bringing forward her exhaustless resources, and calling into existence a
wealth of new elements,--societies, corporations, and institutions,--so
is the need more deeply felt for a powerful supreme guide to keep them
all in health and harmony, to direct them in their various spheres, and
in their several ways towards the common ends and purposes of all, and
thus to provide against decay, variance, and confusion. Such an office
the Primacy alone can discharge, and the importance of the Papacy
increases as the organisation of the Church is more complete. One of its
most important but most delicate duties is to act as an independent,
impartial, and dispassionate mediator between the churches and the
governments of the different States, and between the conflicting claims
and contradictory idiosyncrasies of the various nations. Yet, though the
Papacy is so obviously an essential part of a Church whose mission is to
all mankind, it is the chosen object of attack both to enemies of
Catholicism and to discontented Catholics. Serious and learned men
complain of its tyranny, and say that it claims universal dominion, and
watches for an opportunity of obtaining it; and yet, in reality, there
is no power on earth whose action is restricted by more sacred and
irresistible bonds than that of the Holy See. It is only by the closest
fidelity to the laws and tradition of the Church that the Popes are able
to secure the obedience and the confidence of Catholics. Pius VII., who,
by sweeping away the ancient church of France, and depriving
thirty-seven protesting bishops of their sees, committed the most
arbitrary act ever done by a Pope, has himself described the rules which
guided the exercise of his authority:--
The nature and constitution of the Catholic Church impose on the
Pope, who is the head of the Church, certain limits which he cannot
transgress.... The Bishops of Rome have never believed that they
could tolerate any alteration in those portions of the discipline
which are directly ordained by Jesus Christ; or in those which, by
their nature, are connected with dogma, or in those which heretics
assail in support of their innovations.
The chief points urged against the ambition of Rome are the claim of the
deposing Power, according to the theory that all kinds of power are
united in the Church, and the protest against the Peace of Westphalia,
the basis of the public law and political order of modern Europe. It is
enough to cite one of the many authorities which may be cited in
refutation of the first objection. Cardinal Antonelli, Prefect of
Propaganda, states in his letter to the Irish bishops, 1791, that "the
See of Rome has never taught that faith is not to be kept with those of
another religion, or that an oath sworn to kings who are separated from
the Catholic communion may be broken, or that the Pope is permitted to
touch their temporal rights and possessions." The Bull in which Boniface
VIII. set up the theory of the supremacy of the spiritual over the
secular power was retracted soon after his death.
The protest of Innocent X. against the Peace of Westphalia is one of the
glories of the Papacy. That peace was concluded on an unchristian and
tyrannical principle, introduced by the Reformation, that the subjects
may be compelled to follow the religion of the ruler. This was very
different in principle and in effect from the intolerance of the ages of
faith, when prince and people were members of one religion, and all were
agreed that no other could be permitted in the State. Every heresy that
arose in the Middle Ages involved revolutionary consequences, and would
inevitably have overthrown State and society, as well as Church,
wherever it prevailed. The Albigenses, who provoked the cruel
legislation against heretics, and who were exterminated by fire and
sword, were the Socialists of those days. They assailed the fundamental
institutions of society, marriage, family, and property, and their
triumph would have plunged Europe into the barbarism and licence of
pagan times. The principles of the Waldenses and the Lollards were
likewise incompatible with European civilisation. In those days the law
relating to religion was the same for all. The Pope as well as the king
would have lost his crown if he had fallen into heresy. During a
thousand years, from the fall of Rome to the appearance of Luther, no
Catholic prince ever made an attempt to introduce a new religion into
his dominions, or to abandon the old. But the Reformation taught that
this was the supreme duty of princes; whilst Luther declared that in
matters of faith the individual is above every authority, and that a
child could understand the Scriptures better than Popes or Councils, he
taught at the same time, with an inconsistency which he never attempted
to remove, that it is the duty of the civil power to exterminate popery,
to set up the Gospel, and to suppress every other religion.
