
dethrone him, to aid and abet his enemies.* In other
words, the instrument on which the Pope relied to co
erce his refractory son was treason and rebellion. The
effect of this doctrine was to make rebellion profitable
if it succeeded, and without harm to the rebel if it failed.
Now in the feudal period, when the chief serious occu
pation of the nobles and their retainers was war — when
they were purely a military aristocracy, who, in default
of a patriotic war, carried on private feuds with each
other, and were incited thereto by the hope of plunder,
as well as by the desire for revenge — to add another to
the motives for the appeal to arms was, in my poor opin
ion, one of the greatest political crimes that a wise and
thoughtful man could commit. When parties took
sides in such a quarrel as that between Gregory VII.
and Henry IV., the effect of this doctrine must be —
was intended to be — to expose the dominions of the
king and his defenceless people to the miseries of
civil war, aggravated by the impunity guaranteed to
the rebellious party by the Pope. For if the rebellious
party, fighting under the license of the Pope, were suc
cessful, the plunder of the loyal nobles and of the king
would be their reward ; whereas, if the king were vic
torious, the penalties of treason could not be enacted,

* Notice that all this is the extension of the ideas involved in the move
ment of the " Truce of God "of which I have spoken above. When
thus applied to the sovereign it was pernicious in the extreme, because it
destroyed the autonomy of the nation.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 273
because the Papal aegis would be held over them, and
their pardon be insisted upon as the condition of recon
ciliation with the Church. The turbulent nobles who
chafed under the restraints of the royal authority would
be eager to rebel, if they could thus do it with safety ;
and thus the Papacy, instead of being the conservator
of public order, as is claimed for it by its advocates,
was, it seems to me, the one great obstacle to the
progress of Europe in the ages of its domination. Add
to this the stirring up of kingdom against kingdom,
and the invention of the interdict to punish a people
who would not rebel, and the mischief done by the
Papacy is incalculable, and is not to be offset by the
erection of the Papal curia as a tribunal of last
resort. In one respect the Papacy was an advantage to
Western Christendom in that transition period when
the nations were awaking to new life. It preserved
the idea of the unity of the Church, as greater than
the nation ; and it operated to some extent to arrest
the secularization of the clerical body. It gave the
greater men larger ideas and wider interests ; it as
sisted in the organization of the commonwealth of
nations. But further than that it cannot be said that
the programme of Gregory VII. succeeded. The Popes
succeeded in getting it accepted as canon law that the
clergy should not marry; but their own lawyers in
vented evasions, and that which, but for such laws and
evasions, would have been the honorable estate which
18

2 74 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
it is among us, became the scandal of the later Middle
Ages. They succeeded in modifying the relation of
the ecclesiastics to the temporal power, and in attach
ing to the Roman see a type of Churchmen like Thomas
a Becket, but not of clear-sighted, honest men like
Lanfranc. They did not succeed in denationalizing
the clerical order, although they paralyzed the impulse
towards internal reform in the national Churches, by
requiring all things to be referred to Rome for con
firmation. They succeeded in stirring up rebellions
here and there, as against Henry II. and Frederick II.
of Germany, or in taking advantage of the national
discontent at misrule, as in the case of King John of
England ; but they could not dispose of thrones and
sceptres at their will. Rudolph of Suabia was not
successful in holding the Empire against Henry, nor
Otho of Saxony against Frederick, and there were more
anti-popes than rival Kings or Emperors.* No Em
peror after Henry IV. was dethroned because of their
anathemas; the gradual weakening of the imperial
power was due to political causes internal to Germany,
and to the incompatibility of Germany and Italy. As
mediators between the sovereigns of different nations
they exerted an influence sometimes beneficial ; and
sometimes their influence was hurtful by stirring up
war for their own purposes ; but they did not succeed
in establishing an effective control or suzerainty over

*Between Leo IX. and Innocent III., twelve anti-popes were set up,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 275
any but the smaller and insignificant kingdoms.
They could avail themselves of the difficulties or false
steps of a great ruler like Frederick Barbarossa, or
Henry Plantagenet, to gain an apparent triumph ; but
they could not obtain any real advantage over them.
In extending their authority over the Western Church,
while they made themselves the ultimate court of
appeal in all causes, they depraved the canon law by
inserting in it the False Decretals, and they were very
generally charged with giving judgment in favor of the
longest purse. The great movements of the Crusades,
in which their influence is most apparent, were gigantic
failures as regards the end sought to be attained. The
first only was successful ; while the ultimate results
were destructive of the political influence of the Papacy.
The conquest of Constantinople by the soldiers of the
Third Crusade, and the establishment of the Latin
Empire of the East, did not reduce the Greeks to the
Papal obedience ; and the dominion of the Latins was
short-lived. There was, in the traditions and feelings
of rulers and people in the various nations and national
Churches, an effective barrier against the Hildebrandine
assumptions which the Popes were never able to sur
mount. When Frederick Barbarossa called in the
Italian lawyers to declare his rights as Emperor ac
cording to the Code of Justinian ; when the English
barons, under the leadership of their patriotic arch
bishop Stephen Langton, affirmed the validity .of
Magna Charta against Innocent III. as well as against

276 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
King John; when Philip Augustus refused to do hom
age for certain lands held of the Church, on the ground
that the King must not do homage to any one; and
when his grandson, the sainted Louis IX., issued his
Pragmatic Sanction as the bulwark of the liberties of
the Gallican Church, the death-knell of the Papal
theory of Gregory VII. was sounded. The Papacy as
formulated by that theory does not exist, and never has
existed. The Popes hold to it, and make the extrav
agant claims based upon it; but the Catholic Church
has never accepted it; and the nations and national
Churches of "the Roman obedience" have been obedi
ent with extensive reservations.
Even where the Popes seemed to be most successful,
an analysis of the political situation shows that their
success was due, less to the inherent strength of the
Papacy, than to the separate designs and objects of
those who co-operated with them. Next to the penance
of Henry IV. at Canossa, the most striking demon
stration of the Papal supremacy in the Middle Ages
was the reconciliation of Frederick Barbarossa with
Alexander III. at Venice, on the 24th of July, 1177.
The great Emperor prostrated himself at the feet of
the Pope, and paid him the respect of holding his
stirrup and bridle as he mounted his palfrey. By thus
submitting himself, Frederick brought to an end a
strife of more than twenty years. But the Treaty of
Venice, though it brought peace, settled nothing, so
far as the Pope was concerned, except the acknowl-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 277
edgment of his title as Pope, and the renunciation of
the anti-pope. The advantages gained were gained by
the Italian cities, which had been the allies of the Pope,
not for his sake, but to secure their own liberties.
These cities, while Italy was neglected by preceding
Emperors, had become prosperous by industry and
commerce, and had learned in the school of necessity
to defend themselves against the disorderly nobles of
their vicinity, as well as against barbarian enemies ;
they had therefore formed themselves into republics on
the model of the ancient commonwealths of classical
antiquity. Italian republicanism, however, was not the
enlightened and expansive love of country which ani
mates the patriotic citizen of the United States; it
confined its love of liberty within the walls of its own
city, and was quite willing to subjugate and oppress its
neighbors. The country, meantime, was in the hands
of the old families as nobles and proprietors, and these
were not on good terms with the cities, whose liberties
they grudged, and whose tradesmen they despised.
When Frederick, therefore, made his first appearance
as Emperor in Italy, and summoned his vassals to the
Imperial Diet on the plains of Roncaglia, he was met
with complaints of some of the smaller towns against
the larger, especially against Milan, and he proceeded
to do justice upon the offenders. Frederick Barbarossa
was above all things a just man. He was .always ready
to concede to every one his undoubted rights; but he
was also determined to make his own respected. He

2 78 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
was strenuous in asserting that he held the Imperial
Crown of God alone; he knew very well that the Papal
claims were novelties and encroachments upon his
prerogative; the Empire, as a divine trust committed
to him was the " Holy Roman Empire," and its dignity
and power must suffer no diminution in his hands. He
was resolute, therefore, to resume those imperial rights
which some of his predecessors had weakly suffered to
fall into abeyance. At the same time he had a reverent
respect for all law enacted by the recognized authority
in Church or State, and he was willing that his authority
should be so ascertained; but he would submit to no
usurpation, and tolerate no rebellion. When he was in
Germany, he governed according to the known customs
and laws of the German Kingdom; when he went to
Italy, he summoned the Italian lawyers to declare what
were the imperial rights in Italy, and what were the
legally recognized rights and franchises of the Italian
cities. The lawyers expounded to him the Code of
Justinian, and informed him that by the civil law his
power as Emperor was autocratic; and the investigation
into the status of the cities showed him that they had
assumed to exercise certain " regalia " without authority.
Frederick, therefore, was justified in proceeding against
the offenders; but his conception of his prerogative was
totally opposed, not only to the Papal theory of Hilde
brand, but to the nascent republicanism and indepen
dent feeling of the cities. A conflict, therefore, was
inevitable. It was embittered, not only by the Em-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 2 79
peror's persuasion that he was dealing with rebels, but
by the jealousy of the Italian cities against each other,
which caused them to take sides as imperialists and
anti-imperialists or, in other words as Ghibelline and
Guelph ; and by the active intervention of the Pope,
who was determined by every means in his power to
destroy the imperial authority in Italy. The war lasted
for twenty years ; Frederick set up an anti-pope, and
destroyed city after city ; but after the final defeat of
his army at Legnano, he became convinced that his
position was untenable, and like the great and magnan
imous man he was, he made a just and honorable peace,
rendering to the Pope the outward respect which custom
sanctioned as due to the spiritual head of the Church,
and in 1183, by the Treaty of Constance, securing to the
cities of Lombardy such franchises and privileges as
they had fairly won — a treaty which he and his descend
ants faithfully observed. Although defeated, Fred
erick's dignity suffered no diminution, and when in
1 184 he made his last expedition into Italy to marry his
son Henry to Constance, the heiress of Sicily, the
Lombard cities welcomed him enthusiastically, and
vied with one another in doing him honor.
The other great triumph of the Papacy, the destruc
tion of the House of Hohenstauffen— the long war with
Frederick the Second, and the calling in of Charles of
Anjou to wrest the Kingdom of Sicily from Manfred
and Conradin— though it is made use of by historians
of a certain class, to point the moral of the vanity of

280 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
earthly greatness in conflict with the spiritual power,
was in reality the beginning of the downfall of the
Papacy itself. The indignation of Europe was aroused
at the treatment of an able and enlightened ruler as
Frederick was, by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. — at
the implacable hatred displayed by them, and their
manifest determination that under no circumstances
should Frederick be justified in what he did, or what he
left undone. Its patience was exhausted at the shame
less demands of money to carry on the crusade against
him ; and the vile traffic in sacred things to obtain the
money. And the success of Charles of Anjou was the
means of making the Papacy, in the person of Martin
IV., the obsequious servant of that usurper, and of pre
paring the way for that influence of France in the sacred
college, which resulted in the transfer of the Papacy
to Avignon, and the so-called " Babylonish Captivity "
of the Popes. But I cannot enlarge upon that in this
lecture ; I shall have something to say upon it in the
next ; and in the meantime any history of this period
will give you the facts.
A remark to be made in passing is, that the struggle
between Pope and Emperor for influence in Italy, had
one result in that country which was peculiar to it. I
shall have occasion in the next lecture to point out that
the rise of the people to political influence, and their
interest in the integrity and peace of the nation made
them espouse the cause of King against Pope, and so
curtailed the political power of the Papacy. In Italy it

From Constantine to the Reformation. 281
was different. The fact that the Italian cities were
contending against a foreign sovereign in the person of
Barbarossa, and that this foreign sovereign was a feudal
chief in Germany, attended by his aristocracy, and
served by Italian nobles, and that the Popes sustained
the cities in their struggle against the Emperor, made,
on the whole, the conflict of Guelph against Ghibelline,
a conflict of the democracy against the aristocracy.
There were many exceptions to this. The jealousy
and hostility of city against city made one city Ghibel
line because another city was Guelph ; and then the
spirit of faction within the city, made one party Guelph
because the other party was Ghibelline, and the nobles
in like manner took their sides ; but nevertheless, on
the whole, as I said, at this time, the more democratic
party was Guelph, and the more aristocratic party was
Ghibelline. Later it was not so ; as Italy sunk under
the effects of the Papal policy into a chaotic state, and
all national aspirations died out, the parties perpetuated
themselves as personal animosities, and had no religious
or political meaning. But this was the condition at
this time. And in this, Italy was alone. In the other
countries the people sided with their kings. Do not
make the mistake, therefore, of supposing that the
strength of the Papacy lay in its espousing the cause of
the people, for it never did that with any sincerity.
Even in Gregory VII.'s time, the cities of Germany
sided with Henry IV.

