so directly, is Sacerdotalism. I say not so directly, because the genius
of Christianity is so distinctly negative of all priesthood that, had
there been even an express prohibition of it, its contradiction to the
whole tone of the New Testament could not have been more apparent. Not
more certainly are the sacrifices of the Jewish law abolished in the
sacrifice of Christ, according to the Pauline theology, than the
Levitical priesthood stands abolished in the priesthood of Christ and in
the priesthood of the individual members of his spiritual body (2 Peter
v. 9).[20] Whence, then, came our Christian priesthood? Partly, I
suspect, as the Jewish Sabbath was interpolated into the Christian
Lord's Day, from the nearness and external similitude of the two
things--the presbyter being to the outward eye pretty much the same
as the priest was to the Jewish worshippers; partly from the
self-importance which is the besetting sin of all bodies of men
prominently planted in the social platform, and which induces them to
magnify their vocation, and in doing so stilt their professional pride
up into the attitude of a very stately and a very reputable virtue. The
proper functions of the office-bearers of the early Christian Church,
call them overseers, bishops, or what you will, were so honourable and
so beneficent that, especially with an unlearned and unthinking people,
the reverential respect due to the actors might easily pass into a
superstitious belief in the mystical virtue of the operations of which
they were the conductors; and this ready submission on the part of the
people, holding out a willing hand to the natural self-importance and
potentiated self-estimate of the clerical body, resulted in a
four-square system of sacerdotal control, sacerdotal virtue, and
sacerdotal influence, to which we shall search for a parallel in vain
through all the annals of Asiatic and African heathenism. Nay, I can
readily believe that those who can find a priesthood in the genius of
the gospel and the apostolic institution of the Christian Church, will
naturally be inclined to maintain that the superior power of the
Gregories, Bonifaces, and Innocents of the medieval Church, as
contrasted with anything that we read or know of the Egyptian, Hebrew,
and Roman pontiffs, is the natural and necessary outcome of the superior
excellence of the Christian religion; and this, no doubt, is the only
comfortable belief on which all forms of Christian sacerdotalism can
repose.
So much for the corruptions of the Christian religion proceeding from
what, in theological language, might be called the indwelling sin of the
Church, unstimulated by any strong external seduction. But this
seduction came. After three centuries of hardship, manfully endured in
the school of adversity, the more severe trial of prosperity had to be
gone through. The Church, which had been declared to be not of this
world, and had stood face to face with the greatest political power the
world ever knew in a position of sublime moral isolation, was now
adopted by the State, and formed a bond of the most intimate connection
with its hereditary persecutors. The starting-point of the oldest
heathen social attitude, the identity of Church and State, seemed to be
recalled; and a Justinian on the shores of the Bosphorus seemed as
really a head of the Church as a Menes or an Amenophis on the banks of
the Nile. But under the outward likeness a radical difference lay
concealed. As an essentially ethical society, with its own special
credentials, its separate history, and its independent triumph, the
Christian Church might form an alliance with a purely secular
institution like the State, but it could not be absorbed or identified
with it. That alliance might be made beneficially in various ways and on
various terms; the civil magistrate might be proud to be called the
friend and the brother of the Christian bishop, or he might humble
himself to be its servant, but he never could be its master. The
alliance therefore was, as it ought to be, all in favour of the
spiritual body; the Church gained the civil power to execute its decrees
and to patronise its missions; but a Christian State could never gain
the right to dictate the creed or perform the functions of the Church.
The idea that there is anything absolutely sinful, or necessarily
pernicious, in the conception of an alliance between the Church and the
State, is one of those hyperconscientious crotchets of modern British
sectarianism at which the Muse of history can only smile. There can be
no greater sin in an Established Church than in an Established
University or an Established Royal Academy. Religion and Science and Art
have their separate and well-marked provinces, in the administration of
which they may wisely seek for the co-operation, though they will always
jealously avoid the dictation, of the State. But, though there could be
no sin in the Church receiving the right hand of fellowship from the
State, there might be danger, and that of a very serious description.
Nothing strikes a man so much in the reading of the New Testament as the
little respect which it pays to riches and the pomp and pride of life,
and worldly honours and dignities of all kinds. "_How can ye
believe who receive honour one from another?_" is a sentence
that cuts very deep into the connection between the Church and State,
which might readily mean the alliance of a secular institution,
delighting in pomp and parade and glittering show, with a religion of
which, like the philosophy of the porch, the most prominent feature was
unworldliness, humility, and spirituality. Here unquestionably was
danger: an alliance in which, as in an ill-consorted marriage, the lower
element was as likely to drag down the higher as the higher to lift up
the lower. And so it actually happened. The Church was secularised.