The result was a despotism such as the world had never seen. It was
worse than the Byzantine system; for there no attempt was made to change
the faith of the people. The Protestant princes exercised an
ecclesiastical authority more arbitrary than the Pope had ever
possessed; for the papal authority can only be used to maintain an
existing doctrine, whilst theirs was aggressive and wholly unlimited.
Possessing the power to command, and to alter in religion, they
naturally acquired by degrees a corresponding absolutism in the civil
order. The consistories, the office by which the sovereign ruled the
Church, were the commencement of bureaucratic centralisation. A great
lawyer of those days says, that after the treaties of Westphalia had
recognised the territorial supremacy over religion, the business of
administration in the German States increased tenfold. Whilst that
system remained in its integrity, there could be no peaceful
neighbourhood between Catholics and Protestants. From this point of
view, the protest of the Pope was entirely justified. So far from having
been made in the spirit of the mediaeval authority, which would have been
fatal to the work of the Congress, it was never used by any Catholic
prince to invalidate the treaties. They took advantage of the law in
their own territories to exercise the _jus reformandi_. It was not
possible for them to tolerate a body which still refused to tolerate the
Catholic religion by the side of its own, which accordingly eradicated
it wherever it had the means, and whose theory made the existence of
every religion depend on the power and the will of the sovereign. A
system which so resolutely denied that two religions could coexist in
the same State, put every attempt at mutual toleration out of the
question. The Reformation was a great movement against the freedom of
conscience--an effort to subject it to a new authority, the arbitrary
initiative of a prince who might differ in religion from all his
subjects. The extermination of obstinate Catholics was a matter of
course; Melanchthon insisted that the Anabaptists should be put to
death, and Beza was of opinion that Anti-Trinitarians ought to be
executed, even after recantation. But no Lutheran could complain when
the secular arm converted him into a Calvinist. "Your conscience is in
error," he would say, "but under the circumstances you are not only
justified, but compelled, on my own principles, to act as you do."[336]
The resistance of the Catholic Governments to the progress of a religion
which announced that it would destroy them as soon as it had the power,
was an instinct of self-preservation. No Protestant divine denied or
disguised the truth that his party sought the destruction of
Catholicism, and would accomplish it whenever they could. The
Calvinists, with their usual fearless consistency, held that as civil
and ecclesiastical power must be in the same hands, no prince had any
right to govern who did not belong to them. Even in the Low Countries,
where other sects were free, and the notion of unity abandoned, the
Catholics were oppressed.
This new and aggressive intolerance infected even Catholic countries,
where there was neither, as in Spain, religious unity to be preserved;
nor, as in Austria, a menacing danger to be resisted. For in Spain the
persecution of the Protestants might be defended on the mediaeval
principle of unity, whilst under Ferdinand II. it was provoked in the
hereditary dominions by the imminent peril which threatened to dethrone
the monarch, and to ruin every faithful Catholic. But in France the
Protestant doctrine that every good subject must follow the religion of
his king grew out of the intensity of personal absolutism. At the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the official argument was the will of
the sovereign--an argument which in Germany had reigned so triumphantly
that a single town, which had ten times changed masters, changed its
religion ten times in a century. Bayle justly reproaches the Catholic
clergy of France with having permitted, and even approved, a proceeding
so directly contrary to the spirit of their religion, and to the wishes
of the Pope. A convert, who wrote a book to prove that Huguenots were in
conscience bound to obey the royal edict which proscribed their worship,
met with applause a hundred years later. This fault of the French clergy
was expiated in the blood of their successors.
