We went on to notice how the Church, led by its great saints, resisted those attempts, and how in consequence the Roman bishops had to give way, and to content themselves with the primacy of honour which had been conferred upon them.

We have also seen to what portentous lengths the popes have advanced, as time has gone on; and what enormous authority they now claim, as of divine right, over the universal Church.

1

Now, of course the development of this claim has a history; and it will be my object in this lecture and in the next to set before you some of the stages in that development, and some of the historical circumstances in consequence of which the growth in the papal power became possible. I can only deal with the matter in a very imperfect way, owing to the limitations of time which necessarily restrict the length of a lecture; and I propose to dwell specially on the earlier rather than on the later stages of the growth. I intend to point out from time to time indications of the continuance of

1 It may be well, in a note, to point out that the attempt uncanonically to transform privileges of precedence and honour into a far-reaching jurisdiction is by no means peculiar to the see of Rome. Other sees, which enjoyed from one cause or another a special pre-eminence of honour, did exactly the same thing. Fallen human nature is the same all the world over. Thus the second Ecumenical Council, by its third canon, gave to the Bishop of Constantinople "the prerogative of honour next after the Bishop of Rome." This was a grant of precedence, not of jurisdiction. Seventy years later the fourth Ecumenical Council, held at Chalcedon, gave by its twenty-eighth canon patriarchal jurisdiction to the see of Constantinople in Pontus, Asia, and Thrace. The way had been prepared for this new departure by a series of uncanonical acts of interference on the part of the Constantinopolitan prelates in the Church affairs of those three exarchates. Dr. Bright gives a summary account of these acts in his note on the ninth canon of Chalcedon (Notes on the Canons of the First Four General Councils, pp. 157– 160). Similarly, the Council of Nicaea, in its seventh canon, gave or rather confirmed to the see of Jerusalem a certain right of precedence, reserving, however, to the Palestinian Caesarea its metropolitical dignity. As time went on, the Bishops of Jerusalem endeavoured to make themselves independent of Caesarea. "Immediately after the Council of Nicaea, the Bishop of Jerusalem, Maximus, convoked, without any reference to the Bishop of Caesarea, a synod of Palestine, and proceeded further to the consecration of bishops " (Hefele, i. 407, E. tr.). There was a 66 contest about precedency' "between Acacius of Caesarea and S. Cyril of Jerusalem. Nevertheless as late as 415 John of Jerusalem obeyed the summons of Eulogius of Caesarea, and attended a provincial council at Diospolis. At the Council of Ephesus, in 431, Juvenal of Jerusalem put forward a monstrous claim, asserting that the Bishop of Antioch, who had patriarchal rights over all the provinces of Palestine, ought himself "to be subject to the apostolic see of Jerusalem" (Bright's Notes, pp. 23, 24). S. Leo tells us that an attempt was made to support this claim by the production of spurious documents (cf. S. Leon. Ep. cxix. cap. iv., P. L., liv. 1044). Some years afterwards a contest about this same claim was waged between the claimant Juvenal and Maximus of Antioch. At last the latter, weary of the controversy, agreed that the three provinces of Palestine should be released from their subjection to his see, and should constitute a new patriarchate, of which the Bishop of Jerusalem should be the head and this arrangement was finally sanctioned by the Council of Chalcedon. It is only fair to the popes that the uncanonical aggressions of their brother patriarchs should be chronicled.

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the earlier and truer teaching, which has never died out, and which we can have no doubt that God will preserve and guard in His Church unto the end.