Alongside of the hundred and one monkeries of stolid asceticism and the
hundred and one mummeries of sacerdotal ceremonialism, there grew up in
the process of the ages a consolidated hierarchy of such concentrated,
secular, and sacred potency that the loftiest crowned heads of Europe
ducked beneath its shadow and quailed beneath its ban. To understand
this, we must take note of the change by which the scattered presbyters
of the primitive Church were gradually massed into a strong aristocracy,
which in due season, after the fashion of the State, found its key-stone
in an ecclesiastical monarch. It was the wisdom of the founders of the
Christian Church not to lay down any fixed norm of official
administration, but to leave all the external machinery of a purely
spiritual institution free to adapt itself to the existing forms of
society as time and circumstance and national genius might demand. The
form of government natural to the Church in its earliest stages was
democratic, with a certain loose, ill-defined element of presidential
aristocracy. But in an age which had bidden a long farewell both to the
spirit and the form of democracy in civil administration, such a form of
government in the Church could not hope to maintain itself. Under the
influence of the magnificent autocracy of Rome in its decadence, the
simple overseer or superintendent (ἐπίσκοπος) of a remote
provincial congregation of believers gradually grew into a metropolitan
dignitary, and culminated in the wielder of a secular sovereignty
sitting in council with the most influential monarchs of Europe. The
epiphany of an absolute monarch with a triple tiara on his head when
contrasted with the simplicity and unworldliness of the primitive
bishops wears such a strange look that it has been judged, especially in
Protestant countries, with a more sweeping severity than it deserved. As
a mere form of government, no man can give any good reason why the
Church should not be governed by a monarch as well as the State; the
bishop of Rome, as supreme head of the body of bishops all over
Christendom, and guided by them as his habitual advisers, was at least
as natural and as reasonable a guide for the direction of the conscience
of Christendom in the Middle Ages as the Council of Protestants who at
Dort, in the year 1618, condemned the greatest theologian and jurist of
the day to pine in a Dutch prison, or the Assembly of Divines in
Westminster who empowered the supreme magistrate to suppress the right
of free thought in the breasts of all persons who were not prepared to
set their seal to the damnatory dogmas of extreme Calvinism. Nay, so far
from there being anything anti-Christian or anti-social in the Popedom
as a form of Church government, we may safely say that in ages of
general turmoil, confusion, and violence, the admitted supremacy of the
visible head of a church founded on principles of peace and conciliation
could not act otherwise than beneficially. But when the person in whom
this moral supremacy was vested became the acknowledged head of a
secular princedom, the case was altered. It was an unhappy day for the
Christian Church, the most unhappy day perhaps in its whole eventful
history, when Pepin, the ambitious minister of the last of the
Merovingian kings, in the year 751, contrived to get out of Pope Zachary
a spiritual sanction for his usurption of his master's throne.
From that moment the Church was doomed to a blazing and brilliant, but a
sure career of downfall. The spiritual abetter of a secular crime had to
be rewarded for his pious subserviency: he received the exarchate of
Ravenna, and became a temporal prince. From that time forward the head
of the Christian Church, who ought to have stood before the world as a
model of all purity, truthfulness, peacefulness, and ethical nobility,
was condemned to serve two masters, God and Mammon, unworldly morality
and worldly power, which was impossible. From this time forward there
was not a single court intrigue in Europe, nor a single plot of any knot
of conspirators, into whose counsels the supreme bishop of the gospel of
peace might not be dragged, or, what is worse, into whose lawless and
ungodly machinations he might not be officially thrusting himself, in
order to preserve some accessory interest or gain some paltry advantage
altogether unconnected with his spiritual function. If there is any one
element, always of course excepting the element of gross sensuality and
absolute villainy, which more than another is adverse to the spirit of
Evangelical Christianity, it is the element of court intrigue, political
contention, and party feuds. In this region love, which is the life of
the regenerate soul, cannot breathe; truth is put under ban; lies
flourish; conscience is smothered; and low expediency everywhere takes
the place of lofty principle. So it fared not seldom with the Popes; and
much worse in the last degree; for wickedness, like everything that
lives, must live by growing, and the seed of secular ambition which was
sown in lies, will grow to robbery, blossom in lust, and ripen into
murder. This anywhere, but specially in Italy, where from the time of
the patrician Scipio, who suppressed the elder Gracchus, the hot
contenders for absolute power, in the eager pursuit of their object,
have never shrank from the free use of the assassin's dagger and
the poisoner's bowl. In fact, if the love of mere animal pleasure
makes a man a beast, it is the love of power that translates him into a
fiend; and of this sort of human fiends Italian history presents as
appalling a register as can be found anywhere in the annals of our race;
and at the top of this register stand some of the Popes, whose names are
as prominent in the story of ecclesiastical Rome as those of Nero,
Domitianus, and Heliogabalus are in the story of the imperial decadence.
