^^^R A! f POWER . - : ; ; :. . : . .. nia PLAIN LECTUKES GEOWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER LONDON : GILBERT AND TUYINGTON, PRIXTEHS, ST. JOHX'd SQTIAHE. PLAIN LECTURES GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. JAMES CEAIGIE I'.OBEETSON, M.A. CANON OF CANTERBURY ; LATE PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON. unttcr tfjc Btrcction of tl)c STract Committee. LONDON: SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE SOLD AT THE DEPOSITORIES: 77, GREAT ftUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS; 4, ROYAL EXCHANGE; 48, PICCADILLY; AMD B7 ALL BOOKSELLERS. 39orfe: POTT, YOUNG, AND Co. ADVERTISEMENT. THE Lectures contained in this little volume were composed with, a view to delivery in King's College, London ; and in preparing them for the press, it has seemed well to retain the personal style of address which marks their origin. In such a book, any large display of autho- rities would be out of place ; but full references to the original sources may be found in a "History of the Christian Church," lately published by the same author. 1 PKECINCTS, CANTERBURY, May, 1876. 1 Pour vols. 8vo., or eight vols. small 8vo. Murray, Albemarle Street, London. CONTENTS. LIST OF BISHOPS OF ROME LECTURE I. The Roman See in Early Times .... 1 LECTURE II. Victor I. of Rome Hippolytus of Portus Cyprian of Carthage, A.D. 190258 ..... 24 LECTURE III. The Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325 ..... 43 LECTURE IV. From the First to the Second General Council, A.D. 325381 ....... 60 LECTURE V. From the Second to the Third General Council, A.D. 381 451 .... . . . .79 LECTURE VI. Loo the Great, A.D. 410461 ..... 94 Vlll CONTEXTS. LECTURE VII. PAGB From the Death of Leo the Great to that of Gregory the Great, A.D. 461604 110 LECTURE VIII. From the Death of Gregory the Great to that of Charlemagne, A.D. 604814 .... 129 LECTURE IX. From the Death of Charlemagne to the end of the Carolingian Dynasty, A.D. 814 887 . . . 154 LECTURE X. From the Deposition of Charles the Fat to the Elec- tion of Pope Clement II., A.D. 887 1046 . . 179 LECTURE XL Gregory VII., A.D. 10181085 196 LECTURE XII. From the Death of Gregory VII. to that of Innocent III., A.D. 1085 1216 216 LECTURE XIII. From the Death of Innocent III. to that of Boniface VIII., A.D. 12161303 243 LIST OF BISHOPS OF ROME. A.I). St. Peter. 67. Linus. 79. Cletus, Anencletus, or Anacletus. 91. Clement I. 100. Evaristus. 109. Alexander I. 119. Sixtnsl. A.D. 128. Telesphorus. 139. Hyginus. 142. Pius I. 157. Anicetus. 168. Soter. 177. Eleutherius. 190. Victor I. (Thus far the dates are more or less conjectural.) 202. Zephyrinus. 218. Callistusl. 223. Urban I. 230. Pontian. 235. Anterus. 236. Fabian. 251. Cornelius. 252. Lucius I. 253. Stephen I. 257. Sixtus II. 259. Dionysius. 269. Felix I. 275. Eutychian. 283. Cams. 296. Marcellinus. (A vacancy of four years.) 308. Marcellus. 310. Eusebius. 311. Melchiades. 314. Sylvester I. 336. Mark. 337. Julius I. 352. Liberius. 366. Damasus. 384. Siricius. 398. Anastasius I. 402. Innocent I. 417. Zosimus. 418. Boniface I. 422. Celestine I. 432. SixtusIII. 440. Leo I. 461. Hilary. 468. Simplicius. LIST OF BISHOPS OF ROME.- A.D. A.D. 483. Felix III. 687. Sergius I. 492. Gelasius I. 701. John VI. 496. Anastasius II. 705. John VII. 498. Symmachus. 703. Sisinnius. 514. Hormisdas. Constantino I. 523. John I. 715. Gregory II. 526. Felix IV. 731. Gregory III. 530. Boniface II. 741. Zacharias. 532. John II. 752. Stephen II. 535. Agapetus I. 757. Paul I. 536. Sylverius. 767. Constantino II. 537. Vigilius. 768. Stephen III. 555. Pelagius I. 772. Adrian I. 560. John III. 795. Leo III. 574. Benedict I. 816. Stephen IV. 578. Pelagius II. 817. Paschal I. 590. Gregory I. 824. Eugenius II. 604. Sabinian. 827. Valentine. 607. Boniface III. C* TTT 1 \jrYQgQTy X V 608. Boniface IV. 844. Sergius II. 615. Deusdedit. 847. Leo IV. 619. Boniface V. 855. Benedict III. 625. Honoring I. 858. Nicolas I. 638. Severinus. 867. Adrian II. 640. John IV. 872. John VIII. 642. Theodore I. 882. Marinus I. 649. Martin I. 884. Adrian III. 654. Eugenius I. 885. Stephen V. 657. Vitalian. 891. Formosus. 672. Adeodatns. 896. Boniface VI. 676. Donus. Stephen VI. 678. Agatho. 897. Romanus. 682. Leo II. Theodore II. 683. Benedict II. 898. John IX. 6S5. JohnV. 900. Benedict IV. 686. Conon. 903. LeoV. LIST OF BISHOPS OF EOME. XI A.D. A.D. Christopher. 904. Sergius III. 911. Anastasius III. 1073. Gregory VII. 1086. Victor III. 1088. Urban II. 913. Lando. 1099. Paschal II. 914. John X. 1118. GelasiusII. 928. Leo VI. 1119. Calixtus II. 929. Stephen VII. 931. John XL 1124. Honorius II. 1130. Innocent II. 936. Leo VII. 1143. Celestinell. 939. Stephen VHI. 942. Marinus II. 946. Agapetus II. 955. John XII. 1144. Lucius II. 1145. Eugenius III. 1153. Anastasias IV. 1154. Adrian IV. 963. LsoVIII. 