282 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

But even in Italy, there was one city in which neither
the democratic nor the aristocratic element could be
depended upon for loyalty to the Popes, and that was
their own city of Rome. Most remarkable, in view of
their pretensions at this time, was the relation of the
Popes to that city whence they took their title, to that
see whence they were supposed to derive their sanctity,
and to those people who were above all others their
especial charge. I have been at the pains to make from
Robertson and others a synopsis of their frequent ex
pulsions from Rome, and print it here for those who
may wish to see it. Beginning with Gregory VII.: he
retired from Rome under the hatred aroused against
him because of the devastation of the city by Robert
Guiscard, whom he called in to resist Henry IV., and
died at Salerno, with words upon his lips " which have
been interpreted as a reproach against Providence, but
which may perhaps rather imply a claim to the beati
tude of the persecuted : ' I have loved righteousness
and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile.' " His
successor, Victor III., was conducted to Rome by a
Norman force, but he soon left it, and died at Monte
Casino. Urban II., elected in 1088, did not obtain un
disputed possession of Rome until eleven years after,
and in that year he died. His successor, Paschal II.,
having left the city on the approach of Henry V. of
Germany, in 11 17, the citizens refused to permit his
return after Henry's departure, and he was able to get
possession only of the castle of St. Angelo, where he

From Constantine to the Refoi'mation. 283

died. He was succeeded by Gelasius II., who, in his
short pontificate of one year, was twice brutally
assaulted by one of the nobles of his flock, and twice
driven out of the city. He died in the abbey of Clugny.
Calixtus II., who came next, was elected at Clugny,
and consecrated at Vienne ; he remained in France for
two years, and then obtained possession of Rome,
where he exerted himself vigorously to put down law
lessness. On his death Theobald was elected, but was
frightened out of the Papal chair by Robert Frangipani,
a powerful noble, who made Honorius II. Pope. When
he died, the rival factions set up Anacletus II. and
Innocent II. Innocent is reckoned the legitimate Pope,
but Anacletus held the city of Rome, and Innocent
went to France. He was brought home by the
Emperor Lothair, but was expelled on his departure,
and restored again in 11 37. Two years after this he
was taken prisoner by Roger of Sicily, who compelled
him to acknowledge his title of king, which had been
given him by the anti-pope. Meantime the Romans,
under the influence of Arnold of Brescia, renounced
their allegiance to him, and set up a republic. Celestine
II., his successor, was a friend of Arnold, and reigned
peaceably the six months of his pontificate. The
next Pope, Lucius II., attempting to put down the
republic by force, was killed by the mob.* Eugenius
* ' ' To have slain a Pope afflicted the Romans with no remorse. The
Papal party felt no shame at the unseemly death of a Pope who had
fallen in actual war for the defence of his temporal power ; republican
Rome felt no compunction at the fall of her enemy." — Milman, IV., 243.

284 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

III. followed ; he was a monk of Clairvaux and a friend
of St. Bernard ; he surprised every one by his capacity
after being made Pope ; but he could not get along
with the Romans. He was consecrated at Farfa, about
twenty miles north of Rome. The Romans under
Arnold of Brescia " proceeded to reorganize their do
mestic policy on the basis of the total exclusion of the
Pope from all share in the civil government. * * *
This resolution was practically confirmed by the
plunder and demolition of the pontifical palaces, those
of the fugitive cardinals, the castellated dwellings of the
Papal nobili, and the obliteration of every vestige of
pontifical state and government."* Eugenius made
war upon the city, and was enabled to celebrate the
Christmas of 1145 within 'ts walls ; but the next April
he was compelled to leave, and retired beyond the
Alps, where he and St. Bernard organized the Second
Crusade. In 1 149 he returned under the protection of
the King of Sicily, but the Romans again expelled him.
They allowed him to come back in 11 53, and he died
in the city in July of that year. Anastasius IV. was
Pope for a year and five months, and then Adrian IV.
for four years. Under the protection of Frederick
Barbarossa, he put down the republic and hung Arnold
of Brescia ; but after crowning the Emperor he was
compelled to leave Rome, and died at Anagni. On
his death the Sicilian party in the Roman Church set
* Greenwood, Cathedra Petri, V., 44.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 285
up Alexander III. and the Imperialist, Victor IV.
Alexander is counted the Pope, Victor the anti-pope ;
each was consecrated out of Rome. Alexander resided
at Anagni till 1161, when he withdrew to France. He
came to Rome in December, 1 165, and was enthusias
tically received ; but was driven out by Barbarossa in
1 167, and did not return again until after his reconcili
ation with the Emperor at Venice. In 1179 he held a
great Council (Third of Lateran), and among other
things decreed that the election of Pope should rest
exclusively in the College of Cardinals. He then retired
from Rome, and died at Civita Castellana in 1185.
On the election of Lucius III. by the cardinals only,
under the constitution of Alexander, the Romans, in
dignant at being deprived of their share in the election,
rose against the Pope and expelled him, and he was
never able to obtain a secure footing in the city. Urban
III. succeeded him ; he seems never to have set foot in
Rome as Pope. The next was Gregory VIII. ; he
reigned only one month and twenty-one days, and did
not enter the city. Then came Clement III.; he made
a treaty with the Romans by which he consented to
deliver up the cities of Tusculum and Tibur to their
vengeance, as the price of their consent to receive him.
After him came Celestine III., and then Innocent III.,
who was able to hold the Romans in check.
Of the Popes who followed Innocent, Gregory IX.
was driven out by the Romans in Eastertide 1228,
because he had excommunicated the Emperor Fred-

2 86 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
erick II.; in two years his subjects invited him back, but
the year after he had to appeal to the Emperor for
assistance against them, which was refused, and he
retired from the city. In 1232 he returned, but was
again expelled in 1234, and was restored by Frederick
during an interval of peace between Emperor and Pope.
His successor Innocent IV. fled from Rome at the ap
proach of Frederick, and retired to Lyons in 1244 > ne
sought invitations to visit the Kingdoms of France,
England and Spain, but the sovereigns of these
countries declined the honor. On the death of Fred
erick he went to Italy, but showed no disposition to
return to Rome until the senator Brancaleone sternly
reminded him that he was bishop of that city, and re
quired his residence; he could not have been there
long, however, as he died at Naples the same year
(Dec. 7, 1254). The next Pope, Alexander IV., was
compelled by the Romans, who had again set up a
republic, to reside in their midst; but in 1257 they
drove him out, and he died at Viterbo in 1261. After
this, Viterbo became the ordinary residence of the
Popes, six of whom succeeded one another with great
rapidity — the cardinals adopting the policy of choosing
the oldest or most infirm of their number to be Pope,
to create the next vacancy the sooner. Nicholas III.
(1277) transferred the Papal residence back to Rome;
but Charles of Anjou's Pope, Martin IV, made his resi
dence at Orvieto. Nicholas IV. lived at Rieta, but
removed to Rome under the protection of the Colonna

From Constantine to the Reformation. 287
family. After him there was a vacancy of two years
and three months; then came Celestine V., who abdi
cated in a short time; and then Boniface VIII., with
whom the line of Hildebrandine Popes came to an end.
After him the Papacy went to Avignon.
This is certainly a startling exhibit for the time at
which the Papal power was at its height. It may at
least cause us to inquire whether the progress of
Europe, which was very great at this time, was much
affected by the Papal supremacy. The twelfth and
thirteenth centuries were times of a great awakening
of political and intellectual activity, of an advance in
the material, moral and social condition of Europe; and
that advance, being contemporary with the exaltation
of the Papacy, is plausibly set forth as due to that
exaltation, and made to redound to its credit. But it
is very easy to show, as I shall show in the next lecture,
that the awakening and advance were independent of
the Papacy ; and that the Papacy itself was an effect of
its earlier development, and a hindrance to its later.

VI.
NATIONALISM.

VI.
NATIONALISM.

It is the greatest fallacy in the world to call the
Church of Western Europe in the Middle Ages the
Roman Church, or the Romish Church, or even the
Roman Catholic Church. The writers of the Middle
Ages themselves accurately distinguish between the
Roman Church and the National Churches which were
in communion with it. The English Church, for ex
ample, is the English Church in Magna Charta, and in
the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire; while the
Roman Church in contemporary documents stands for
the local church of the city of Rome. The National
Churches, although in the period now under review, they
acknowledged the primacy or supremacy of the Roman
pontiff, did not acknowledge it in the same way that
the Churches of the Roman obedience do now, and
have done since the Council of Trent and the Creed of
Pope Pius IV. Still less did they draw their spiritual
vitality from that fountain. It suits the infidel or ultra-
Protestant historian to make the mistake of ignoring
these National Churches, and confounding them under
the one name, that he may discredit the Church idea,

292 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
and make it appear that the Church failed in "the Dark
Ages," notwithstanding our Saviour's promise that the
gates of hell shall not prevail against it ; and it suits
the Romish controversialist to foster this mistake,
because it enables him to claim for the Roman Church
the credit of all the good that belongs to this period —
of which there was a great deal. But it does not
become us of the American Catholic Church to fall into
the same error. The National Churches had their own
traditions and lived their own spiritual life; they held
the loyal adhesion of their people because they were
the National Churches; and they did not begin to lose
it until from the time of Innocent IV., and during the
Avignon period and the Great Schism that followed it,
curialism made them its prey. These Churches were
worthy of the loyalty and love that were so freely given
them, because (despite the superstitions and abuses
popularly attributed to this period) they were honestly
engaged in the endeavor to lead the people heavenward
through faith in Christ, and the knowledge of the truth.
The point I make is, that the intellectual, moral and
social advance of Europe in the eleventh, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries was due to the religious and civil
izing influence of the National Churches; that the Pa
pacy was at most only auxiliary to them in its better
period, and was distinctly oppressive and corrupting to
them in its worse and later period; that the evidences
of spiritual life are found in their spontaneous efforts;
that the great moral and spiritual movements of the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 293
period had their various centres in the National
Churches of Europe; and that we must study these
National Churches as well as the Papacy, if we would
know the real state of Christianity in the Middle Ages.
It was natural, of course, that the ecclesiastics of high
hierarchical principles, as well as some of the imagina
tive and enthusiastic saints, should throw themselves
into the Papal movement, so far as it promised to
make the hierarchy less worldly and more ascetic. But
this alliance with the Papacy, this subordination and
loyalty to it of good and holy men, does not prove or
imply that they found in it the springs of their spiritual
life. He would be greatly in error who should count
St. Anselm, the first of the Schoolmen, or St. Bernard,
the last of the Fathers, a Romanist of the Tridentine
type, or assume that the Rome of the eleventh or
twelfth century made them what they were. The
truth is that both St. Anselm and St. Bernard were
suspicious of the vast claims of the Papacy, and were
willing to see them curtailed because they were injuri
ous to the National Churches. It was the traditional
Christianity descending to their generations in the
national and local churches, which made these men
what they were.
Take St. Bernard for the example. I have in the last
lecture spoken of the influence of the great monastery
of Clugny in the period preceding the Hildebrandine,
and its connection with the reform of the Papacy. In
course of time, and in consequence of the genera]

294 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
revival, of which the Hildebrandine movement was an
effect rather than a cause, other orders of monks sprang
up under rules much more severe than that of Clugny,
the chief of which were the Carthusians and the Cister
cians. St. Bernard is the great glory of the Cistercian
order. No envy can, no calumny attempts to detract
from the bright example of that great saint. His aus
terities may have been uncalled for and unwise; his
advocacy of the Second Crusade led many brave men to
destruction without any compensating benefit to Chris
tendom; but when you get to the inner heart of the
man himself, you find it filled with the pure love of God
and of his fellows; you find a man whom no amount of
popularity could corrupt, who was sincere, faithful,
honest, Christian through and through, who was
learned in the best school of Christian thought — "the
last of the Fathers" they call him, because his method
was the patristic, and not that of the scholastics of the
next age. The wonderful personal magnetism of St.
Bernard, his infectious enthusiasm, his unbounded
influence over everyone who came within his reach,
his immense activity, his complete abnegation of self —
these were sanctified, under the rigid discipline of the
Cistercian order, by the grace of God's Holy Spirit in
the heart of the sincere seeker after righteousness, to
make him an illustrious example of that principle of the
Christian life enunciated by St. Paul : " I live, yet not
I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live

From Constantine to the Reformation. 295

in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who
loved me, and gave Himself for me."
Now St. Bernard was a zealous champion of Innocent
II. in his contest with the anti-pope Anacletus, and the
friend and monitor of Eugenius III., who had been one
of his monks at Clairvaux; but he was not a product of
Hildebrandine Romanism. He was one of those, of
whom there were many in the Middle Ages, who were
carefully brought up at home by a pious mother. You
remember the story of his entering Citeaux with thirty
followers whom he had won by his persuasiveness ;
among them all his brothers, except the youngest, who
remained at home with his aged father — both of these
joining him after a short time. As abbot of Clairvaux
he became, through no other influence than his exalted
piety, the oracle of Europe — more really pope than the
Pope himself. He gained the allegiance of France, of
England, and of Germany to Innocent II.; but when
Innocent visited him at Clairvaux, the Puritan simplici
ty and monastic rigor of the Cistercians were so uncon
genial to the Pope and his cardinals, that they had no
desire to tarry long with him. As the promoter of the
Second Crusade he carried away all Europe with his
enthusiasm, performing the "miracle" of winning Con
rad III., the Emperor of Germany, to take the cross.
He is not only the friend but the instructor of Eugenius
III., for whom he writes his treatise "On Consideration."
But closely as he is connected with the Holy See, he
stands up manfully for the rights of the National Church

296 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
and its bishops, and is not sparing of rebukes to the
Pope himself.
Thus, having occasion to write to Pope Innocent on
behalf of the Archbishop of Treves, he says: "I speak
to you with a great deal of freedom, because I have a
more than ordinary affection for you, which could not
be, should I use dissimulation. The Archbishop of
Treves' complaint is not his alone, but proceeds from
the sentiments of several others, and chiefly those that
love you best. They complain that justice is no more
to be found in the Church, that the keys thereof become
of no use, and the Episcopal authority is rendered
despicable by reason that the bishops have now no
more power to revenge the injuries done to God, nor to
punish the offences committed in their dioceses. The
fault of all which is laid upon you and the Court of
Rome. It is affirmed that you abolish what they have
well established, and that you have established what
they have abolished with reason. * * * What a
shame is this ! What occasion for laughter to the
enemies of the Church ! Friends find themselves con
founded, the faithful affronted, bishops become the sub
jects of scorn and contempt, and your authority much
lessened by the weakness of your decisions."* To certain
cardinals he writes in favor of an abbot whom he thinks
unjustly treated : " Formerly you have been accused of
domineering over the clergy and the consciences of all

'Ep. 178, Dupin, Cent. XII., p. 55.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 297
the world, contrary to the precept of the Apostle; and
now you add something to this presumption in showing
an inclination to dispose absolutely of all religious per
sons [i.e. monks]; insomuch that I know not what
remains for you to desire more, unless you would like
wise command over the angels."* Of the proceedings
of Cardinal Jordan, in the character of Papal legate,
he writes: "He has passed from nation to nation, and
from one kingdom to another people, everywhere leav
ing foul and horrible traces among us. He is said to
have everywhere committed disgraceful things; to have
carried off the spoils of churches, to" have promoted
pretty little boys to ecclesiastical honors wherever he
could ; and to have wished to do so where he could
not. Many have bought themselves off that he might
not come to them; those whom he could not visit he
taxed and squeezed by means of messengers. In
schools and courts and the places where roads meet,
he has made himself a by-word. Seculars and religious,
all speak ill of him; the poor, the monks and the clergy
complain of him."t In his treatise " On Consideration,"
written at the request of Pope Eugenius, he speaks with
like freedom: "He gives him to understand that he is
not set over others to domineer over them, but to be
their minister and watch over them. * * * That the
same person cannot well execute the civil government

*Ep. 231, lb., p. 58.
^Robertson, III., 216. Dupin, p. 62.