When we cast a rapid glance--for it deserves nothing more--on
the revolting record of the Roman Popes in the age immediately preceding
the Reformation, we hear the solemn voice of history repeating again the
maxim above quoted--_corruptio optimi pessima_: when priests
are bad, they are very bad; when the salt of the gospel, which was meant
to preserve the moral life of society from putrescence, has lost its
savour, if not cast out, it is worse than useless--it becomes a
poison.
Before proceeding to the modern history of the Church, we ought to
emphasise in a special paragraph the fact that one unfortunate result of
the incorporation of the Church with the State was that the Church was
now in a position to request the State to lend its potent aid in
establishing the true doctrine of the gospel and suppressing all
heresies. That the State had a right to do so no man doubted; even in
democratic Greece free-thinking philosophers, such as Anaxagoras,
Diogenes, and Socrates, were banished or suffered death on charges of
impiety; and though, no doubt, political elements, as in the case of the
Arminians in Holland, worked along with the strictly religious feeling
to set the brand of atheism on those men, there cannot be any doubt that
where the State and the Church were so essentially one, persecutions for
unauthorised religious observances were perfectly legitimate, as indeed
the memorable case of the forcible suppression of the Dionysiac
mysteries, more than two hundred years before the earliest of the
Christian martyrdoms in Rome, abundantly testifies. But there was a
double horror in the religious persecution, after the establishment of
Christianity, now inaugurated for the first time--the horror of a
conduct so diametrically opposed to the spirit and the express
injunction of the Founder of the Gospel, in whose defence it was
practised, and the horror also that what was now violently suppressed
was not, as in the case of the Dionysiac mysteries, rather immoral
practices than erroneous beliefs, but simply and nakedly metaphysical
objections against metaphysical propositions in theology, which, whether
true or false, could not be made the subject of State action, or, in my
opinion at least, of ecclesiastical censure, without a flagrant
violation of that law of charity which a large philosophy and a catholic
Christianity equally enjoin. The banishment of Arius to Illyria, as the
civil consequence of the formal signature of the Trinitarian creed by
the decision of the Council of Nice in the year 325, though it made no
small noise in the world in those days, was a very innocent overture to
the barbarous dramas of fire and blood that were in after ages to be
enacted on this evil precedent. There are many grand places rich with
historical lessons in London, and not a few sad ones; but the saddest of
all is Smithfield. I can never pace the stones of this memorable site,
where our noblest Scot, Sir William Wallace, was disembowelled and
quartered to gratify the vengeance of an imperious Norman, without
thinking of the sad fate of the young and beautiful Anne Askew. This
lady, the daughter of a knight of good family in Lincolnshire, under
some of those stimulants of thought which were stirring up the stagnant
traditions of medieval piety, had been led to conceive serious doubts
with regard to the Scripture authority for some of the most universally
received doctrines of the Roman Church. This pious scepticism coming to
the ears of certain leading persons in Church and State, who, after the
example of the Nicean doctors, considered it a sacred duty in matters
pertaining to religion to tolerate no contradiction, first brought this
lady before the Lord Chancellor, who tore her limb from limb on the
rack, because she would not say that she believed what she could not
believe without denying her senses, and then dragged her to the
blood-stained pavement of Smithfield, where she was girt with gunpowder
bags and fenced with faggots, to be burnt to death, as if the God of
Christians were a second and enlarged edition of the old Moloch of
Palestine. And what was her offence--beautiful, young, pure, and
truthful woman, not more than twenty-five years of age--that she
should be treated in this worse than cannibalic style in the name of the
gospel of Jesus Christ? Simply that Henry VIII., in that style of
insolent masterdom which he showed so royally, and conceiting himself,
like a Scotch fool who came after him, to be a considerable theologian,
assumed the right to put the stamp of absolute kingship on the doctrine
of the Church that a piece of bread, over which a priestly benediction
had been pronounced by a priest, was by the mystical virtue of this
benediction changed into flesh, while the fair young lady persisted in
seeing nothing but bread. Let it be granted that the lady was in the
wrong and the churchly tradition right, it never could be right to tear
her flesh to shreds and to burn her bones to ashes because she held an
opinion which, to say the least of it, looked as like the truth as its
opposite. How sad, how sorrowfully sad, and what a commentary on what we
are ever and anon tempted to call poor, pitiful, prideful, and
presumptuous human nature, that Christianity had at that time been more
than fifteen hundred years in the world, sitting in high places, and
walking with triumphal banners over the earth, and yet neither the
princes of the earth nor the rulers of the Church should have retained
even a slight echo of that reproof from a mild Master to a zealous
disciple, to the effect that no man who knew the spirit of the divine
religion which He taught, would ever propose to bring fire down from
heaven or up from hell to consume the unbeliever.