1159. Alexander III. 964. Benedict V. 1181. Lucius III. 965. John XIII. 1185. Urban III. 972. Benedict VI. 974. Benedict VII. 1187. Gregory VIII. Clement III. 983. John XIV. 1191. Celestine III. 984. Boniface VII. 1198. Innocent III. 985. John XV. 1216. Honorius III. 996. Gregory V. 999. Sylvester II. 1003. John XVI. 1227. Gregory IX. 1241. Celestine IV. 1243. Innocent IV. John XVII. 1254. Alexander IV. 1009. Sergius IV. 1012. Benedict VIII. 1261. Urban IV. 1265. Clement IV. 1024. John XVIII. 1033. Benedict IX. 1271. Gregory X. 1276. Innocent V. 1045. Gregory VI. 1046. Clement II. Adrian V. John XXI. 1047. Damasus II. 1277. Nicolas III. 1048. Leo IX. 1281. Martin IV. 1054. Victor II. 1285. Honorius IV. 1057. Stephen IX. 1059. Nicolas II. 1288. Nicolas IV. 1294. Celestine V. 1061. Alexander II. Boniface VIII. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. LECTURE I. THE ROMAN SEE IN EARLY TIMES. ANY argument as to the claims which the Bishop of Rome advances to supremacy over the whole Church of Christ must, of course, be based On Holy Scripture. The advocates of the papacy allege that passage of St. Matthew xvi., where, after St. Peter had uttered the confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," our Lord spoke thus to him, "I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter (Uerpo?) , and upon this rock (eVl ravrrj rfj Trerpa) I will build My Church ; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever tlnu shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." They point 2 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. out that St. Peter is named first of the Apostles; and they allege as further proof the commission given to him by our Lord after His resurrec- tion " Feed My sheep." 1 To this we reply that the words cited do not bear the sense which Romanists would put on them. We argue from Scripture that there was no office in the Church higher than that of Apostle ; that St. Peter was but the first among a company of equals ; that the Church was not built on him alone, but " on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets ; " 2 that the pro- mises made to St. Peter, as a representative of others, were given to him, not as representing those who should succeed him in any one par- ticular place, but as representing the brother- hood of the Apostles, or them and their successors in the government of the Church, or the whole body of the Christian ministry, while other promises were given to him for his own person only ; so that the Bishops of Rome are not entitled by either class of promises to make that claim of inheritance from St. Peter which is put forward on their behalf. This, then, may serve as a rough statement of the argument from Scripture on the one side and on the other; and I need not here go 1 John sxi. 16, 17. 2 Eph. ii. 20. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. O further into the discussion of the scriptural question. I may, however, remark that it seems very possible to be somewhat too conten- tious as to the text of St. Matthew xvi. ; if, for example, it should be thought necessary, in controversy with Rome, to insist on the diffe- rence between the words ITer/Do? (Petros, the new name given to the Apostle) and Trerpa (petra, a rock), or to maintain that the rock on which the Church is founded must be either the Saviour Himself, or the confession which St. Peter had just been making. These are, indeed, opinions which have been, held by ancient writers of venerable authority, who had so concluded without any controversial intention. Yet it may be wiser not to fight this point, but to allow that St. Peter may have been the rock intended. For in truth the supposition that the rock was the Apostle him- self, the supposition that it was his profession of faith, the supposition that it was our Blessed Lord, the object of that faith all these suppo- sitions are really one. The apostle is viewed in connexion with his confession. The promise is made, not to the old man Simon, but to the new man Peter, in whom that confession is impersonated and embodied. 