The excess of evil led to its gradual cure. In England Protestantism
lost its vigour after the victory over the Catholic dynasty; religion
faded away, and with it that religious zeal which leads to persecution:
when the religious antagonism was no longer kept alive by a political
controversy, the sense of right and the spirit of freedom which belongs
to the Anglo-Saxon race accomplished the work which indifference had
begun. In Germany the vitality of the Lutheran theology expired after it
had lasted for about two hundred years. The intellectual contradictions
and the social consequences of the system had become intolerable to the
German mind. Rationalism had begun to prevail, when Frederick II.
declared that his subjects should work out their salvation in their own
way. That generation of men, who looked with contempt on religious zeal,
looked with horror on religious persecution. The Catholic Church, which
had never taught that princes are supreme over the religion of their
subjects, could have no difficulty in going along with public opinion
when it disapproved of compulsion in matters of conscience. It was
natural that in the new order of things, when Christendom had lost its
unity, and Protestantism its violence, she should revert to the position
she occupied of old, when she admitted other religions to equal rights
with herself, and when men like St. Ambrose, St. Martin, and St. Leo
deprecated the use of violence against heretics. Nevertheless, as the
preservation of morality depends on the preservation of faith, both
alike are in the interest and within the competence of the State. The
Church of her own strength is not strong enough to resist the advance of
heresy and unbelief. Those enemies find an auxiliary in the breast of
every man whose weakness and whose passions repel him from a Church
which imposes such onerous duties on her members. But it is neither
possible to define the conditions without which liberty must be fatal to
the State, nor the limits beyond which protection and repression become
tyrannical, and provoke a reaction more terrible than the indifference
of the civil power. The events of the last hundred years have tended in
most places to mingle Protestants and Catholics together, and to break
down the social and political lines of demarcation between them; and
time will show the providential design which has brought about this
great change.
These are the subjects treated in the first two chapters on "The Church
and the Nations," and on the Papacy in connection with the universality
of Catholicism, as contrasted with the national and political dependence
of heresy. The two following chapters pursue the topic farther in a
general historical retrospect, which increases in interest and
importance as it proceeds from the social to the religious purpose and
influence of the Papacy, and from the past to the present time. The
third chapter, "The Churches and Civil Liberty," examines the effects of
Protestantism on civil society. The fourth, entitled "The Churches
without a Pope," considers the actual theological and religious fruits
of separation from the visible Head of the Church.
The independence of the Church, through that of her Supreme Pontiff, is
as nearly connected with political as with religious liberty, since the
ecclesiastical system which rejects the Pope logically leads to
arbitrary power. Throughout the north of Europe--in Sweden and Denmark,
in Mecklenburg and Pomerania, in Prussia, Saxony, and Brunswick--the
power which the Reformation gave to the State introduced an unmitigated
despotism. Every security was removed which protected the people
against the abuse of the sovereign power, and the lower against the
oppression of the upper class. The crown became, sooner or later,
despotic; the peasantry, by a long series of enactments, extending to
the end of the seventeenth century, was reduced to servitude; the
population grew scanty, and much of the land went out of cultivation.
All this is related by the Protestant historians and divines, not in the
tone of reluctant admission, but with patriotic indignation,
commensurate with the horrors of the truth. In all these countries
Lutheran unity subsisted. If Calvinism had ever succeeded in obtaining
an equal predominance in the Netherlands, the power of the House of
Orange would have become as despotic as that of the Danish or the
Prussian sovereigns. But its triumph was impeded by sects, and by the
presence of a large Catholic minority, destitute indeed of political
rights or religious freedom, but for that very reason removed from the
conflicts of parties, and therefore an element of conservatism, and a
natural ally of those who resisted the ambition of the Stadtholders. The
absence of religious unity baffled their attempts to establish arbitrary
power on the victory of Calvinism, and upheld, in conjunction with the
brilliant policy abroad, a portion of the ancient freedom. In Scotland,
the other home of pure Calvinism, where intolerance and religious
tyranny reached a pitch equalled only among the Puritans in America, the
perpetual troubles hindered the settlement of a fixed political system,
and the restoration of order after the union with England stripped the
Presbyterian system of its exclusive supremacy, and opened the way for
tolerance and freedom.