298 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
and the Papacy, and therefore he who grasps at both
ought justly to lose both. * * * You are not
supremely perfect by being supreme bishop, and take
notice that if you think yourself so, you are the worst of
men. * * * 'Tis to you that the keys of heaven have
been entrusted, and to whom the care of the flock has
been committed; but there are other doorkeepers of
heaven and other pastors besides you." [i.e., the bishops
of the Church.] It is evident that even as early as this
the new Papacy is felt to be hurtful to religion, since
St. Bernard is very severe upon appeals, exemptions,
and other interferences with the national Churches.
"Everybody appeals to your Holiness; it is a badge of
your primacy, yet, if you are wise, you will rather en
deavor to procure the welfare of the Church, than insist
upon the grandeur of your see. Men appeal to the Pope,
and would to God it were to a good end. Would to
God that those who oppress others would feel the effect
of protection granted to those who are oppressed. But
on the contrary, nothing is more common than for
the oppressors to have cause to rejoice, and for the
oppressed to have reason to mourn." As regards ex
emptions he says, "I have a mind to speak of the com
plaints and murmurings of the Churches, who cry con
tinually that they are torn to pieces and dismembered,
and that there are few or none but either feel this
damage or fear it. If you ask, wherefore ? it is because
the abbeys are wrested from the jurisdiction of their
bishops, the bishops from that of the archbishops, and

From Constantine to the Reformation. 299
the archbishops from that of the patriarchs or primates.
Does this consist with order ? Can this be any way
excused ? You may thereby indeed show the abso
luteness of your power, but it is to be feared you can at
the same time produce but little justice. You do thus
because you have the power to do it, but the question
will be only whether you ought to have done it. You
are set above others to preserve to every one his rank
and quality, and not to injure any one." He proves
afterwards that these exemptions are neither just nor
profitable; that they confound the economy of the
Church; that they occasion a great deal of trouble,
and raise a contempt as well of the laws and powers
established by God Almighty, as of those of the
Pope.* Now these are the utterances, not of a discontented
or rebellious son of the Church, not of the adherent of
an emperor or anti-pope, but of the greatest saint of
the mediaeval period; of one who was honestly devoted
to the Papacy as he understood it, and highest in the
confidence of the Popes. I do not quote these passages
to throw discredit upon the Popes of this period ; but
simply to prove what I said, that Bernard was not a
creature of the Papacy, but a genuine product (so far as
any man with a distinct individuality can be said to be
a product of his age and surroundings) of the Church of
France, and of the traditional Christianity of the period.

*Dupin, Cent. XII., p. 68, 69.

300 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

That he was its most illustrious product is not to be
denied; but where there was one Bernard there must
have been many good Christians who made no noise in
the world; and my contention is that the Church which
had such sons was a living Church, Papacy or no
Papacy. The fact is that all the great religious movements of
this period had their rise in the National Churches, in
dependently of, and antecedent to, or concurrently with
the Hildebrandine movement. Let me trace some of
them in outline :
i. — The intellectual revival, which is so marked in
the eleventh century and still more in the twelfth, and
which led to the immense activity of scholasticism in
the thirteenth, shows that the traditions of the age of
Charlemagne had not died out in the tenth century,
and that as soon as order began to be restored, the
Church endeavored first to raise the standard of cler
ical education, and then to educate the people. Not
only did Charlemagne require schools to be kept in the
cathedrals and monasteries, but a capitulary of his re
quired the bishop to call up his priests " by sections
and weeks," for instruction by himself or by well-
learned ministers, what they ought to do and to
preach.* During the troublous times that succeeded,
necessity compelled the acceptance of persons into the
sacred ministry who were slenderly furnished for their
*Thomassin De Beneficiis, Part I., B. III., t. vi., 4.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 301
office. But the bishops endeavored to improve them
by assembling them for conferences, by the diocesan
synods, by furnishing them with homilies and exhorta
tions to read to the people, and by requiring their
attendance at the cathedral schools.* In the eleventh
century these schools are in a flourishing condition,
both in the monasteries and in the cathedral cities.
The fact that we find theological controversies arising,
and heresy charged upon one and another scholar, such
as Berengar, Roscelin, and later that erratic and unfort
unate genius Abelard, shows a revived interest in
theological studies, and the beginning of a feeling for
philosophy. Lanfranc, who had been trained to the
civil law in Italy, but who became a monk at Bee, in
Normandy, and later abbot of Caen, whence he was
called by William the Conqueror to be archbishop of
Canterbury, made the little monastery of Bee, by his
teachings, a renowned seminary ; but he was surpassed
in fame by his successor St. Anselm, another Italian,
who also succeeded him in the archbishopric. Lanfranc
was born about the year 1005, and Anselm in 1033, and
their early training shows that there were good schools
in Italy at that time. Stimulated by these great
scholars the Normans established in England, between
the Conquest and the death of King John, five hundred
and fifty-three schools.t Anselm of Laon, and William

*Dupin, Century X., p. 68.
fTaine, English Literature, p. 61.

302 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
of Champeaux, master of the cathedral school of Paris,
each of whom had Abelard for his pupil, were great
teachers; it is from William of Champeaux that the
impulse started which made Paris an intellectual centre,
and gave rise to the university of that city, which re
ceived its charter from Philip Augustus in the year
1200.* In the twelfth century several universities were
established — that of Bologna, which was a celebrated
law-school in the time of Frederick Barbarossa ; that at
Oxford, where a professor of civil law is known to have
been appointed in 1149; those of Montpellier and Sa
lerno, which were celebrated medical schools. In the
thirteenth century others were added to them ; and the
learned professions opened out a career to those who
were disposed to study. It is of course the custom
now to sneer at the learning that was taught in these
universities ; but they were invaluable for those times,
and they were important factors in the progress of
Europe during the Middle Ages. But my point now is,
that all this was a movement of the national Churches,
and a proof of their activity, irrespective of the Papacy.
2. — Looking in another direction, we find the Church
of this period (and here again independently of the
Papacy, J endeavoring to make the power of religion felt
by all classes of men, and to adapt the divine order to
the necessities of the age. I spoke in the last lecture
of the effort to limit the right of private warfare by the

*Michelet, I., p. 254.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 303
Truce of God. That was a spontaneous effort of the
local Church ; it was taken up by Pope Urban II., when
he came into Auvergne to organize the First Crusade,
and made universal, so far as the canons of a council
could make it universal, at the Council of Clermont ;
and if it did not accomplish all that was desired, it marks
at least the effort of the Church to put a bridle upon
lawlessness.* But it is to be remarked here, that in
speaking of the lawlessness and turbulence of the
Middle Ages, it is scarcely just to measure them by the
legal standard of our own times. In the Middle Ages
there was not that access to the courts for the redress
of private wrongs, or for breaches of the public peace,
with which we are familiar. The law did not take to
itself, as it does with us, the monopoly of justice or of
vengeance. The lord was bound to protect his vassal
from injustice, and to do him justice ; but the vassal was
not bound to appeal to his lord, when he could do him
self justice, or what he deemed to be justice, upon the
offender ; and according to the feeling of the times, he
would be thought a coward who should put himself
under the protection of the law, when the means of
righting the wrong done to him were in his own hands.
That was the foundation of the right of private war,
* Peter de Marca, among other documents, gives a letter of Alexander
III., approving of what appears to be a kind of mutual insurance against
robbery, etc. Each person was to make an annual payment to the common
fund, and then if he were robbed, he was to receive the value of his goods
provided he could give information that would identify the robber. — Ap
pendix, p. 259.

304 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
with all the misery it entailed upon the non-combatants.
The vassal appealed to his lord to do him justice upon
the wrong-doer who was stronger than he, but not nec
essarily upon his equal, much less his inferior. Now
this idea of law and right and justice was ingrained in
the feudal system, and the Church could not overcome
it until the advance of society brought new ideas of the
functions of the law and the judge. It set itself there
fore to limit it by the Truce of God. But it did more
than this. It endeavored to impress upon the con
science of him who had the right of thus redressing his
own injuries, the duty of drawing his sword only in a
righteous cause, by surrounding the delivery of his arms
to him with the solemnities of religion, and pledging
him to knightly honor and purity and graciousness.
Hence the institution of chivalry. Its origin seems to
be lost in the mists of antiquity. Historians do not
seem able to tell us when the Church began to make
the conferring of knighthood a religious ceremony. But
the custom was certainly older than the crusades ; at
first local, then spreading by its own fitness, then be
coming general. I shall have occasion to point out how
the fine gold became dim ; but I want you to do justice
to the Church by recognizing its endeavor to fulfil its
duty of Christianizing all orders of society. M. Guizot
describes the reception of a knight in the twelfth cen
tury. The candidate was first bathed, then clothed in
symbolic garments ; he observed a rigorous fast for
twenty-four hours ; he passed the night in prayer in

From Constantine to the Reformation. 305

church ; he made his confession and received the holy
communion ; he heard a sermon upon the duties of 3
knight ; he was then clothed with his armor and re
ceived the accolade. The same author gives twenty-six
items of the knightly oath taken by the candidate, col
lected from different forms, showing that he promised
to serve God religiously, and his prince faithfully, to
maintain the right of the weak, to avoid malicious
offence of any one, to obey his commander, to keep faith
with all the world, to be courteous and humble, and
never to fail in his word, for any ill or loss that might
thence happen to him.* " There is," says Guizot, " in
this series of oaths, in the obligations imposed upon
knights, a moral development very foreign to the lay
society of this epoch. Moral notions so elevated, often
so delicate, so scrupulous, above all so humane, and
always impressed with the religious character, evidently
emanated from the clergy. The clergy alone, at that
time, thus thought of the duties and relations of men.
Its influence was constantly employed in directing the
ideas and customs which chivalry had given rise to, to
wards the accomplishment of these duties, towards the
amelioration of these relations."
3. — In still another direction, the Church exerted its
influence over the common people — and that also in the
development of their traditional institutions entirely
apart from the Papacy. I refer to the guilds which were

* Hence the proverb : " Noblesse oblige."

306 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
so important a part of the social life of the Middle Ages.
Of the various accounts of their origin, that of Sir
Francis Palgrave seems the most reasonable, that they
were derived from the Roman municipalities and col
leges of operatives and artificers. They were of different
kinds : the great merchant guilds sometimes became
the municipalities of the cities ; in other cases, the
guilds of the different trades united formed the civic
corporation ; in other cases they were associations of
artisans, or particular classes, or something like modern
clubs ; again they were friendly societies, organized for
mutual assistance ; or in many cases they were purely
religious associations. But of whatever kind they were,
their bond of union was religious. A trades-union of
the Middle Ages which had not a home in the parish
Church and the blessing of the priest would have been
looked upon as a monstrosity. Of the purely religious
guilds mention is made in a capitulary of Archbishop
Hincmar of Rheims, of the year 859, the object of which
was "to unite men for every exercise of religion, for
offerings, for mutual assistance, for funeral services, for
alms and other deeds of piety." The mediaeval Guilds
" were essentially Christian societies. * * * Whilst
embracing the objects aimed at in our modern benefit
societies, young men's associations, clothing clubs,
burial clubs, trades-unions, aye, and to some extent our
banks and trading companies, all the ancient guilds
were based upon the foundation of the Christian faith,
which, if true and living, must show itself in works of

From Constantine to the Reformation. 307
mercy, corporeal and spiritual. Thus, amid the great
multitude of guilds in the Middle Ages, and the variety
of special objects for which they were founded, we find
precisely the same general principles kept in view.
These principles were the united worship of God, and
the exercise of love towards man. The real aim of a
guild was to make its members more devout towards
their Father in heaven, and more full of mercy and
charity towards their brethren upon earth."*
Here, then, we see the Church (independently of the
Papacy) touching the secular life in the three vocations
which dominated the Middle Ages, the pursuit of learn
ing, the pursuit of arms, and the pursuit of trade. Let
us get rid of the idea that religion was confined to the
cloister, of the idea that the Church was merely the
creature of the Papacy ; and above all, let us get rid of
the idea that mediaeval religion was a mass of saint-
worship and image-worship.t and of debasing super
stitions. How such an idea can have got abroad with
the existing monuments of mediaeval religion to testify
against it, defies all explanation. I want you now to
consider what that religion really was. We might
fancy, what with Popes and monasteries, and legends of
* Guild Papers, p. 42.
f Bellarmine, having to account for certain dicta of Thomas Aquinas
and others, contrary to the Second Council of Nicaea, which restored
image-worship among the Greeks, is obliged to confess that that Council
was not known in the West. Bellarmine, De Imaginibus Sanctorum.
Lib. II. Cap. XXII. Vol. II. p. 409. Venice, 1721. Charlemagne's
work at the Council of Frankfort had been complete.