3 And when we 3 See Olshausen's Commentary on the passage. B 2 4 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. have thus granted that St. Peter may have been intended under the figure of the rock, the advocates of the papacy are really no nearer their end than if we had denied it. But now comes in the office of Ecclesiastical History, bridging over the interval between the apostolic age and our own time. We have seen that the Romanists interpret the texts of Scripture in one sense, and that we interpret them in another sense. The Roman- ists point, on the one hand, to the promises which they claim as belonging to St. Peter and his successors ; on the other hand, they point to the great phenomenon of the papacy, and they tell us that the papacy was foreshown in the promises that in it the promises are realized and fulfilled. "We, on our side, deny this ; and we say that history bears out our view, that it disagrees with and confutes the Roman view. We undertake to trace the story of the Roman see from the earliest evidence that can be found, to show that in the primitive times there neither existed in fact, nor was claimed as of right, any such supremacy as that which the see of Rome now claims ; we undertake to show how the Roman power advanced step by step, in age after age, until at length not by any prerogative divinely conferred on it from the THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. beginning, but by a slow, gradual, and distinctly traceable progress by means which, without forgetting the overruling control of the Divine Providence, we may call simply natural it attained its greatest fulness under such Popes as Gregory VII. in the latter half of the eleventh century, and Innocent III. in the beginning of the thirteenth. At the outset, we are met by two questions, which have been debated with much learning and with no less warmth : (1) Was St. Peter Bishop of Rome ? (2) Was he ever at Rome at all ? I shall not go into these questions, but shall content myself with expressing an opinion which is in accordance with that of our most respected divines in general (1) that St. Peter never was Bishop of Rome ; but (2) that it is an unreasonable scepticism, and an excess of controversial opposition, to deny the truth of the ancient belief that he visited Rome, and there suffered martyrdom in the reign of Nero. " This," says Dean Alford (a writer whose leanings, as I need hardly say, are not towards an unquestioning acceptance of traditional beliefs), " is a tradition which does not interfere with any known facts in Scripture or early history, and one which we have no 6 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. means of disproving, as we have no interest in disproving it." "* As to the Roman story that St. Peter was Bishop of Rome for twenty-five years, a period which no Roman Bishop in later times has equalled, with the exception of Pius IX., and which, until the year 1871, when Pius completed the twenty-fifth year of his pontificate, it was popularly believed that no pope could live to equal as to this story there are chronological difficulties which can- not be got over. But, if it were not so, we have no interest in disproving this any more than the statement of St. Peter's residence and martyrdom at Rome. For, besides that, as I have said, there is no ground for supposing our Lord's promises to the Apostle to have been intended for transmission to his successors in any particular place, we know from certain evidence that the early Bishops of Rome neither made such claims nor enjoyed such prerogatives as the papal theory supposes. We know that there was no distinction between them and other bishops, but such as is to be naturally accounted for naturally, and without any reference to prophecies, or to special endow- ments from above by the secular greatness of the city. For this was the sole original ground 4 Prolegomena to the Greek Testament, vol. iv. p. 121. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 7 of distinction between one bishop and another. It was held that all bishops were alike in real dignity. "Wherever a bishop be," says St. Jerome in a well-known passage, 5 " whether at Rome or at Eugubium " (a town of Central Italy, now called Gubbio, and insignificant in St. Jerome's time as well as in our own), " at Constantinople or at Rhegium, at Alexandria or at Thanis, he is of the same worth, and of the same priesthood. The power of wealth and the humbleness of poverty doth not render a bishop either higher or lower ; but they are all successors of the Apostles." In spiritual power, then, bishops were all regarded as equal ; yet distinctions crept into the order, and these distinctions were grounded on the comparative greatness of the cities in which the several bishops were established. In eveiy country the bishops naturally gathered round their provincial capital. There they met from time to time for consultation ; the bishop of the local capital ordinarily presided at such meetings, and became the organ and representative of his brethren in communica- tions with other Churches. Hence came the titles of Metropolitan (i. e. bishop of the mother city) and of Archbishop (i. e. chief bishop), by 5 Ad Evangelum, ep. 146, ed. Vallarsi. 