But, in passing from the Church of the first three centuries to the Church of the fourth and subsequent centuries, we must bear in mind the great change which took place in the whole condition of the Church in consequence of the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, and all that followed therefrom. I cannot attempt to describe that change, but its magnitude can hardly be exaggerated. One may say with S. Jerome that "the Church under the Emperors was greater in power and wealth, but she was less in virtues" (potentia et divitiis major, sed virtutibus minor 1). Or, perhaps, still more accurately, one may say with the late Bishop Wordsworth of Lincoln, "In the ante-Nicene age the world had been arrayed against the Church; but in the next period the world worked in the Church; and it caused more injury to the faith [and, one may add, to Christian life] than when arrayed against it." To put plainly what is implied in Bishop Wordsworth's statement, the world broke into the Church and established itself there, and has remained there ever since. No doubt there were all along tares mingled with the wheat. The Church of the first three centuries was never, except perhaps on the day of Pentecost, in an absolutely ideal condition. But yet, during the ages of persecution, the Church as a whole was visibly an unworldly institution. It was a spiritual empire in recognized antagonism with the world-empire. But from the time of the conversion of Constantine, A.D. 312, and still more completely from the time of Theodosius the Great (A.D. 379-A.D. 395), the Church and the world seemed, in some respects at any rate, to have made terms with each other. The world, without ceasing to be the world, was no longer outside, but had been admitted within the sacred enclosure. And that Roman world of the fourth century, what a detestable world it was! On this point Christian writers of every school seem to be agreed. The fervent and eloquent Roman Catholic, Montalembert, quotes and adopts the words of the Protestant Guizot, who says, "The sovereigns and the immense majority of the people had embraced Christianity; but at bottom civil society was pagan; it retained the institutions, the laws, and the manners of paganism. It was a society which paganism, and not Christianity, had made.' e." Montalembert adds that "this

In Vitâ Malchi, § 1, P. L., xxii. 53.

2 Church History, ed. 1882, ii. 3.

Guizot, Histoire de la Civilization en France, lect. ii., quoted in Montalembert's Monks of the West (English trans., 1861, i. 263). See also Additional Note 56, p. 477.

paganism was paganism under its most degenerate form. . Nothing," he says, "has ever equalled the abject condition of the Romans of the empire. . . . With the ancient freedom, all virtue, all manliness, disappeared. There remained only a society of officials, without strength, without honour, and without rights. . . . We must acknowledge that in this so-called Christian society, the moral poverty is a thousand times greater than the material, and that servitude has crushed souls more than bodies. Everything is enervated, attenuated, and decrepit. Not a single great man nor illustrious individual rises to the surface of that mire. Eunuchs and sophists of the court govern the State without control, experiencing no resistance but from the Church." These last words guard Montalembert's meaning.1 He is speaking of civil society which was now nominally inside the Church; but, side by side with this Christianized paganism, the Church still handed on the glorious traditions which had been bequeathed to her by the age of the martyrs. Though it may be true that the civil society of the fourth and fifth centuries produced no great men, yet the hierarchy of the Church produced a galaxy of heroes. Let me name only five, S. Athanasius, S. Basil, S. Ambrose, S. Chrysostom, and S. Augustine. A religious institution which can produce such splendid names is undoubtedly still full of life; but nevertheless the Church, which had admitted the world within her precincts, was in a very different condition from the Church during the first three centuries of her existence. Speaking of the great saints of the post-Nicene epoch, Montalembert says, "That long cry of grief, which echoes through all the pages which Christian writers and saints have left to us, strikes us at once with an intensity which has never been surpassed in the succession of time. They felt themselves attacked and swallowed up by pagan corruption. Listen to Jerome, Chrysostom, Augustine, Salvian especially; listen to them all! They denounced the precocious decay and disgraceful downfall of the Christian people, who had become a prey to vice. They saw with despair the majority of the faithful precipitate themselves into the voluptuousness of paganism. The frightful taste for bloody or obscene spectacles, for the games of the circus, the combats of the gladiators, all the shameful frivolities, all the prostitutions of persecuting Rome, came to assail the new converts, and to subjugate the sons of the martyrs. However great a margin we may leave for exaggeration in these unanimous complaints, they undoubtedly prove that the political victory of Christianity, far from having assured the definite triumph of Christian principles in the world, had 1 Montalembert, op. cit., pp. 264, 269, 271, 272.

provoked a revival of all the vices which the Christian faith S ought to have annihilated." 1