308 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
the saints, and scholasticism, and all that we hear of
the corruption and superstition of the times, that the
great churches of Christendom, commenced, most of
them, late in the twelfth or early in the thirteenth
century, and building we might say continuously for
centuries, would show in their structure and ornamen
tation a religion eaten up within of corruption, and
encrusted without with superstition ; but is that so ?
On the contrary they are shrines of the purest, as well
as most sublime conceptions of Christianity. And
what I want you particularly to note is, that it was
lay-Christianity — the Christianity of the layman who
had been taught and guided by the Church, and who
brought, with the bishop and the priest, his knowledge
and his skill to make the place of Christ's feet glorious.
Gothic architecture, the prevailing architecture of the
Middle Ages in England, France, Germany, Spain, and
Northern Italy, was in its origin and essence a lay-
architecture ; the layman's house was Gothic as well as
his Church ; while the purely clerical or monastic archi
tecture was round-arched, founded on the ancient
Roman styles, and developing into what we call Nor
man.* Here, too, the evidence of continuous Christian
teaching from the times we think so very dark is con
clusive, and the independence of Rome so marked, that
Rome is the one place in the West where Gothic art
found no abiding-place.

* See an interesting article on Gothic architecture in Harper's Magazine,
for January, 1876.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 309
Long before Gothic architecture became the prevail
ing style, the people of Venice built their glorious St.
Mark's. It was begun, Prof. Norton tells us, somewhere
about the year 1050, just at the time that Hildebrand
began to be influential, and before Hildebrandine ideas
had the opportunity to make themselves felt, and was
so far completed in 1071, two years before Hildebrand
became Pope, that the incrustation of the interior with
its mosaics was proceeded with. I am sorely tempted
to print entire Mr. Ruskin's account of these mosaics
from "The Stones of Venice," to show the Scriptural
character of the religion that conceived them. A few
sentences from that matchless description I must give,*
and they shall not be the ones usually quoted : " There
is one circumstance," says Mr. Ruskin, " to which I
must in the outset direct the reader's special attention,
as forming a notable distinction between ancient and
modern days. Our eyes are now familiar and wearied
with writing ; and if an inscription is put upon a build
ing, unless it be large and clear, it is ten to one whether
we ever trouble ourselves to decipher it. But the old
architect was sure of readers. He knew that every one
would be glad to decipher all that he wrote ; that they
would rejoice in possessing the vaulted leaves of his
stone manuscript; and that the more he gave them,
the more grateful would the people be. We must take

* If I need an apology for so long a quotation, I must plead that it
is necessary to my argument. There is but this one description of St.
Mark's.

310 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

pains, therefore, when we enter St. Mark's, to read all
that is inscribed, or we shall not penetrate into the
feeling either of the builder or of his times.
" A large atrium or portico is attached to two sides
of the Church, a space which was especially reserved
for unbaptized persons and new converts. It was
thought right that before their baptism these persons
should be led to contemplate the great facts of the Old
Testament History ; the history of the Fall of Man, and
of the lives of the Patriarchs, up to the period of the
Covenant by Moses : the order of the subjects in this
series being very nearly the same as in many northern
churches, but significantly closing with the Fall of the
Manna in order to mark to the catechumen the in
sufficiency of the Mosaic covenant for salvation — ' Our
fathers did eat manna in the wilderness and are dead,'
and to turn his thoughts to the true bread of which that
manna was the type.
"Then, when after his baptism he was permitted to
enter the Church, over its main entrance he saw, on
looking back, a mosaic of Christ enthroned, with the
Virgin on one side and St. Mark on the other, in atti
tudes of adoration.* Christ is represented as holding
a book open upon His knee, on which is written : ' I am
the Door ; by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.'
On the red marble moulding which surrounds the
mosaic is written : ' I am the gate of life ; let those who
* Note that the Virgin and St. Mark are pictured as worshippers, not as
objects of worship.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 3 1 1
are Mine enter by Me.' Above, on the red marble fillet
which forms the cornice of the west end of the Church
is written, with reference to the figure of Christ below :
' Who He was, and from whom He came, and at what
price He redeemed thee, and why He made thee and
gave thee all things, do thou consider.' * * * The
mosaic of the first dome, which is over the head of the
spectator as soon as he has entered by the great door
(that door being the type of baptism), represents the
effusion of the Holy Spirit, as the first consequence and
seal of the entrance into the Church of God. * * *
On the vaults at the four angles which support the
cupola, are pictured four angels, each bearing a tablet
upon the end of a rod in his hand : on each of the
tablets of the first three angels is inscribed the word
' Holy ;' on that of the fourth is written ' Lord ;' and the
beginning of the hymn being thus put into the mouths of
the four angels, the words of it are continued around the
border of the dome, uniting praise to God for the gift of
the Spirit, with welcome to the redeemed soul received
into His Church : ' Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of
Sabaoth : Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.
Hosanna in the highest : Blessed is he that cometh in
the name of the Lord.' And observe in this writing
that the convert is required to regard the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit especially as a work of sanctification.
It is the holiness of God manifested in the giving of His
Spirit to sanctify those who had become His children,
which the our angels celebrate in their ceaseless

312

Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

praise ; and it is on account of this holiness that the
heaven and earth are said to be full of His glory.
" After thus hearing praise rendered to God by the
angels for the salvation of the newly-entered soul, it
was thought fittest that the worshipper should be led
to contemplate, in the most comprehensive forms pos
sible, the past evidence and the future hopes of Chris
tianity, as summed up in three facts, without assurance
of which all faith is vain ; namely, that Christ died, that
He rose again, and that He ascended into Heaven,
there to prepare a place for His elect. On the vault
between the first and second cupolas are represented
the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, with the
usual series of intermediate scenes. * * * The
second cupola itself, which is the central and principal
one of the Church, is entirely occupied by the subject
of the Ascension. At the highest point of it, Christ is
represented as rising into the blue heaven, borne up by
four angels, and throned upon a rainbow, the type of
reconciliation. Beneath Him the twelve Apostles are
seen upon the Mount of Olives with the Madonna, and,
in the midst of them, the two men in white apparel who
appeared at the moment of the Ascension, aboa^e whom,
as uttered by them, are inscribed the words, ' Ye men
of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? This
Christ, the Son of God, as He is taken from you, shall
so come, the arbiter of the earth, trusted to do judg
ment and justice.' * * * The third cupola, that
over the altar, represents the witness of the Old Testa-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 313
ment to Christ ; showing Him enthroned in its centre,
and surrounded by the patriarchs and prophets. * * *
If [the worshipper] had time to explore the minor
lateral chapels and cupolas, he could find in them the
whole series of New Testament History, the events of
the life of Christ, and the Apostolic Miracles in their
order, and finally the scenery of the Book of Revela
tion ; but if he only entered, as often the common
people do to this hour, snatching a few moments before
beginning the labor of the day to offer up an ejaculatory
prayer, and advanced but from the main entrance as far
as the altar screen, all the splendor of the glittering
nave and variegated dome, if they smote upon his heart,
as they might often, in strange contrast with his reed
cabin among the shallows of the lagoon, smote upon it
only that they might proclaim the two great messages
— ' Christ is risen,' and ' Christ shall come.' * * *
And this thought may surely dispose the reader to look
with some change of temper upon the gorgeous build
ing and wild blazonry of that shrine of St. Mark's. He
now perceives that it was, in the hearts of that old
Venetian people, far more than a place of worship. It
was at once a type of the Redeemed Church of God,
and a scroll for the written word of God. It was to be
to them, both an image of the bride, all glorious within,
her clothing of wrought gold ; and the actual table of
the Law and Testimony, written within and without.
And whether honored as the Church or as the Bible,
was it not fitting that neither the gold nor the crystal

314 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
should be spared in the adornment of it ; that as the
symbol of the bride, the building of the wall thereof
should be of jasper, and the foundations of it garnished
with all manner of precious stones ; and that, as the
channel of the Word, that triumphant utterance of the
Psalmist should be true of it — ' I have rejoiced in the
way of Thy testimonies, as much as in all riches.' "
Now it is not only that this is Scriptural teaching —
that the mosaics of St. Mark's are founded upon the
Bible, but that to conceive and carry out such a design
in all its parts, implied not only a desire to honor the
Bible and to make it known to people who could not
read, but an intimate knowledge of the Bible on the
part of those who did this work and a Bible Christianity
in the age itself. This is the secret of that wondrous
multiplicity of decoration in the cathedrals of the great
Gothic period. What was that decoration ? It was,
strange as it may seem, " the religion of Protestants "—
"the Bible and the Bible only." Read Mr. Ruskin's
analysis of the west front of Amiens Cathedral in his
latest little book, " Our Fathers have told Us," and you
must be astonished at the profound knowledge of the
Bible manifested in the composition and arrangement
of the sculptures. Or study the west front of Wells
Cathedral, or many another cathedral which the tourist
will remember. I find among my notes the following
from Didron's Christian Iconography, concerning the
sculptures on the exterior of Chartres Cathedral:
"Seventy-five figures represent the Creation, the life in

From Constantine to the Reformation. 315

Paradise, and the fall of Adam and Eve ; one hundred
and three, the various labors by which, as the result of
the fall, mankind eat their bread in the sweat of their
brow; one hundred and forty-eight, the virtues he
should practise and the vices he should shun ; while
fourteen hundred and eighty-eight depict the history of
the world, through the Old Testament and the New,
and the period succeeding the New, the series ending
with the solemn scene of the Last Judgment" — a total
of eighteen hundred and fourteen sculptures, intended
to teach the people, not saint-worship nor image-
worship, nor any other "mediaeval superstition," * but
the truths of God's revelation and man's duty and
responsibility.t * Mr. Ruskin, " Our Fatheu have told Us," p. 136, remarks on the ab
sence of representations of Purgatory in the art of this period : "At what
time the doctrine of Purgatory was openly accepted by Catholic doctors I
neither know, nor care to know. It was first formalized by Dante, but
never accepted for an instant by the sacred artist-teachers of his time — or
by those of any great school or time whatsoever."
\ ' ' What distinguishes it [the Cathedral of Orvieto] from all others,
and makes it worth a long pilgrimage to see, are the pictures in brilliant
mosaics, which cover nearly the whole facade. If you want to know
what they are, I can only say, ' Go read your Bible through.' " — Charles
Dudley Warner, Roundabout Journey, p. 75.
The difference in biblical knowledge and feeling between the earlier
and later painters — those who wrought before the Church had been cor
rupted by the Papacy, and those who wrought after — is thus shown by Mr.
Ruskin in a comparison of the figure of Christ in Orcagna's Last Judgment
in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment in
the Sistine Chapel at Rome. After saying that Michael Angelo borrowed
the gesture of Christ from Orcagna, he shows how he failed of the mean
ing which the earlier painter put into it. "You all remember the action
pf Michael Angelo's Christ, the right hand raised as if in violence of rep-

316 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

This, then, was the state of the Church, and its credit
with the laity before the Hildebrandine theory had
completely permeated it. After that it was different.
It is a fact written broad and large upon the face of
history, that the corruptions of the Church against
which men rebelled at the Reformation — those which
weighed upon them with crushing force — those which
were an offence to their conscience and their reason,
and a stumbling block to their faith — those which made
the Church itself, formerly so loved and honored, to
have become hateful to mankind — were the direct effects
of the Papal theory carried out into practice. The
mistakes of scholastic theologians in philosophizing
upon doctrine, the popular superstitions of the common
people, these would have corrected themselves through
the natural and educated progress of the human mind,
had not the self-regulating action of the Church been
fettered by the abnormal and malign influence of the
robation ; and the left closed across His breast, as refusing all mercy.
The action is one which appeals to persons of very ordinary sensations,
and is very naturally adopted by the Renaissance painter, both for its
popular effect, and its capabilities for the exhibition of his surgical science.
But the old painter-theologian, though indeed he showed the right hand
of Christ lifted, and the left hand laid across His breast, had another
meaning in the actions. The fingers of the left hand are folded in both
the figures ; but in Michael Angelo's as if putting aside an appeal ; in
Orcagna's, the fingers are bent to draw back the drapery from the right
side. The right hand is raised by Michael Angelo as in anger ; by
Orcagna, only to show the wounded palm. And as to the believing dis
ciples, He showed them His hands and His side, so that they were glad
— so to the unbelievers at their judgment, He shows the wounds in hands
and side. ' They shall look on Him whom they pierced.' " — Val d'Arno,
p. 122.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 317
Papacy, during the course of its dishonorable history
from Innocent IV. to Leo X. Not only were nations
thrown into disorder by the claim of the supreme polit
ical power ; but the churches were thrown into still
greater disorder by the claim asserted and assented to
of supreme spiritual power.
But the Reformation was only the last act of the
reaction against these exorbitant claims. The first was
the reaction against the political usurpations of the
Popes. Less than a century intervened between Inno
cent III. and Clement V.; but in that time the Papacy
descended from the height of political power to the
depths of political subserviency. Innocent III. died in
1216; Innocent IV. reigned from 1243 to 1254; Boni
face VIII., the last of the Hildebrandines, from 1294 to
1303 ; in 1305, Clement V. was made Pope by the in
fluence of Philip the Fair of France ; he removed the
Papacy to Avignon, and the "Babylonish Captivity"
began. The Pope was the political slave of the King
of France.
I think the real cause of this revolution has not been
noted by the historians. It was, in my judgment, the
increasing political importance of The People, and their
loyalty to the Nation, the National Church, and the
Sovereign, as against the elements which were ready to
disturb the public peace for their own selfish purposes—
that is, against the rebellious aristocracy, and the all-
grasping Papacy. The appearance of the Communes, or
Commons, as an influential element in the national life