8 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. which some members of the episcopal order were distinguished above the rest. And that preference of one bishopric before another on account of the size of the respective cities which you here see on a small scale was carried out through the whole system of the Church. For instance, the mother of all Churches was unquestionably Jerusalem ; and if we were to suppose one Church superior to another on a spiritual account, we should expect to find Jerusalem the first of all in dignity. Yet so far was this from being the case, that Jerusalem was but an ordinary bishopric, and was subject to the metropolitical jurisdiction of Caesarea, because under the Roman imperial govern- ment Caesarea was the civil capital of the Holy Land. In time, indeed, Jerusalem became one of the five chief or patriarchal sees ; but this was not until the middle of the fifth century, when the practice of pilgrimage, which streamed always more and more towards the Holy City, had given it an increased importance ; and then, when it became a patriarchal see, instead of being ranked as first of the five, it was the last, as being the latest which had attained the patriarchal dignity. What, then, were those cities which had that dignity earlier, and which still took precedence of Jerusalem after THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 9 it had become the seat of a patriarch ? They were originally (1) Rome; (2) Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, and the second city in the empire ; (3) Antioch, the capital of Syria, and the third city in the empire. The Churches of these three cities were all believed to owe their foundation to St. Peter ; but it is remarkable that, although the Church of Antioch was said to have been founded by St. Peter himself, and to have been the seat of his episcopate before he established himself at Rome although Antioch was supposed to have had this special connexion with the Apostle in person, whereas the Church of Alexandria was said to have been founded under his direction by his disciple St. Mark and although Antioch was also the earlier in foundation of these two yet Alex- andria took the precedence. Why, then, was the younger Church, which had had its origin through the agency of a disciple, preferred before the elder Church, which claimed the master in his own person as its founder ? The only conceivable reason is, that Alexandria was the greater city of the two that Alexandria took precedence of Antioch for the same reason that Rome took precedence of Alexandria. These three chief cities of the Roman world, then, were the seats of the original patriarchates ; 10 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. but after Byzantium had been raised by Con- stantine the Great to be the second capital of the empire (A.D. 334), although Byzantium had until then been only an ordinary bishopric, and subject to the Metropolitan of Heraclea, the chief city of Thrace, it became under its new name of Constantinople a patriarchal see, and was placed by the Second General Council, A.D. 381, next to Rome, " forasmuch as it is New Rome.'-' The new Rome a place which had no claim whatever to ecclesiastical pre- cedence except on the ground that it had become the second city in the empire became also the seat of the second bishop in the whole Church, thrusting down to lower positions the ancient and apostolic sees of Alexandria and Antioch. So that throughout you see the principle established, that the ecclesiastical jurisdiction should follow the secular jurisdic- tion that in every country that city which was the seat of civil government should also be the seat of the chief ecclesiastical government. And was it not so as to Rome also? As- suredly it was ; and, however high the privi- leges of St. Peter and his successors may be reckoned, still we come back to this. Suppose that St. Peter was the first of the Apostles, and attach any meaning, however high, to that THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 11 title what are we to say to the fact that the three sees which were especially traced to St. Peter were also the sees of the three chief cities in the Roman world ? that that see which especially rested its claims to precedence over every other on St. Peter, was also the capital of the entire Roman world ? Surely it is fair to infer that the chief Apostle had a distinct purpose in choosing the greatest cities for his especial spheres of operation. Is it to be sup- posed that if St. Peter had never gone to Rome at all, but had fixed himself in the insignificant Eugubium, the Popes to this day would have been Popes of Gubbio, and that to Grubbio all the Redeemer's promises which are claimed for Rome on account of St. Peter would have been attached? This is surely inconceivable. If St. Peter established himself at Rome, it was because Rome was the capital of the empire. If the Churches of Alexandria and Antioch could boast of St. Peter as their founder, it was because those were the cities which came next to