Although the political spirit of Anglicanism was as despotic as that of
every other Protestant system, circumstances prevented its full
development. The Catholic Church had bestowed on the English the great
elements of their political prosperity,--the charter of their liberties,
the fusion of the races, and the abolition of villeinage,--that is,
personal and general freedom, and national unity. Hence the people were
so thoroughly impregnated with Catholicism that the Reformation was
imposed on them by foreign troops in spite of an armed resistance; and
the imported manufacture of Geneva remained so strange and foreign to
them, that no English divine of the sixteenth century enriched it with a
single original idea. The new Church, unlike those of the Continent, was
the result of an endeavour to conciliate the Catholic disposition of the
people, by preserving as far as possible the externals to which they
were attached; whilst the queen--who was a Protestant rather by policy
than by conviction--desired no greater change than was necessary for her
purpose. But the divines whom she placed at the head of the new Church
were strict Calvinists, and differed from the Puritans only in their
submission to the court. The rapidly declining Catholic party accepted
Anglicanism as the lesser evil; while zealous Protestants deemed that
the outward forms ought to correspond to the inward substance, and that
Calvinistic doctrines required a Calvinistic constitution. Until the end
of the century there was no Anglican theology; and the attempt to devise
a system in harmony with the peculiar scheme and design of the
institution, began with Hooker. The monarch was absolute master in the
Church, which had been established as an instrument of royal influence;
and the divines acknowledged his right by the theory of passive
obedience. The consistent section of the Calvinists was won over, for a
time, by the share which the gentry obtained in the spoils of the
Church, and by the welcome concession of the penal laws against her,
until at last they found that they had in their intolerance been forging
chains for themselves. One thing alone, which our national jurists had
recognised in the fifteenth century as the cause and the sign of our
superiority over foreign States--the exclusion of the Roman code, and
the unbroken preservation of the common law--kept England from sinking
beneath a despotism as oppressive as that of France or Sweden.
As the Anglican Church under James and Charles was the bulwark of
arbitrary power, the popular resistance took the form of ecclesiastical
opposition. The Church continued to be so thoroughly committed to the
principle of unconditional submission to the power from which it derived
its existence, that James II. could reckon on this servile spirit as a
means of effecting the subversion of the Establishment; and Defoe
reproached the bishops with having by their flattery led on the king,
whom they abandoned in the moment of his need. The Revolution, which
reduced the royal prerogative, removed the oppressiveness of the royal
supremacy. The Established Church was not emancipated from the crown,
but the Nonconformists were emancipated from the tyranny of the
Established Church. Protestantism, which in the period of its power
dragged down by its servility the liberties of the nation, did
afterwards, in its decay and disorganisation, by the surrender of its
dogmatic as well as of its political principle, promote their recovery
and development. It lost its oppressiveness in proportion as it lost its
strength, and it ceased to be tyrannical when divines had been forced to
give up its fundamental doctrine, and when its unity had been dissolved
by the sects. The revival of those liberties which, in the Middle Ages,
had taken root under the influence of the Church, coincided with the
progress of the Protestant sects, and with the decay of the penal laws.
The contrast between the political character of those countries in which
Protestantism integrally prevailed, and that of those in which it was
divided against itself, and could neither establish its system nor work
out its consequences, is as strongly marked as the contrast between the
politics of Catholic times and those which were introduced by the
Reformation. The evil which it wrought in its strength was turned to
good by its decline.
Such is the sketch of the effects of the Protestant apostasy in the
political order, considered chiefly in relation to the absence of a
supreme ecclesiastical authority independent of political control. It
would require far more space to exhibit the positive influence of
heretical principles on the social foundations of political life; and
the picture would not be complete without showing the contrast exhibited
by Catholic States, and tracing their passage from the mediaeval system
under the influence of the reaction against the Reformation. The third
chapter covers only a portion of this extensive subject; but it shows
the action of the new mode of ecclesiastical government upon the civil
order, and proves that the importance of the Papacy is not confined to
its religious sphere. It thus prepares the way for the subject discussed
in the fourth chapter,--the most comprehensive and elaborate in the
book.