3 1 8 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
of Europe at this time, is an important fact in ecclesias
tical as well as political history, and merits more atten
tion in this connection than it has received. I have
endeavored to show that the Church did its duty to the
people in the period with which we have been dealing,
and that the people repaid its care with the love and
loyalty of which the great cathedrals are the monuments.
That love and loyalty were given to the national and
local Church, and were not withdrawn from it until the
Papal interferences with order and discipline, by exemp
tions, appeals, extortions, provisions, intrusions, reser
vations, pluralities, expectatives, and all the iniquities
of the non-obstante clause had broken down its moral
and spiritual power, and made it (as Matthew Paris has
it) a slave of the Papacy and a table of money-changers.
In the political world the evil consequences of the Papal
interference were manifest before they appeared in the
Church ; and therefore the people strengthened the
hands of the kings to resist it. When Philip the Fair
was at the height of his quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII.,
he assembled for the first time the States-General of
France, and summoned to it, not only the prelates and
the nobles, but also the " Third Estate," the represent
atives of the Communes, the towns and cities which
lived by trade. The fact is significant and tells its own
story. The loyalty of these towns and cities was the
lever by which the royal power was raised to supremacy
over the aristocracy. They found it to their interest to
be protected by royal charters; they throve by the pres-

From Constantine to the Reformation. 3 1 $
ervation of the king's peace ; they required for their
prosperity safe roads and security against the plunder of
their goods in transit from place to place ; they were
therefore hostile to robber-barons, and loth to assist in
stirring up civil war, and for these reasons they were
ready to help the king against rebellion or aggression.*
They were therefore in no mood to have the kingdom
thrown into disorder for the political benefit of the
Papacy, or to be blind tools of Papal animosity or am
bition or rapacity.
The history of popular institutions in the Middle Ages
is very interesting, and I regret that my knowledge of
it is only superficial. The towns and cities began to be
of importance at the time of the revival of Europe after
the Carlovingian period. But their development was
different in the different nations. In Italy a revival of
the old municipal life begins to be discernible in the
ninth century,t and the cities made rapid progress from
that time on. But unfortunately Italian pride was
averse to dependence on the German Empire, and the
Papacycould not endure an Italian Kingdom ; the result
therefore of their struggles was the disintegration of
Italy, the feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline, the attempt
to build up each city into a little republic on the model
of ancient Rome, constant wars between the cities them
selves, or against the Emperor or the Pope, and finally

*I think a connection can be traced between the " Truce of God" and
" the King's peace." See the last Lecture.
•fSismondi, Italian Republics, p. 32-

320 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
the subjection of each city to its tyrant noble. In Ger
many, towns were fortified, as a part of the military
policy of Henry the Fowler, and as they increased in
trade and wealth the chief of them became free cities of
the Empire, and had their place in the German Diet.
They were loyal to Henry IV. in his struggle with the
Papacy and his rebellious vassals, and a source of
strength to Frederick Barbarossa. In France the rise
of the Third Estate is said to begin with the patriotic
efforts of the clergy to assist Louis VI. (i 108-37) against
the robber-barons, by arming their vassals, who marched
under the lead of their parish priests. In the south of
what is now France, there were many of the old muni
cipalities remaining; of the new towns some were volun
tarily granted charters by their lords, who, however,
appointed their governors and officers ; others obtained
by successful struggles, not only franchises, but the
privilege of self-government by magistrates of their own
choosing. All these found it to their account to draw
closer to the king, to fortify their liberties by his char
ters, and to render him service in return for his
protection ; and thus they built up the nation. In
England, the increase of trade gave prosperity to the
towns, and as they obtained importance they sought to
have their liberties secured by royal charters. William
the Conqueror's letter to the city of London is short
and to the point : " William the king greets William
the bishop, and Gosfrith the port-reeve, and all the
burghers of London, French and English friendly : and

From Constantine to the Reformation. 321
I do you to wit that I will that ye twain be worthy of
all the law that ye were worthy of in King Edward's day.
And I will that every child be his father's heir after his
father's day ; and I will not endure that any man offer
any wrong to you. God keep you."*
By the middle of the twelfth century, the Commons
had become so important an element of the body politic,
that they began from that time to be called to the great
assembly or parliament of the nation. The representa
tives of the towns were called to the Cortes of Aragon
in 1 162, to that of Castile in 1 169. The Emperor Fred
erick II., who, as King of Sicily, promulgated a consti
tution which is said to be an anticipation of modern
political enlightenment in the liberality of its provisions,
called the deputies of the cities to his General Court in
1232. In 1254 the Commons were first summoned to
the English Parliament. The deputies of the cities first
made their appearance in the German Imperial Diet in
1255. And in 1302 the "Third Estate" was, as I said,
called to the French States-General, to hear the com
plaints of the King of France against Boniface VIII.
Notwithstanding the absolutism of Innocent III., I think
we may mark his pontificate (1198-1215) as the epoch
when the increased activity, intelligence and wealth of
the Commons, as the English call them, of the people,
as we call them, began to foreshow a new order of affairs.
If you look, in the fourth volume of Guizot's History of

*Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, I., p. 4°4-
81

322 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

Modern Civilization, at the list of charters granted to
the communes by the kings of France from Henry I. to
Charles IV., you will notice that those granted by Philip
Augustus, the contemporary of Innocent III., are many
more in number than those of any king before or after
— a very significant fact in this connection. It was Philip
Augustus who chartered the University of Paris in the
year 1200 — the rise of the great universities marking the
time when learning was spreading among the laity. In
a short time we shall see the lawyers taking their place
by the side of the theologians as a learned profession.
You remember also that it was at this time that the
English people secured their liberties by the Great
Charter, and that they held to it, although Innocent III.
annulled it by a Papal bull, suspended the Archbishop
of Canterbury, and excommunicated the barons. It was
a natural result of increased activity in the cities where
there were many resident foreigners, and much foreign
trade, that lax ideas should prevail, and that there should
be some loose and luxurious living. In the County of
Toulouse the cities were justly open to this censure ;
heresy was undoubtedly rife among them ; but the
Albigensian Crusades, I doubt not, were in part at least
urged on by the fears of Innocent III. of the effects of
the great popular movement of which he could not be
ignorant. A more praiseworthy result of the insight
into the signs of the times was the establishment of the
two great orders of mendicant friars, that of St. Francis
and that of St. Dominic, whose vow of absolute poverty,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 323
even to beggary, compelled them, for the supply of their
daily necessities, to be in daily contact with the common
people, and whose activity at first in missionary work
was as noble as their deterioration was rapid, when they
became the army of the Papacy and the instruments of
its extortions. All these phenomena occurring just at
this time, point out, in my view, the pontificate of Inno
cent III. as the precise time when the power and
influence of the people became an important factor in
the political life of Europe. And from the time of
Innocent III., the political power of the Papacy began
to decline.
For, as I have remarked, the people were at this time
naturally on the side of the kings, as against the selfish
and rapacious nobility, who did them so much harm in
pursuing their right of private war, and in other ways ;
and they speedily found that it was not to their interest
to permit the sovereign to be weakened for the benefit
of the Papacy. They therefore instinctively sustained
the national cause against the Popes. Even as early
as the time of Henry IV. of Germany, the cities adhered
to the Emperor, and the common people revered him
as a saint after his death. The success of Alexander
III., such as it was, against Frederick Barbarossa, was
possible only because the Italian cities were determined
to shake off the German yoke— because it was impossi
ble for Germany and Italy to form one nation. The
long struggle of Frederick II. against Gregory IX. and
Innocent IV. is remarkable for the appeals to the peo-

324 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

pie on both sides. On the one side the mendicant friars
filled the world with denunciations of the Emperor ; on
the other side, the Emperor issued manifesto after mani
festo against the Pope. And notwithstanding the in
tense partisanship of Guelph against Ghibelline in Italy,
the Emperor held his own. So again, the answer of
Philip the Fair of France to the famous bulls of Boniface
VIII., Auscultafili and Unam Sanctam was to convoke
the States-General, and by their aid and counsel to bid
defiance to the Pope. When the national feeling of the
people had attained strength and consistency, the
political supremacy of the Papacy passed away. That
is the real meaning of the so-called Babylonish Cap
tivity at Avignon.
Let us now see how the Papal claim of supreme
spiritual authority affected the national Churches.
Much has been written concerning the usurpation, ex
tortions, and corrupt practices of the Popes in the
period immediately preceding the Reformation ; but I
have not seen any systematic attempt to estimate their
effect upon morals and religion generally. My propo
sition is, that the alienation of the people from their
National Churches at the Reformation was due primarily
to that interference of the Papacy with them, resulting
inevitably from the Hildebrandine theory of the Papacy
itself, which obstructed their normal working, which
hindered their adaptation of themselves to the state of
Europe in a period of rapid development, and which to

From Constantine to the Reformation. 325

a large extent destroyed their influence in favor of
sound morals and true religion.
It happened most unfortunately for the Church, that
just at the time the people were obtaining political in
fluence, the clergy, by the progress of the Hildebrandine
idea, were more and more withdrawn from sympathy
and intercourse with them. Alexander III., we have
seen, confined the election of the Bishop of Rome to
the College of Cardinals exclusively. That provision
became the pattern for the Cathedral Chapters to
follow in electing the bishops. The effect was bad
both on the Popes and on the bishops. The intrigues
of the cardinals among themselves led to the worst re
sults. The chapters made terms with the candidates,
and extorted concessions from them which were fatal
to discipline, so that the bishop had less power in his
own cathedral than in any other church in his diocese.
At the same time, as the laity had no approval of the
choice made by the chapters, either immediately by
that public assent which had obtained in earlier ages,
or indirectly by the royal confirmation,* they looked
upon their bishop as a stranger, and he became alienated
from them. Again, the privilege called "benefit of
clergy," which, in accordance with the Hildebrandine
scheme, withdrew the minor orders, as well as the
priests from the jurisdiction of the secular courts, and
secured them virtual immunity for crimes which would
* In England the conge d'elire is the mode in which lay influence exerts
itself in the election of bishops.

326 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

be severely punished in the layman, not only assisted
in lowering the morals of the clergy, and provoking the
envy or enmity of the laity, but excluded the clergy
from the general movement of the people towards a
true national feeling. When we remember what a wise
ruler and guardian of the kingdom of France, the abbot
Suger of St. Denys was, in the absence of Louis VII. on
the Crusade, it marks a great change in the relation of
the clergy to the kingdom, to find an ordinance of
Philip the Fair in 1287 requiring all who possess tem
poral jurisdiction in the kingdom, as dukes, counts,
archbishops, bishops, abbots, and the like, to institute
for the exercise of such jurisdiction, bailiffs, provosts,
and lay-sergeants, who are not clerics, " to the end
that if the said officers should happen to fail, their
superiors may proceed against them "* — which they
could not do, if they could plead "benefit of clergy."
The same ordinance prohibited any but lay-attorneys
practising in the courts of France — a very proper pro
vision, according to our ideas, but severely reflecting
upon the clergy of that day, as wanting in loyalty ; for
that was the real reason.
The general complaint against the extortions and
evil practices of the Papal legates a latere is a common
place of history, and I need not enlarge upon it.
Much has been written of the political, social and
commercial effect of the Crusades upon Western
* Guizot, History Civilization, IV., p. 173.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 327
Europe, less of their religious effect. I have here to
note two consequences of the Papal connection with
them, the influence of which upon the subsequent moral
and religious condition of Europe was most disastrous.
The first was the offence given to the conscience of
Europe by Papal excommunications for purely political
reasons, and the proclamation of a Crusade or "Holy
War " against the prince so excommunicated for politi
cal reasons. We have naturally some sympathy with
the effort to rescue the Holy Land, the scene of the
sacred events of our redemption, from the hands of the
unbelievers ; but to call the purely political and personal
war of Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. on the Emperor
Frederick II. a crusade, offended the conscience of St.
Louis, and it offends the conscience of every reasonable
being. There is nothing more iniquitous in all history
than the "Holy War" of Charles of Anjou, at the in
stigation of the Pope, upon the descendants of Fred
erick. The ruin of Manfred, the murder of the youthful
and gallant Conradin, and the oppressions of the
French conquerors of Naples and Sicily justify, if any
political outbreak ever was justified, the " Sicilian
Vespers." Religion could not but suffer, when the
dealings of the Popes with the kingdoms of the world
were, in intent and will, such as wrought the ruin of the
House of Hohenstauffen.
This demand of the Popes upon the allegiance of
their adherents, requiring them to consecrate their
swords in " Holy Wars," whenever the Papal policy rg-

328 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

quired the ruin of a prince, introduced into Europe a
peculiar and fanatical temper, warlike and inquisitorial,
the direct antagonist of the spirit of the Gospel, and
which, fostered in its self-delusion by the promise of
plenary indulgence, enabled men to commit crime with
the full assurance that they were pleasing God and
meriting eternal salvation. What manner of man was
this Charles of Anjou, who was the instrument of Papal
vengeance upon Manfred and Conradin ? You get no
clear idea of him from Milman, or Gibbon, or Robertson,
and therefore you will thank me for calling your atten
tion to this estimate of him by Ruskin, which I believe
to be strictly true, and which will help you to enter
into the spirit of Guelphism as opposed to Ghibellinism,
better than any words I know. First, however, let me
give a few preparatory words, also from Ruskin, by
way of preface, premising that he is speaking ironically
from the Papal stand-point, when he identifies Guelph
with Christian, and Ghibelline with infidel. "Of the
character of their enemy, Charles of Anjou," he says,
" there will remain on your minds, after careful exami
nation of his conduct, only the doubt whether I am
justified in speaking of him as Christian against infidel.
But you will cease to doubt this, when you have entirely
entered into this nascent Christianity of the thirteenth
century. You will find that while men who desire to
be virtuous receive it as the mother of virtues, men who
desire to be criminal receive it as the forgiver of crimes •
and that therefore, between Ghibelline or infidel cruelty

From Constantine to the Reformation. 329
and Guelph or Christian cruelty, there is always this
difference, that the infidel cruelty is done in hot blood,
and the Christian's in cold. * * * And among the
pieces of heraldry most significant in the Middle Ages,
the asp on the shield of the Guelphic viscounts is to be
much remembered by you as a sign of this merciless
cruelty of mistaken religion ; mistaken, but not in the
least hypocritical. It has perfect confidence in itself,
and can answer with serenity for all its deeds."* Of
Charles of Anjou, and the manner of man he was, Mr.
Ruskin gives this account from Villani, with the com
ment that follows, of his own : " This Charles was
wise and of sane counsel ; and of prowess in arms, and
fierce, and much feared and redoubted by all the kings
in the world — magnanimous and of high purposes ;
fearless in the carrying forth of every great enterprise ;
firm in every adversity ; a verifier of his every word ;
speaking little, doing much ; and scarcely ever laughed,
and then but a little ; sincere and without flaw as a
religious and Catholic person ; stern injustice and fierce
in look ; tall and nervous in person, olive colored and
with a large nose, and well he appeared a royal majesty
more than other men. Much he watched, and little
he slept, and used to say that so much time as one
slept, one lost ; generous to his men-at-arms, but
covetous to acquire land, signory and coin, come how it
would, to furnish his enterprises and wars ; in courtiers,

*Val d'Arno, p. no.