Rome in importance, and which next to it offered the greatest field for his operations ; and, as we have seen, Alexandria, founded by his disciple, took precedence of the older Church of Antioch, which, according to the Roman view, was founded by the Apostle himself. Alexandria 12 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. took precedence, because it was a greater capital than Antioch. But there was yet another city which claimed St. Peter for the founder of its Church namely Caesarea in Palestine ; and on this fact the historian Eusebius insists, because he was himself Bishop of Cscsarea, and very naturally wished to make the most of the apostolical origin of his Church. Yet, although we really know more of St. Peter's doings at Caesarea than at any of the other places (for it was there that h6 admitted the first-fruits of the Gentiles, the good centurion Cornelius, into the Church by baptism), 6 we shall hardly find mention of its apostolical origin anywhere but in the writings of its own bishop, Eusebius, nor had it any of the prerogatives of Rome or Alexandria, or Antioch. And the reason of this is, that Caesarea, although a local capital, was not a place of first or even of second-rate mark in the Roman world, but was surpassed in size and population and general importance by many other cities. Now consider what Rome was. It was by far the greatest city in the world ; it occupied a position altogether its own. The Queen of Great Britain and the Emperor of Russia at 6 Acts x. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 13 this day, each rule over territories larger than the ancient Roman empire ; and, if we may trust the most careful of late inquirers, London and Paris are each greatly more popu- lous than ancient Rome ; for while some authorities suppose the population of Rome at the greatest to have been under 600,000, no one in recent days appears to have carried it higher than about twice that number. But Rome was what no other city has ever since been the capital of the whole civilized world. To it were subject, Palestine, the land which God had given to Abraham and his seed, the land where the Redeemer had spent His earthly life, where the Christian Church had taken its be- ginning ; Egypt, that land of ancient mysteries, which was destined to play for centuries a very important and remarkable part in the history of the Church ; Greece, where the human intellect had achieved its greatest triumphs Greece, with its far-spread and famous colonies ; and besides these a multitude of other countries, influenced more or less by the Roman civilization, governed by Roman officials resident in them, garrisoned by Roman soldiers. From every quarter of the empire there was a constant flow of human life to the capital ; there was a constant flow from the capital to every part of the vast 14 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. body; andas this connexion with Rome as a centre gave the greatest possible facilities for the spread- ing of the Gospel throughout the empire, when once it had established a footing in Rome, so among the Christians of every province it gave the Church of Rome an importance quite unique and peculiar. Let a Christian come from what quarter he might to Rome, there, if fortified with those letters of commendation which served as a passport to the communion of such Churches as he might visit, he was received in the character of a brother. He saw a com- munity which, even at the early date when St. Paul wrote to the Romans, and when the city had not as yet been visited by any Apostle, had been enough to form congregations meeting in several houses, 7 and which had ever since been growing in numbers and in importance. He found it connected with Christian societies in every other part of the empire, even as it was connected with that provincial Church of which the visitor himself was a member. He found it wealthy enough to send relief to those Chris- tians in all countries who might suffer either from general poverty, or from some special pressure of persecution, famine, or other dis- tress. And as the head of it the governor of " See Kom. xvi. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 15 its numerous clergy, its representative in inter- course with other Churches, the chief adminis- trator of its wealth at home, of its charity both at home and abroad, he found the bishop no more, indeed, as to priestly office and power, than the Bishop of Eugubium, or Rhegium, or Thanis, but in all other respects a vastly greater personage with a loftier position, a more powerful sway, a name which was known throughout all the Churches, and which was everywhere respected, so long as he did not risk his title to respect by invading the rights of others. Moreover, the Roman Church in those early ages was always orthodox. It was not a Church of any great literary fertility or eminence. The earliest writings which we possess from it those of Clement and Hippolytus for example are not composed in Latin, but in Greek, which for a long time was the literary language of Christian Rome. The earliest Latin Christian writings those of Minucius Felix and Ter- tullian, which date no farther back than about the year 200 are not of Roman, but of African origin ; and Victor, Bishop of Rome, who died in 202, and is mentioned by St. Jerome as the earliest Roman bishop that wrote in Latin, 3 8 De Yiris Illustr., c. 53. 