Dr. Doellinger begins his survey of the churches that have renounced the
Pope with those of the Eastern schism. The Patriarch of Constantinople,
whose ecclesiastical authority is enormous, and whose opportunities of
extorting money are so great that he is generally deposed at the end of
two or three years, in order that many may succeed each other in the
enjoyment of such advantages, serves not as a protection, but as an
instrument for the oppression of the Christians. The Greek clergy have
been the chief means by which the Turks have kept down both the Greek
and the Slavonic population, and the Slavs are by degrees throwing off
their influence. Submission to the civil power is so natural in
communities separated from the Universal Church, that the Greeks look up
to the Turkish authorities as arbiters in ecclesiastical matters. When
there was a dispute between Greeks and Armenians respecting the mixture
of water with the wine in the chalice, the question was referred for
decision to the proper quarter, and the Reis Effendi decided that, wine
being condemned by the Koran, water alone might be used. Yet to this
pusillanimous and degenerate Church belong the future of European
Turkey, and the inheritance of the sinking power of the Turks. The
vitality of the dominant race is nearly exhausted, and the
Christians--on whose pillage they live--exceed them, in increasing
proportions, in numbers, prosperity, intelligence, and enterprise.
The Hellenic Church, obeying the general law of schismatical
communities, has exchanged the authority of the patriarch for that of
the crown, exercised through a synod, which is appointed on the Russian
model by the Government. The clergy, disabled for religious purposes by
the necessity of providing for their families, have little education and
little influence, and have no part in the revival of the Grecian
intellect. But the people are attached to their ecclesiastical system,
not for religion's sake, for infidelity generally accompanies education,
but as the defence of their nationality.
In Russia the Catholic Church is considered heretical because of her
teaching on the procession of the Holy Ghost, and schismatical in
consequence of the claims of the Pope. In the doctrine of purgatory
there is no essential difference; and on this point an understanding
could easily be arrived at, if none had an interest in widening the
breach. In the seventeenth century, the Russian Church retained so much
independence that the Metropolitan of Kiev could hold in check the power
of the Czar, and the clergy were the mediators between the people and
the nobles or the crown. This influence was swept away by the despotism
of Peter the Great; and under Catherine II. the property of the Church
was annexed to the crown lands, in order, it was said, to relieve the
clergy of the burden of administration. Yet even now the Protestant
doctrine that the sovereign is supreme in all matters of religion has
not penetrated among the Russians. But though the Czar does not possess
this authority over the national Church, of which he is a member, the
Protestant system has conceded it to him in the Baltic provinces. Not
only are all children of mixed marriages between Protestants and
schismatics brought up in the religion of the latter, by which the
gradual decline of Protestanism is provided for, but conversions to
Protestanism, even of Jews, Mohammedans, and heathens, are forbidden;
and, in all questions of doctrine or of liturgy, the last appeal is to
the emperor. The religious despotism usually associated with the Russian
monarchy subsists only for the Protestants.
The Russian Church is dumb; the congregation does not sing, the priest
does not preach. The people have no prayer-books, and are therefore
confined to the narrow circle of their own religious ideas. Against the
cloud of superstition which naturally gathers in a religion of
ceremonies, destitute of the means of keeping alive or cultivating the
religious sentiments of the people, there is no resource. In spite of
the degeneracy of their clergy, which they are unable to feel, the
Russians cling with patriotic affection to their Church, and identify
its progress and prosperity with the increase of their empire. As it is
an exclusively national institution, every war may become a war of
religion, and it is the attachment to the Church which creates the
longing and the claim to possess the city from which it came. From the
Church the empire derives its tendency to expand, and the Czar the hopes
of that universal dominion which was promised to him by the Synod of
Moscow in 1619, and for which a prayer was then appointed. The
schismatical clergy of Eastern Europe are the channel of Russian
influence, the pioneers of Russian aggression. The political dependence
of the Church corresponds to its political influence; subserviency is
the condition of the power it possesses. The certificate of Easter
confession and communion is required for every civil act, and is
consequently an object of traffic. In like manner, the confessor is
bound to betray to the police all the secrets of confession which affect
the interest of the Government. In this deplorable state of corruption,
servitude, and decay within, and of threatening hostility to Christian
civilisation abroad, the Russian Church pays the penalty of its
Byzantine descent.