330 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
servants of pleasure, or jocular persons, he delighted
never." " To this newly-crowned and resolute king,
riding south from Rome," says Ruskin, " Manfred, from
his vale of Nocera under Mount St. Angelo, sends to
offer conditions of peace. Jehu, the son of Nimshi, is
not swifter of answer to Ahaziah's messenger, than the
fiery Christian king, in his ' What hast thou to do
with peace ?' Charles answers the messengers with his
own lips : ' Tell the Sultan of Nocera, this day I will
put him in hell, or he shall put me in paradise.' Do
not think it the speech of a hypocrite. Charles was as
fully prepared for death that day, as ever Scotch Cov
enanter fighting for his holy league ; and as sure that
death would find him, if it found, only to glorify and
bless. Balfour of Burley against Claverhouse is not
more convinced in heart that he draws the sword of the
Lord and of Gideon. But all the knightly pride of
Claverhouse himself is knit together in Charles, with
fearless faith and religious wrath. ' This Saracen scum,
led by a bastard German — traitor to his creed, usurper
among his race, dares it look at me, a Christian knight
—a prince of the House of France, in the eyes ? Tell
the Sultan of Nocera, to-day I put him in hell, or he
puts me in paradise.' They are not passionate words
neither. They are measured, resolute, and the fewest
possible. He never wasted words, nor showed his
mind, but when he meant it should be known. * * *
After fourteen years of misery, Sicily sang her angry
vespers, and a Calabrian admiral burnt the fleet of

From Constantine to the Reformation. 331
Charles before his eyes, where Scylla rules her barking
Salamis. But the French king died in prayerful peace,
receiving the sacrament with these words of perfectly
honest faith, as he reviewed his past life : ' Lord God,
as I truly believe that you are my Saviour, so I pray
you to have mercy on my soul ; and as I truly made
the conquest of Sicily, more to serve the Holy Church
than for my own covetousness, so I pray you to pardon
my sins.'"*
Such was Charles of Anjou, and such also in his way
was Simon de Montfort, the leader in the Albigensian
Crusade. Such was Guelph chivalry and Papal religion.
But such was not the chivalry or the religion of Charles'
brother, St. Louis, or of the younger Simon de Mont
fort. Read the eulogy of this nobleman in Matthew
Paris : " Thus ended the labors of that noble man Earl
Simon, who gave up not only his property, but also his
person, to defend the poor from oppression, and for the
maintenance of justice and the rights of the kingdom. "t
Connected with this Papal perversion of the Christian
temper, was the practice of declaring indulgences to
the crusaders, leading finally to the sale of indulgences,
and, through the unblushing effrontery of Tetzel, to
the outbreak of the Reformation in Germany. An in-

* Mr. Ruskin adds : " You are to note the two clauses of this prayer.
He prays absolute mercy, on account of his faith in Christ ; but remission
of purgatory in proportion to the quantity of good works he has done, or
meant to do, as against evil."— Val d'Arno, pp. 1 13-16.
f Matthew Paris, III., p. 355-

332 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

dulgence was originally the remission of some part of
the canonical penance, or the substitution for it, of
some deed of charity or piety as the evidence of sincere
repentance ; it could be assigned by any bishop to meet
the individual case. During the Crusades the Popes
took it upon themselves to proclaim a plenary or gen
eral indulgence to all who took the cross. From this
beginning it was easy to extend the principle to other
methods of serving the Pope ; and finally to the mere
gift of money to the Papal treasury ; and it was just as
easy for the ignorant or superstitious layman to con
sider the purchase of an indulgence as assuring the
absolute pardon of sin. The bad effect of Tetzel's in
dulgences upon the members of Luther's own parochial
cure, in encouraging them in immorality, was the ex
citing cause of the great German reformer's indignant
protest against them.
The other outcome of the Papal connection with the
Crusades which I have in mind, was the pretext they
afforded the Court of Rome of extorting money from
the Churches throughout Europe. The destructive
influence of the Papal financial system upon religion
and morality in general was much more direct than
might appear at first sight. It was manifest long
before the sale of indulgences became the scandal of
the Church. Under date of the year 1254, the English
chronicler, Matthew Paris, gives this story: "In the
same week in which Pope Innocent IV. departed this
life, a wonderful vision was seen by a certain cardinal,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 333
whose name is suppressed for caution's sake. It ap
peared to him that he was in heaven before the Majesty
of the Lord, who was sitting at the judgment seat, and
on whose right hand stood the blessed Virgin His
mother, whilst on His left there appeared a woman of
noble person and venerable mien. The latter, with
arm extended, carried in her left hand a kind of temple,
on the front of which was written in letters of gold,
' The Church.' Before the Divine Majesty was pros
trated Innocent IV., who with clasped and upraised
hands and on bended knees, was asking pardon, not
judgment. The noble lady, however, spoke against
him, saying, ' Oh ! just Judge, give judgment aright, for
I accuse this man on three points : Firstly, when you
founded the Church on earth, you gifted it with the
liberties which proceeded from yourself ; this man has
made it a most abject slave. Secondly, the Church
was founded for the salvation of sinners, to gain over
the souls of the wretched ; but he has made it a money
changer's table. Thirdly, the Church was founded on
the firmness of faith ; but this man has caused faith and
morals to waver, has done away with justice, and over
shadowed truth : render me therefore a just judgment.'
Then said the Lord, ' Go, and receive your reward
according to your deserts ;' and thus he was taken
away." *
One of the claims involved in the contest of inves
titures was that of the immunity of Church property
* Matthew Paris, III., p. iol.

334 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

from taxation, or what was in those days equivalent to
taxation. The sovereigns of Europe succeeded in
asserting their right to the customary feudal dues from
those estates for which the ecclesiastic did homage ;
but the Popes claimed that extraordinary imposts to
meet a national emergency, could be levied upon
Church property only by their permission. The famous
" Saladin tithe " was imposed by Richard I. of England,
and Philip Augustus of France, upon the clergy as well
as the laity of their respective kingdoms, to fit out their
Crusade. But in 1199, Innocent III. imposed, for the
expenses of the Fourth Crusade, a tax upon the Church
throughout Europe of one fortieth of all "movables"
{i. e., personal property), to be paid to his own col
lectors. The example was not lost upon succeeding
Popes. Gregory IX. taxed the Church for his crusade
against Frederick II. to such good effect that from
England alone, when Henry III., the most subservient
of all her kings, was reigning, he is said to have re
ceived the sum of 950,000 marks, equivalent to about
$70,000,000 of our money.* The exactions of Innocent
IV. provoked the indignation represented by the story
of Matthew Paris which I have just read to you. Urban
IV. granted a tenth of the revenues of the Church of
France to fit out the expedition of Charles of Anjou
against Manfred. These are only examples. Much of
the money thus raised was used by the Popes for their
* Hallam, Middle Ages, p. 296.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 335
own purposes, and sometimes it was shared with the
kings to secure their license for these exactions.
During the residence of the Popes at Avignon, and
the Great Schism that followed, all possible means of
obtaining money from the Church were resorted to by
the Papacy. The Popes invaded the rights of patron
age by which the laity had some influence in the
selection of the clergy, and openly sold the succession to
bishoprics, canonries, and parishes. In the earlier period,
Adrian IV. had requested certain bishops to confer
vacant benefices on persons whom he nominated. The
request soon became a command, and foreigners who did
not pretend to perform their duties drew revenues from
the Churches while engaged in the service of the Pope.
In one way or another the confirmation of the bishops
in their sees was made difficult, and when the election
of the chapters was questioned in the Papal court, the
Pope would set aside the election, and provide a nomi
nee of his own. From the nomination to the sale of
the nomination was an easy step ; and " provisions " as
they were called, became a source of revenue to the
Papacy. Then the expectation of a benefice not yet
vacant was sold, and sometimes sold several times
over. John XXII., the second of the Avignon line, who
has the reputation of being the most avaricious of the
Popes, reserved to himself all the bishoprics in Chris
tendom. The same Pope claimed, as the fee for con
firming an appointment, the tax called annates or first
fruits, the first year's revenue entire of the benefice ;

336 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

his example became a precedent, so that those who
received benefices entered upon them impoverished.
In England these exactions led to the famous Statutes
of Provisors and Praemunire, by which those who
sought preferments from the Papal court were outlawed,
and the Church of England was saved from some of the
evil effects of these usurpations.
What must necessarily have been the effect upon the
national Churches of the exactions of tenths for the
Papal wars, of the corrupt bargains with kings to
share these taxes, of the open sale of the succession to
bishoprics, canonries and benefices to non-residents,
of reservations, commendams, provisions, pluralities,
expectatives and the rest, in which men with money
speculated at the Court of Rome, as men speculate
now in railway shares — of exemptions, of appeals
decided in favor of the largest purse, of dispensations
for the non-observance of solemn oaths ? It is easy to
see that godly discipline could not be maintained when
many of the clergy were non-residents, when foreigners,
who were placed in benefices merely for the sake of the
income, had no sympathy with the people of their
charge, when the Church itself was impoverished by the
exactions of the Papacy, and when men of the character
to be expected from these doings were entrusted with
the cure of souls. Men who had to pay heavily to the
Papacy must endeavor to reimburse themselves out of
the tenants of their estates, and thus the Churchmen,
instead of being as of old, gentle landlords, became

From Constantine to the Reformation. 337

oppressive in their exactions, severe collectors of tithes,
and zealous seekers of bequests. They thus obtained,
and not unjustly, the reputation of avaricious persons,
and the respect and reverence for them fell off. Mr.
Hallam remarks, that while the writers of the thirteenth
and following centuries complain of the Papacy in
terms of unmeasured indignation, the laity came to
more universal conclusions, and a spirit of inveterate
hatred grew up among them, not only towards the
Papal tyranny, but towards the whole system of eccle
siastical independence.* Representations began to be
made to the government that the wealth of the clergy,
so much of which was sent out of the kingdom, might
be better employed in providing for the national defence,
and thus the first note of confiscation of Church property
was sounded. But discontent at the financial condition
of the Church was not the worst. As the reverence for
the clergy decreased, the reverence for religion decreased
also ; immorality spread among the people, and the
character of the intruded clergy was not such as to set
a good example. It was not as in former times, when
the Papacy was corrupt, but the Church was not in
fected by it ; now the evil influence of the Papacy
pervaded the whole body ; the. nominees of corrupt
Popes were everywhere, and everywhere they carried
the morals of the Papacy into the Churches. There is
no gainsaying the fact that there was an immense

* Hallam, Middle Ages, Ch. VII.