16 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. was probably himself an African by birth. On the ground of literary accomplishment or per- formance, therefore, Rome had no great claims to show. But while the Greeks and Syrians originated one perverse kind of doctrine after another with a fertility which is as remarkable as their ingenuity in error, the Romans kept steadily to the traditionary belief; their national mind was exercised within the Chris- tian sphere, as it had been exercised in earlier days, not in the invention of subtleties, but in the organization of government. " Tu regere imperio populos, Eomane, memento, Hae tibi erunt artes." 9 Heretic after heretic, from Greece, from Asia Minor, from Syria, from Egypt, seeking afield for spreading their peculiar opinions, made their ap- pearance at Rome; but one after another they were rejected by the stern and simple orthodoxy of the Roman Church. And this firmness of doc- trine, this fixity of government, contributed powerfully to raise the character of the Roman Church, and of the Roman see, to increase the influence of the Roman bishops throughout the whole Christian world. Moreover, Rome was an Apostolical Church ; St. Paul had written his greatest Epistle to it, 9 Virgil, Jn. vi. 852, 853. THE GROWTH OF 1HE PAPAL POWER. 17 he had himself long sojourned at Rome, he had received the crown of martyrdom there. St. Peter too had been there martyred, and the belief in his having been Bishop of Rome (although, as I have said, it is irreconcilable with undoubted facts of history and chrono- logy) arose early in the Church. To apos- tolical Churches belonged a certain degree of reverence ; thus early Christian writers, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, refer to them with great respect, challenging the teachers of novel opinions to apply to the apostolical Churches for information whether their doctrines were or were not agreeable to those which had always been held in such Churches. Home, then, as it could boast of two Apostles the one, the great teacher of the Circumcision, the other, the great teacher of the Gentiles, and as it was the only Western city whose Church could pretend to the title of Apostolical at all had extra- ordinary advantages for asserting this claim in addition to its many other claims. But we must observe what was the nature of the authority attached, in the opinion of those early times, to the apostolical character of the Roman Church. The great witnesses on this point are the two whom I have just named Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, and Tertulliau, the 18 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. famous presbyter of Carthage ; and these may both be placed about the last ten years of the second century. Irenseus, I may observe, being an Asiatic by birth, wrote in Greek, but the passage with which we have now to do is preserved only in a somewhat barbarous Latin translation, so that, if we wish to get at the meaning, it will be necessary, as in the case of many versions from the German, published both here and in America at the present day, first to guess from the translation what the original words may probably have been, and then to re- translate them more faithfully, or at least more intelligibly, for ourselves. Irenseus, then, in arguing against heretics, says that we may see the novelty and the falsity of their doctrines by having recourse to the tradition of the Apostles, as preserved in the Churches for which they had instituted bishops, through which bishops and their suc- cessors the original Christian doctrine had been handed down uncorrupt. "But/* he continues, " since it would be too long in a work such as this to recount the successions of all Churches, we confound all those who conclude wrongly by pointing to the faith which was delivered by the Apostles, and has reached us through the succession of bishops in that Church which is THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 19 the greatest and most venerable, and known to all men the Church founded and settled at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul. For with this Church, on account of its more important precedence or prerogative, the whole Church (i. e. the faithful everywhere) must agree with this Church, in which the Apostolical tradition has always been pre- served." ' The words which have caused the greatest difficulty here are those which, after the very eminent Germ an historian Gieseler, I have ren- dered on account of its more important precedence or prerogative ; 2 for, as all apostolical Churches, according to St. Irenaeus, were entitled to a precedence over other Churches, the Church of Rome had this title in a higher degree than others, inasmuch as it was greater than any other Church, and as it had a doubly apostolical foundation, from the two most eminent among the Apostles. 