Such enormities in the doctrine and practice of the Church, as we have
indicated rather than described, could lead to only one of two
issues--Reform or Revolution. The change brought about, though
contenting itself with the milder name, was in fact the more drastic
procedure. The European reformation of Martin Luther in 1517 was a
revolution in the Church, much more radical and much more worthy of so
strong a designation than the political revolution of 1688 in Great
Britain. It is needless to recapitulate the causes of offence; they were
only too patent--insolence, secularity, sensuality, venality,
idleness, vice, and worthlessness of every kind in the Church; but there
were two causes which, in addition to corruption from within, tended to
open the ears of Christendom largely to the cry for Church reform. These
were the stir in the intellectual movement from the days of the author
of the Divine Comedy downwards, enforced by the invention of printing in
the middle of the fifteenth century, which was amply sufficient to
become a danger to even a much less vulnerable creed than that which had
satisfied the crude demands of medieval intelligence; and, in the second
place, the hostility which the insolence and ambition of Churchmen had
roused in the secular magistracy--that is, not only the monarch and
his official ministers, but the great body of the higher nobility who
found themselves ousted from their place in the familiar counsels of the
monarch by the advocates and ambassadors of a foreign potentate. Thus
the two best friends of every Established Church in its normal state
were converted into enemies; and the natural indignation of the common
people at the licentious lives and gross venality of the clergy was
stimulated into an explosion by the desire of the secular dignities to
curb the pride of the clergy, and, it might lightly happen also, to rob
them of part of their overgrown wealth, nominally for the public good,
really for the aggrandisement of the Crown and the nobility. The
shameless nepotism of Pope Sixtus IV., the flagitious lives and
abhorrent practices of the Borgias, more fit for a sensational melodrama
in the lowest Parisian theatre than for the home of a Christian bishop;
the military rage of a Julius, who turned the Church of Christ into a
travelling camp and the bishop's crozier into a soldier's
sword; the literary dilettantism of the Court of Leo X., more eager to
distinguish itself by the elegant trimming of Latin versicles than by
apostolic zeal and Christian purity,--all this, so long as it
disported itself on Italian ground, the aristocracy of England and
Scotland might have continued to look on with indifference; but that the
son of anybody or nobody, in a county of unvalued clodhoppers, should
jostle them in the antechamber of the monarch, and claim precedence in
the hall of audience, simply because he was the supple instrument of an
insolent Italian priest, this was not to be borne; and so the
Reformation came, with the mob of the lowest classes, the mass of the
respectable middle classes, the most influential of the nobility, and
the power of the Crown, all in full cry against the ecclesiastical fox.
The revolution thus volcanically effected, and known in history under
the name of Protestantism, meant simply the right of every individual
member of the Christian Church to take the principles and the practice
of his Church directly from the original records of the Church, without
the intervention of any body of authorised interpreters; and the
necessary product of this right when exercised was first to declare
certain practices and doctrines that had grown up in the Church through
long centuries to be unauthorised departures from the original
simplicity and purity of the gospel; and, further, to deny that there
existed in the Christian Church, as originally constituted, any class or
caste of men enjoying the exclusive privilege to perform sacred
functions, and endowed with a divine virtue to perform sacramental
miracles by their consecrating touch,--in a word, that there was no
priesthood, properly so called, in the Reformed Christian Church. Nor is
this doctrine, as some may think, the teaching only of the Helvetic
confession, what certain persons have been fond to call extreme
Protestantism; for, though the word priest has been retained in the
English prayerbook as a minister in sacred things of a particular grade
and exercising a particular function, the attempt made by Archbishop
Laud and the Romanising party in the Reformed Church of England to
retain in the bosom of the Anglican Church the ideas which the ancient
Jews and the Romish Christians attached to the word _priest_,
proved a signal failure; and for the sacerdotal despotism which it
implied, as well as for the secular despotism which the priest advised
and encouraged the unfortunate king to assert, the adviser and the
advised justly lost their heads. Of all the teachings of Church history,
from the Waldenses in the twelfth century down to the present hour,
there is nothing more certain than this, that between Popery and
Protestantism there is no middle term possible. They may agree, in fact
they do agree, in many essential things, and in a few accidental; but in
the fundamental principle of Church administration they are
diametrically opposed. The principle of the one is sacerdotal authority,
absolute and unqualified; the principle of the other is individual and
congregational liberty. The one form of polity is a close oligarchy, the
other either a free democracy or an aristocracy more or less penetrated
by a democratic spirit.