338 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
moral deterioration in Europe in the latter part of the
thirteenth and in the fourteenth century, and that the
Papacy was the cause of it. And the worst of the situ
ation was that the people having obtained political in
fluence, and being able to defend the nation from the
political encroachments of the Papacy, looked with
indifference upon the difficulties of the clergy, resented
their exemption from the secular law, felt themselves
powerless to redress the grievances of the National
Churches so long as the Papal authority was acknowl
edged by them, and so permitted matters to take their
course. The withdrawal of patronage from the laity,
the exclusion of the laity from influence in the election
of bishops or the nomination of parish priests, the
making the clergy a close corporation — abrogating the
very principle of the Church's welfare as enunciated by
St. Paul : " If one member suffer, all the members
suffer with it ; if one member rejoice, all the members
rejoice with it "—this left the laity hopeless of correcting
abuses, and therefore willing to profit by them, and
produced a despairing contempt of religion as the guide
of human conduct.
The progress of the deterioration was helped forward
by the interference of the Mendicant Orders, under the
Papal patronage, with the parochial and pastoral rights
and responsibilities of the resident priesthood. That
the Dominicans and Franciscans originated in a pure
impulse of Christian zeal and devotion is not to be de
nied. But the change which came over them through

From Constantine to the Reformation. 339
their connection with the Papacy was rapid and radical.
The establishment of these orders, particularly that of
St. Francis, shows the religious earnestness that existed
among the common people at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, and undoubtedly assisted in advanc
ing it during the first generation after their foundation.
You remember the rebuke which St. Dominic adminis
tered to the Papal Legates, as they proceeded with
pomp and splendor upon their mission of converting the
Albigenses : "It is not by the display of power and
pomp, cavalcades of retainers and richly-houseled pal
freys, or by gorgeous apparel, that the heretics win
proselytes ; it is by zealous preaching, by apostolic
humility, by austerity, by seeming, it is true, but yet
seeming holiness. Zeal must be met by zeal, humility
by humility, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching
falsehood by preaching truth." Dominic was a Spaniard,
a noble and a priest, and therefore his order, though it
adopted the principle of mendicancy from the Francis
cans, was founded at first, more for preaching the
scholastic theology than its rival, and therefore the
Dominicans are called the "Friars Preachers." The
order speedily obtained command of the Inquisition ;
its great master, St. Thomas Aquinas, is the chief au
thority in mediaeval divinity ; it appeals less to our
sympathy than the order of St. Francis, though it is free
from the extravagances of the latter. It became not
only subservient to the Papacy, but the director of the
Papal policy in theology, and was more active than any

340 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
other influence in spreading Papalism among the common
people. And yet some of the purest theology came
from the Dominican convents. The German mysticism
found in Eckart and Tauler its best expression.
The lovable, if half-insane visionary, St. Francis 01
Assisi, was the genuine expression of the religion of the
people, exaggerated indeed, but appealing at once to
the popular heart. Divesting himself of all property for
the sake of Christ, wedded, after the manner of his
Master, as he thought, to " Holy Poverty," preaching
and practising the love of God, the love of man, and the
love of all God's creatures, his example touched the
strings of the human heart tuned to that key, in the
mediaeval society which we are told was so corrupt, and
exerted an immediate and universal influence. Now I
want you to notice here again, that notwithstanding all
that may be said against mediaeval superstitions, the
Christianity of St. Francis and the foundation-principles
of his order were the imitation of Christ. Whatever
may be said of the way in which they endeavored to
imitate Christ, and whatever may be said of the order
at a later period when it was made the instrument of
the Papacy for its own purposes — the conception of
Christianity which the Church of that age presented to
St Francis and his associates and sympathizers, was
that of following Christ and Christ only. The wisdom
of their mode of following Christ may be doubted ; the
power of propagating the initial enthusiasm by the
machinery of an order is negatived by its subsequent

From Constantine to the Reformation. 34 1
history ; but the spontaneous response of the popular
heart to the challenge of St. Francis to be Christlike in
purity and love is a phenomenon as significant as it is
honorable. It is said that out of the religious zeal of
St. Francis came the impulse which led to the wonder
ful revival of religious art in Italy, and how Scriptural
that is, let Mr. Ruskin tell us. Here again, the impor
tant fact is, that the Franciscans, being of the people,
spoke to the people in their own new language, the
Italian of the age preceding Dante — a language not yet
sufficiently formed to be literary, but so different from
the old Latin as to have made that unintelligible.
When, in that language, they proclaimed the love of
Christ, the people found that they were teaching the
truths which the Church was instituted to teach, and
there was no need to break with the Church to heed the
lesson. How soon did the fine gold become dim ! The change
which so speedily came over the great mendicant orders,
and more over the Franciscans than over the other,
illustrates by the contrast the purity of the initial im
pulse. Innocent III., taught by the signs of the times,
took the followers of St. Dominic and St. Francis under
the protection of the Holy see. His successors, abusing
their authority, and taking advantage of the implicit
obedience the mendicants rendered them, employed
them to spread Papal principles among the people, to
execute the Papal commissions, to preach the Papal
crusades, to collect the Papal taxes, to sell the Papal

342 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
indulgences, and to take the management of the common
people into their hands. The evil effects were speedily
seen. That great and wise bishop, Robert Grosteste of
Lincoln, at first hailed their labors with hearty approval;
but before his death he was forced to confess that the
friars had more deteriorated in forty years than the
monks in four hundred. The sophism that corporate
wealth was consistent with individual poverty, the moral
dangers of an irresponsible itinerancy, the wild legends
of the miracles of their founders, the license and buf
foonery of their popular revivalist preaching, the draft
on the inventive imagination for material for their
addresses, the extravagant claims made for their order,
and for the Papacy, and the fact that the more extrav
agant the claims, the more acceptable they were to the
ruling pontiffs — these deteriorated the mendicant
orders, and through them deteriorated the religion of
the common people ; so that whereas at the beginning
of the fourteenth century, Europe was still profoundly
religious, at the beginning of the fifteenth it was becom
ing despairingly indifferent or morbidly superstitious,
and at the beginning of the sixteenth it determined to
take the matter into its own hands.
The ancient Greeks had their doctrine of Nemesis.
It was surely a divine nemesis, which brought out of the
bosom of the Franciscan order the doctrines that have
had most force with Protestants as against the Papacy.
The " Everlasting Gospel " of Joachim of Calabria was
taken up by the rigid party among the Franciscans, and

From Constantine to the Reformation. 343
after the relaxation of their rule by Gregory IX. in 1230,
and still further by Innocent IV. in 1245, they taught
that Rome was the Babylon of the Apocalypse, if not
that the Pope was the veritable Anti-Christ. In their
fierce contest with John XXII., they charged him with
heresy ; they threw themselves with energy into the
conflict between that Pope and the Emperor Louis XII. ;
William of Ockham argued the Ghibelline cause against
the Guelph, defending the Empire against the Papacy.
The lawyer Marsilius of Padua found arguments against
the Papacy ready made for him by the Franciscans.
And in justice to Henry VIII., it must be said that for
two hundred years before his time, the doctrine was
spread abroad by the rigid Franciscans and others, that
the wealth of the Church was its ruin, and the curtail
ment of it a necessity for its reformation.
I turn to another branch of my subject : While the
pastoral work of the Church was thus hindered, and
the character and position of the clergy deteriorated
through the corrupting influences which emanated
from the see of Rome, it was impossible, with the
revival of commercial, political and intellectual activity
among the people, that there should not appear evi
dences of ignorant and wild speculation upon religious
subjects, as well as survivals of old superstitions, and
importations of various opinions and practices from
foreign countries. In the eleventh century we find
notices of sporadic heresy, here and there, which is
called Manicheism, and as such gifted with the char-

344 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

acteristics that appear in the earlier patristic accounts
of the heretics of that name. One peculiarity, the par
taking of a certain food called consolamentum, reminds
us of the Oriental intoxication with hasheesh or opium,
and points to a connection with the East, either through
the Paulicians of Bulgaria, or through the Fatimite
Mohammedans of Spain.* The real horror of heresy
* Toledo was conquered from the Moors by Alfonso VI., King of
Castile, in 1085. In his army were a number of French, Provencal and
Gascon knights, who were connected with him by his marriage with
Constance of Burgundy. The conquest of Toledo "mingled the Moors
and the Christians in a more intimate manner. A complete toleration
was granted to such of the Moors as remained subject to the King of
Castile. * * * This city, one of the most celebrated universities of
the Arabians, retained its schools, and all its learned institutions, and
spread among the Christians the knowledge of Eastern letters." —
Sismondi, Literature of Europe, I., p. 98. Of the Paulicians, Sismondi
says (p. 154): "The Bulgarians, who had established a considerable
commerce between Germany and the Levant, by means of the Danube,
spread their opinions over the north of Europe, and prepared the way for
the Hussites of Bohemia ; while those Paulicians who had become sub
jects of the Mussulmans, insinuated themselves through Spain into the
south of France and Italy." In my copy of Robertson (Vol. II. p. 466.
8vo ed.) I find this MS. note made by myself so long ago that I had
forgotten it: "How far is this [i. e., the consolamentum] connected,
through the Mohammedans of Spain, with the Shiites of Persia [the
Fatimites were Shiites], and a parallel development with that of the
Assassins [and the Old Man of the Mountain] a few years later (A.D.
1090. — Michelet I. p. 206) see Pagi in Baionius XV. 232, for the use of
drugs by the Paulicians, at Tephrica, anno 871." Here it seems to me
is an interesting subject for investigation. I am inclined to think that
a mystery is made about the consolamentum, because of the theories of
mediseval writers who knew more about the tracts of St. Augustine
against the Manicheans, than about the natural properties of plants.
Michelet, in that wild book of his, La Sorciere, says that Toledo "seems
to have been the holy city of Wizards, who in Spain were numberless."
He also has the following, speaking of the access to witches for remedies

From Constantine to the Reformation. 345

on the part of a believing people led to some perse
cution at first, but there were not wanting voices —
among them that of St. Bernard — raised against it. As
time went on, the indications of these heretics become
more numerous along the great lines of commercial
activity, and their spread may be compared with that
of the Anarchists among ourselves. It was an incident
of a time of commercial activity, when also the
Crusades produced a great deal of travel and inter
course of people with people ; and therefore it is not to
be wondered at that strange opinions were rife in
Southern France, where commercial intercourse was
active, both with the East and with the Mohammedans
of Spain, and where, therefore, there would be a cos
mopolitan toleration. I do not need to declaim against
the iniquity of the Albigensian Crusades, nor to palliate
the errors of the Albigenses, who must not be con
founded with the Waldenses. But I must, in justice to

against pain : " What we know for surest with regard to their medicinal
practice is, that for ends the most different, alike to stimulate and to
soothe, they made use of one large family of doubtful and very dangerous
plants, called, by reason of the services they rendered, The Comforters or
Solanese," adding in a foot-note: "Man's ingratitude is painful to see.
A thousand other plants have come into use; a hundred exotic vegetables
have become the fashion. But the good once done by these poor Comforters
is clean forgotten ! * * * The Asclepias acida, Sarcostemma,-oT flesh-
plant [hasheesh] which for five thousand years was * * * eaten
gladly by five hundred millions men— this plant, in the Middle Ages
called the Poison-queller (vince venenum), meets with not one word of
historical comment in our books of botany. Perhaps two thousand years
hence, they will forget the wheat."— La Sorciere, p. 121. With all his
fancifulness one can learn something from Michelet.

346 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
the Church at large, point out how the wholesale perse
cution of heretics at this period was connected with the
condition of the Church, as I have stated it, brought
about by the Papal supremacy. That Innocent III. is
responsible for the Albigensian Crusades no one will
deny. But it is a frequent and sophistical assertion of
the Papal advocates, that the burning of heretics was
an act of the State and not of the Church. The state
ment is technically true, but practically false. The
establishment of the Inquisition in 1233 made it the
tribunal to judge of heresy, and the charge of favoring
heresy, easily made against the ruler who refused to
inflict the extreme penalty upon condemned heretics,
exposed him to the fate of Count Raymond of Toulouse.
In the quarrel between Gregory IX. and Frederick II.
this charge of favoring heresy was made on both sides.
Frederick taunted Gregory IX. with being a fautor of
heretics, because they were numerous in Milan, which
adhered to Gregory ; and to repel the charge the
Milanese, as an old chronicler says, "began to burn
heretics" in the year 1233* Gregory retaliated by
making the same accusation against Frederick, who
felt himself thereupon obliged to make laws against the
sectaries. And so, between the Inquisition and the

* Robertson, III., p. 560. In a note on the next page R. says: "Matthew
Paris mentions some burnings at Milan in 1240, as caused ' rather by fear
of punishment than by love of virtue,' as the Pope was then the only
hope of the Milanese." In other words the Milanese had no love for the
business.

From Constantine to the Reformation. 347
Papal pressure upon " the secular arm," the disgrace
of persecution for religion, whatever share the clergy
in general may have taken in it, lies principally at the
door of the Papacy.
Here some remarks are pertinent concerning cert.ain
strange phenomena of the later Middle Ages. As the
popular feeling rose against the Papal usurpations, it
seemed more and more necessary to cow it and keep
it down. The extension of the definition of heresy to
cover every crude opinion of the untheological laity
would condemn as a heretic many a sincere and earnest
Christian of the present day, and there was the like
danger in the Middle Ages. And when the heretic
was counted worthy of death, the execution of silly and
obstinate people for their crude opinions would natu
rally provoke the sympathy of all who were indignant
at the condition of the Church, and increase the num
ber of those who would think their errors indifferent,
their . fanaticism heroic, and their fate unjust. The
persecution of heretics, therefore, did not reduce the'
number of their sympathizers ; and so it seemed good
to the powers that then were, to terrorize the popular
mind by raking up from the records of the past all the
horrors attributed to the Gnostics and Manicheans of
the first ages of Christianity, and imputing them to the
sectaries of the thirteenth century. Undoubtedly the
type of opinion represented by the term AlbigenseS
was Manichean in principle ; and this being so, the
theologian would feel justified in describing the Mani-

348 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
chean heretic of his own day by what he learned from
his books of the Manicheans of the fourth century.
But what I want to point out now is, that after the
Albigensian crusades these stories seem to have lost
their terror, and it was necessary to improve upon
them. Hence we find that when Gregory IX. in 1232
commissioned Conrad of Marburg to proceed as in
quisitor against the Stedingers, stories of dealing with
the devil and the witches' sabbath begin to make their
appearance. These stories, with the necessary varia
tions, are made good use of by Philip the Fair in
proceeding against the Knights Templars, when he
determines to suppress that order. Finally, under
John XXII., the second of the Avignon Popes, there
are tales of a sudden outburst of witchcraft and malig
nant magic and diabolical incantations taking the
place of the old accusations of heretical pravity —
notions which held their own until they had succeeded
in putting an ineffaceable stain upon Puritan New
England. The fact to notice, however, is that at the
time we are speaking of, these extreme and fanatical
beliefs in heretical depravity and diabolical dealings
appear where the Papacy is most active and the Inqui
sition most powerful.
But we must not suppose that even under these con
ditions, all religious zeal among the laity was drawn off
from the Church into the heretical sects. If, as I have
endeavored to show, the Church in earlier ages was
faithful to its mission, it was not possible that the

From Constantine to the Reformation. 349
Christian tradition should not hold its own, and the
desire for a Christian life should not survive among the
people, even though their institutions were thus thrown
into disorder. The traditions of the home and the fire
side have as much to do with religion as the public
teaching of the Church. Prof. Stokes, in his very inter
esting volume just published on Ireland and the Celtic
Church, remarks upon the firm hold which tradition has
upon the uneducated mind — and we take it for granted
that people who in the Middle Ages could not read Latin
were uneducated ; at least they had not newspapers to
draw them off from home and local instruction. " The
more you investigate," he says, " the more you will be
struck with the firm, tenacious grasp tradition, tradi
tional scenes, traditional history, traditional games and
celebrations take of the popular mind. * * * Noth
ing destroys tradition so utterly and so rapidly as
education. Give a peasant a penny newspaper and teach
him to use it, get him to take an interest in the politics
of Europe, and the great political questions which may
be exciting his own country, and you deprive him of the
keen interest he once took in the stories handed down
from generation to generation, and told round the fire
side on the winter evenings, as the rain and the storm
raged without." * Among ourselves, the common
people in the village and the country are conservative
by the operation of this principle ; the innovation and

* Ireland and the Celtic Church, p. 57.