1 Adv. Hsereses, iii. 3, 4. * The Latin is, "propter potentiorem (or potiorem) prin- cipalitatem." Gieseler supposes the Greek to have been, 8ii Trjv iKaven-epav irpwreiav (I. i. 214). Dr. Wordsworth (now Bishop of Lincoln) in his book on Hippolytus (200) conjectures that the Greek words were, 8i& T)JI> iKavwrfpav apxcuJTT)Ta " on account of its more august primitiveness" a conjecture which differs little in sense from the other. c 2 20 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. In like manner Tertullian speaks of the apostolical Churches as faithful witnesses to apostolic doctrine. 3 " Come now/' he writes, in ch. 36 of his treatise on "Prescription," " come now, thou that wilt exercise thy curiosity to better purpose in the business of thy salvation, go through the apostolical Churches, in which the very seats of the Apostles at this very day do preside over their own places ; in which their own authentic writings are read, speaking with the voice of each, and making the face of each present to the eye. Is Achaia near to thee ? Thou hast Corinth. If thou art not far from Macedonia, thou hast Philippi, thou hast the Thessalo- nians. If thou canst travel into Asia, thou hast Ephesus. But if thou art near to Italy, thou hast Rome, where we also " (i. e. the African Church to which Tertullian belonged) " have an authority near at hand. What a happy Church is that ! on which the Apostles poured out all their doctrine with their blood ; where Peter had a like passion with the Lord; where Paul had for his crown the same death with John the Baptist ; where the Apostle John was plunged into boiling oil, and suffered nothing, and was afterwards banished to an 3 De Praescr. 20, 21 ; adv. ilarcion. ir. 5. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 21 island. Let us see what she (the Roman Church) hath learned, what taught." Here, then, you have the references made by these ancient fathers to the authority of the Roman Church. In their kind they are references full of respect, full of a desire to set Rome as high as possible. But their kind is wholly different from what would be neces- sary in order to support the modern Roman views. Both Irenaeus and Tertullian speak of Rome, not as of something altogether by itself, but as belonging to the same class with other apostolic Churches. Tertuliian expressly names along with it Churches of far inferior note, but which had in common with it the honour of apostolic foundation ; Irenasus brings forward the Roman Church as a speci- men and representative of a class, because, he says, it would be impossible within the bounds which he had set himself to go through the whole of that class. Again, both these writers rest the apostolic glory of the Roman Church, not on its having had St. Peter for its bishop, but on its connexion with the two Apostles, SS. Peter and Paul ; it is on the facts of these Apostles having founded it, settled it, taught it, established in it bishops from whom the chief pastorship had come down unbroken. 22 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. bearing in its hands the traditions of the apostolic doctrine it is on these facts, and not on any promise of our Lord to St. Peter and his successors, that Irenacus and Tertullian insist. And, as the object of their references to Rome is to silence the teachers of novel doctrines by an appeal to the authority of the Roman Church, observe how this is done. The venerable writers do not point to this authority as being lodged in the Roman bishop in his character of successor to St. Peter, so that he should be entitled by virtue of his office to pronounce judgment, to decree, to condemn ; but the only authority which they speak of is that of traditional doctrine, derived from the Apostles, and preserved in the Roman Church, as it was also in those other Churches which, although too numerous to mention accord- ing to IrenaDus, although less distinguished than Rome as they appear in Tertullian's enu- meration of them could, like Rome, trace their origin and the institution of their episcopate up to members of the apostolic company. For this reason, says Ircnocus, it is necessary that the whole Church should agree with the Roman Church ncccsse cst (not oportet] in the Latin, and probably avdy/cij (not Bet) in the lost Greek ; " it must be," not " it behoveth." THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 23 Agreement with the Roman Church is repre- sented here, not as a moral duty, but as a natural consequence resulting from the fact that the Roman Church had preserved that one faith which was handed down to it and to the whole Christian Church by the Apostles. 