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It was impossible for the effects of this decay of Christian life to be confined to the ranks of the laity. That decay necessarily also affected many of the clergy, and even of the bishops. There were, no doubt, in that age many saintly bishops, priests, and deacons. But there were also timeserving bishops, worldly bishops, courtier bishops, heretical bishops, ambitious and haughty bishops. The Emperors set the example of giving immense donations of lands and money to the churches, especially to the great churches in the principal cities of the empire; and, most of all, these gifts were lavished on the primatial church in Rome, the capital city of the civilized world. And the example of the Emperors was followed by all classes of society. The property of each church, or at any rate the income, was at the disposal of the bishop for the time being; and so it came to pass that, especially in the more important churches, the office of bishop became an object of ambition for worldly-minded men. A pagan historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, speaks of the great wealth which the Roman bishops owed to the donations of the matrons; and he says that it ought not to be wondered at, that the candidates for the Roman episcopate were ready to sacrifice everything to obtain it. The popes, he tells us, ride in chariots splendidly attired, and sit at a profuse, more than imperial, table. He goes on to say that it had been happy for them if they had followed the example of many of the bishops in the provinces, who, by their frugal and simple mode of life, commended their pure and modest virtue to the Deity and to all His true worshippers. Ammianus Marcellinus makes these remarks with special reference to the contests, and even bloodshed, which disgraced the Roman Church on the occasion of the election of Pope Damasus in A.D. 366.2 Another pagan, Vettius Praetextatus, who was generally esteemed for the integrity of his life, and who occupied the high post of prefect of the city, used to say laughingly to Pope Damasus, "Make me Bishop of Rome, and I will become a Christian to-morrow." It is S. Jerome who mentions this fact.3 We have a startling proof of the worldliness which had crept into the very sanctuary of the Church, in an edict of the Emperor Valentinian I., addressed to Pope Damasus, which was publicly read in the churches of Rome. The Emperor "admonished the ecclesiastics and monks not to frequent the houses of widows and virgins;

1 Montalembert, op. cit., pp. 255, 256.

De Broglie, L'Eglise et l'Empire Romain au iv Siècle, part. iii. i. 40. 3 Lib. contra Joann. Jerosol., § 8, P. L., xxiii. 361.

and he menaced their disobedience with the animadversion of the civil judge. The director was no longer permitted to receive any gift, or legacy, or inheritance, from the liberality of his spiritual daughter; every testament contrary to this edict was declared null and void, and the illegal donation was confiscated for the use of the treasury. By a subsequent regulation, it would seem," so Gibbon tells us, "that the same provisions were extended to nuns and bishops; and that all persons of the ecclesiastical order were rendered incapable of receiving any testamentary gifts, and strictly confined to the natural and legal rights of inheritance." Perhaps it will be said that this was an unfair and tyrannical enactment of the civil power. Let us, then, hear how S. Jerome comments on it. He says, in a letter to the priest Nepotianus, "The priests of idols, players, charioteers of the circus, harlots even, can freely receive legacies and donations, and it has been necessary to make a law excluding clerics and monks from this right. Who has made such a law? the persecuting Emperors? No; but Christian Emperors. I do not complain of it. I do not complain of the law, but I complain bitterly that we should have deserved it. Cautery is good; it is the wound which requires the cautery which is to be regretted. The prudent severity of the law ought to be a protection, but our avarice has not been restrained by it. We laugh at it, and evade it by setting up trustees."2 S. Ambrose also refers to the law in terms, which imply that it was needed. I think that I have said enough to show that the nominal conversion of the empire lowered the spiritual tone of the Church at large, and of the clergy no less than of the laity; and undoubtedly it was in large cities like Rome that the poison of worldliness worked the chief harm.

No doubt, in the earlier decades of the fourth century, the bishops, who succeeded one another in the Roman see as in other great sees, had received their training during the ages of persecution; but as time went on the Church was more and more governed by bishops who had been brought up in the full sunshine of worldly prosperity. The bishops were elected by the clergy and people, and if the tone of the clergy and people gradually deteriorated, such deterioration would be sure in the end to show itself in the character of those who were chosen to fill the episcopal thrones. It is obvious that the process of deterioration would not go on

1 See Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxv., Murray's edit., 1862, iii. 253.

2

chap. xi.

Ep. lii., § 6, P. L., xxii. 532. Compare S. Jerome, by the Rev. E. L. Cutts, 3 S. Ambros. Ep. xviii. ad Valentinianum, § 13.