350 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
the corruption spread in the lines of commerce and of
political activity, and, in an aristocratic state of society
among the governing classes, before they affect " the
people." In the Middle Ages it was much more so, and
among persons of higher intellectual status than nowa
days, when the newspaper circulates everywhere. I do
not assert that the Middle Ages were better than, or as
good as our own for this reason ; but I do say that this
must be taken into the account in estimating the prog
ress of the corruption which is so freely charged upon
the whole Church in the period preceding the Refor
mation. Dr. Neale, the eminent Liturgical scholar,
argues that the Liturgies of outlying and secluded dis
tricts are more primitive in their structure than those of
the great Patriarchates because of the conservatism of
such districts. The principle must be applied, in all
justice, to the problem of the condition of Christian
belief among the laity at this period — which is the true
test of the faithfulness of the Church. Again, allowance
must be made for the fact that language was in a tran
sition state, and that it was not easy for persons trained
as theologians to think and dispute in Latin to preach
in the vernacular ; and therefore that public preaching
became less frequent — as many persons wish it was at
the present day. At the same time, the fact that the
people could not read Latin kept, to some extent at
least, hurtful innovations from them. They could un
derstand sculptures or paintings, like those on St.
Mark's, Venice, or Chartres Cathedral, when they could

From Constantine to the Reformation. 351
not, and did not want to, understand the last subtilty
of the scholastic philosophy, or the last argument for
the plenary authority of the Pope. And therefore it is
not to be doubted that at this time there were multitudes
of sincere and earnest souls, seekers after God, and be
lievers in our Lord Jesus Christ, who were faithful to
the Church, and found in it the nurture of their spiritual
life ; and it is pathetic to see how the earnestness and
faith of some of them were repressed, when they sought
for the approval of those high in authority, or how their
influence for good, when they became active workers,
was perverted, either by the unjust ban of the Papacy,
or its interested and selfish favQr. The Waldenses are
an example of the one, the Franciscans and Dominicans
of the other. The Waldenses are sometimes asserted
to be "survivals" of a time when the Church was Pres
byterian — a condition which can be found nowhere in
all history before John Calvin.* As a matter of fact the
Waldenses had no desire to break with the Church ;
what they did desire was to have the Scriptures in the
new language which had been gradually forming itself
among the people, in which there was as yet no litera
ture. In their simplicity they laid their books and
teachings before Pope Alexander III., and had he dealt
* Hooker's Challenge to the Puritans has never been met : "We re
quire you to find out but one Church upon the face of the whole earth,
that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by
ours, that is to say by Episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the
blessed Apostles were here conversant." — Preface to Eccl. Polity, Ch.
IV., p. 1.

352- Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political

with them as Innocent III. did later with the Francis
cans, they would not have formed a sect of their own.
But his cardinals laughed at them for their want of
scholastic learning ; and in an evil hour Lucius III.
(A.D. 1 184) excommunicated "those who falsely styled
themselves humiliati or poor men of Lyons." * They
then went to the other extreme in opposing, not only
the existing system, but the truth of the visible Church;
and they suffered severely at the hands of the Inqui
sition. It is the fact that all through mediaeval Europe, while
the evil influence of the Papacy was making itself felt in
the high places of Church and State, and slowly filtering
down, the tradition of the home and the fireside was
doing its work for Christian faith and feeling ; and it
was helped by the traditional system of the Liturgy and
the Christian year. Is it not significant that English
Literature begins with Piers Plowman's Vision ; and
that the "Imitation of Christ" appeared at the very
worst period in the history of the Church ? Michelet
says that there are two thousand editions of this book
in Latin, a thousand in French, sixty French translations,
thirty translations into Italian, besides others of which
he makes no mention. Surely this fact of itself proves
that in the age preceding the Reformation, religion was
not to be found only among the sectaries ; it is not true
that the Church was utterly corrupt.f
?Robertson, III., p. 201.
f There is another branch of this argument which I have not time or
space to develop. It is that as the sectaries departed from the traditiona]

From Constantine to the Reformation. 353
What, then, was the evil of these times ? It was that
the Hildebrandine system, as administered in the thir
teenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries set fidelity to
the Papacy above true Christian morality. So far as
this affected the Church, so far it corrupted it ; when
the Church was able to resist it, religion held its own.
And therefore, for more than a century before Luther,
the cry was constantly being repeated for a Reformation.
The reforming Councils of Pisa, Constance and Basle
made honest efforts to reform the Church ; but they
failed because they could not bind the Pope, and they
were not prepared to renounce allegiance to him. Nor
were they willing to call the people to their aid. They
were fearful of revolution instead of reformation.
I must, I find, compress what more I have to say into
the fewest possible sentences. A few dates in the sub
sequent history of the Papacy are all that are necessary
for this lecture ; the details you can read in Robertson.
On St. Martin's Day, Nov. 11, 1305, Clement V. was
crowned at Lyons ; he remained in France for five years,
and then fixed his residence at Avignon. For seventy
years the Papacy was virtually subject to France. Dur
ing this period the House of Valois came to the throne ;
the feudal nobles, who had been curtailed of their priv
ileges in the previous reigns, reasserted themselves;
and France was made to suffer in the wars with Edward

Christianity of the Church— 1 mean from that which had descended from
ancient times in the National Churches— they became wild and fanatical
and corrupt : e.g., the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Anabaptists,

354 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
III. of England. January 15, 1377, Gregory XI. restored
the Papacy to Rome, where Rienzi had lately " strutted
his brief hour upon the stage." But the Great Schism
of 40 years immediately followed (A.D. 1 377-1417), in
which there was a line of Rome, a line of Avignon, and
part of the time a line of the Council of Pisa.
In 1375, two years before Gregory XI. returned to
Rome, the Republic of Florence, exasperated at the bad
faith of the Papal legate who governed in Italy, sent its
army into the Papal States, under a banner inscribed
with the one word, "Libertas," and in ten days, eighty
cities were restored their republican constitutions. In
the same year in which Gregory returned, he sent a bull
to England, requiring the authorities to investigate the
errors attributed to John Wycliff. Put these two appar
ently unconnected facts together, and study their
meaning. They mean among other things this, that in
Italy and in England alike, the people have discovered
the true character of the Papacy. For the offence of
Wycliff was not that he held such and such opinions-
others had held and taught with impunity much the
same as he did— but these others had taught them in
the schools and in Latin, while John Wycliff was teach
ing them in English and to the people. But they mean
more than this. They mean that Europe was now
conscious that it was passing through a revolution
which should bring the Middle Ages to an end, and
introduce what we call modern times. And by the
operations of the Papacy the Church had been enfeebled,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 355
so that it was not able to guide the Ship of State through
that revolution. Take a single illustration. In the
feudal times, the life of a noble was one of laborious in
dustry. He was not only an officer of the army, but
the governor of a district, and a judge of the people.
While the right of private war existed, he was bound to
be on the alert to avenge his injuries, or to defend his
possessions and his people. When there was public or
national war, he was bound to furnish his contingent to
the army, and to lead it himself. As the nation gained
consistency, and the cities became more important, the
changes in the political condition deprived the nobility
one by one of these duties and responsibilities. As soon
as it was found that infantry could meet cavalry, and
when gunpowder rendered armor useless, the mercenary
soldier, and later the standing army deprived the noble
of his military consequence. The extension of the royal
law over the kingdom, and the practice of the lawyers
in the king's courts put an end to the baronial admin
istration of justice ; and the government of cities and
towns by the king's officers, or by their own magistrates,
restricted his functions as governor and lord of his dis
trict. The noble, under these changed conditions,
found his life useless, and time hung heavy on his hands.
He became an absentee landlord, spending his time
amid the revels of the court, and compelled to oppress
his vassals and his tenants for the means to support his
extravagance. "When the pride of wealth and pomp,"
says Prof. Stubbs, " took the place of political aspira-

356 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
tions, personal indulgence, domestic tyranny, obsequi
ous servility followed as unmitigated and deeply-rooted
evils." Then, when a general calamity, like the Black
Death, swept over the country, the evils of a transition
period became exaggerated, and the luxury and privi
leges of the nobility produced, as they had a right to
do, discontent among the suffering and the destitute,
that is to say the serf and the laborer. The privileges
and luxury had been the pay of work done ; now the
work was not done ; but the privileges were clung to
tenaciously, and the luxury increased and became
vicious. I cannot go more into this, but this one illus
tration may show how the old order was passing away,
and the new was not yet formulated. Now when, under
these conditions, the evils in the Church, made worse
by the Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism, came
into debate, it was felt that the state of Europe, both
political and ecclesiastical, was so bad that any at
tempt at readjustment would bring down the whole
fabric of government, kingly as well as papal. That
was the meaning of the attempt to silence Wycliff.
England, fortunately, was in a better condition than
other countries. Her constitution was developing in an
orderly manner, and there was no real break between
the old order and the new. And therefore, with all the
efforts of the Papacy, and the Papal portion of the,
Church of England, Wycliff 's University of Oxford and
the people stood by him, and he died quietly in his bed,
On the continent it was different. And therefore when

From Constantine to the Reformation.. 357
the University of Paris took in hand the reform of the
Church, it was afraid of the popular movement, and
John Huss was burned at the Council of Constance, to
the eternal infamy of wise and good men like Gerson,
ostensibly for heresy, but really because he had made
the appeal to the people, which the authorities feared
because they were, as I said, afraid of revolution. Huss
was burned for political reasons, quite as much as for
imputed heresy ; and terribly was he avenged in the
Hussite wars. To the honor of England let it be said
that if Robert Hallam, Bishop of Salisbury, had lived to
the end of the Council of Constance, Huss would not
have suffered.
I shall not have time during the present academic
year to prepare another lecture for this course, although
the terms of the foundation permit seven ; and therefore
I must leave the subject in this incomplete state. The
Reforming Councils of Pisa, Constance and Basle, show
the sincere desire of the national Churches to bring
back the Church Catholic to a healthy condition. At
Constance, particularly, the fact I have insisted upon
that the National Churches must be taken into the ac
count in estimating the good and evil of the times is
shown by the method of voting — by nations. That
these councils accomplished nothing very great was
because they could not bind the Popes. The Hilde
brandine theory made the Pope superior to a council,
and the inferior could not bind the superior. After the
Council of Basle, the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles

358 Christendom Ecclesiastical and Political
VII. did something for the Gallican Liberties ; but the
old evils remained, wherever the Papal influence could
be exerted. The Popes themselves descended to the
level of Italian intriguers, of whom Alexander VI. was
the worst. In the meantime, Constantinople was taken
by the Turks, and fugitives from that city brought the
Greek learning into the West. The printing-press was
invented, and books became accessible to the multitude,
and libraries numerous for scholars. The discovery of
America changed the commercial condition of the
world, and compelled the new adjustments which
brought the Middle Ages to an end. Just at this time,
Leo X. sent his preachers of indulgences into Germany,
which had been groaning under her "hundred griev
ances," and the righteous indignation of Martin Luther
broke out against them, and we know the rest. Into
that it has not been my intention to enter. I hope I
have shown that there was a living Church, doing its
work for Christ, even in the unreformed ages.
One word in conclusion. If my interpretation of the
history I have endeavored to review is correct, and I
believe it is, we need no vindication of our position, as
members of the historic Church, both Catholic and
Reformed, other than the intelligent knowledge of its
history. The English Reformation avoided the evils
of the Continental uprooting. In breaking finally with
the Papacy, while holding to the unchangeable order
of the Ministry of Apostolic Succession, it removed the
great cause of the evils which had afflicted the Church,

From Constantine to the Reformation. 359
and gave opportunity for that recurrence to and de
velopment of true Church principles, which, please
God, is to be more complete as time goes on. At the
same time, in the English Reformation there are the
seeds of other difficulties. The relation of Church and
State is too much of a piece with that under Constan
tine. Here, in the United States, we are, by Divine
Providence free from State politics as well as Papal
tyranny. In this respect, notwithstanding our diffi
culties, our reformation is one step in advance of the
English, and our position with reference to the future
is so much better. Hitherto we have been a feeble
and timid folk, afraid to assert our privileges and
prerogative as the Church in the United States of
America. But, day by day, as the fact of our refor
mation works in us, and we obtain clearer views of our
vocation, and the power of divine grace granted us in
the Apostolic Ministry, and the Sacraments of the
Gospel — as we feel our freedom in Christ — as we feel
that we are the Church and not a sect — the Catholic
faith and spirit revive in us, and we go forth, following
Him, who has on His vesture, and His thigh, a Name
written, King of kings and Lord of lords, con
quering and to conquer.

THE END.

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