21 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. LECTURE II. VICTOR I. OF ROME H1PPOLYTUS OF POKTUS CYPRIAN OF CARTHAGE. A.D. 190 258. ABOUT the time when Irenccus and Tertullian wrote, we find an exemplification of the treat- ment which a Bishop of Rome was likely to meet with if he went beyond the proper limits of his authority. During the episcopate of Victor, who held the see from 190 to 202, a question as to the time of keeping Easter, which had before been amicably debated and compromised between the Church of Rome and the Asiatic Churches, was revived. Victor, for reasons which might very fairly have justified such an attempt, endeavoured to get the Roman rule established throughout all Churches. By his desire councils were held in various countries widely separated from each other, and all these assemblies consented in witness- ing that the traditional practice of their own Churches agree I with the Roman order. So THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 25 far, then, we may consider that Victor acted rightly by collecting the testimony of other Churches ; but when the Asiatics held out against the force of this, and referred to the venerable men from whom their own customs had been derived, beginning with the Apostle St. John, whose last years were spent in the government of an Asiatic Church, Yictor, instead of treating the matter as one on which Christians might lawfully differ, and admitting the right of the Asiatic Churches to follow their own observance, shut them out from his communion, and endeavoured to prevail on other Churches to do the like. This exclusion from the communion of the Roman Church was, indeed, very far short of what exclusion from its communion would have signified in later times. It did not profess to cut them off from the spiritual body of Christ, but only to deny them communion with the local Church of Rome ; yet this, if we consider what the Church of Rome was in relation to other Churches, would have been a very serious disability ; and the idea of so excluding the whole Asiatic Church shocked the feelings of Christians in general, so that letters of re- monstrance (some of them written in a tone of considerable sharpness) were addressed to Victor 26 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER.. from many quarters. Among others, the Church of Lyons wrote, by the hand of its bishop, that same Irenoous of whom I have already spoken. They exhorted the Bishop of Rome to moderation ; they referred to the precedents of a conciliatory policy which had been set him by his predecessors with regard to the same questions, and urged that such a matter should not be made a ground for a breach of communion, inasmuch as a diversity of usages had always been allowed, and such variations as to indifferent things served to confirm the argument which might be drawn from the agreement of all Churches in those points which were essential to the faith. And through the mediation of Irenaous and others peace was re-established, so that the Asiatics, on clearing themselves from all suspicion of certain heretical tendencies which for par- ticular reasons had at that time been supposed to be mixed up with their peculiarity as to Easter, were allowed to retain their usages. Here, then, we see an attempt at assumption on the part of a Bishop of Rome a very mode-, rate assumption indeed, as compared with those claims which his successors in later ages were able to establish ; but we see how it was met, and how he was compelled by the general voice THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 27 of the Church to withdraw from the position which he had rashly endeavoured to occupy. Yictor's immediate successors, Zephyrinus and Callistus, have been of late years shown to the world more distinctly than before by the dis- covery of the book which was first published under the title of " Origen's Philosophumena," but which almost all scholars now agree in believing to be the work ,of St. Hippolytus, Bishop of Portus, at the mouth of the Tiber. This treatise, which is intended as a refutation of all religious errors known in the time when it was written, was brought in 1842 from a monastery on Mount Athos to Paris, and in 1851 was published at Oxford. It has given occasion for the appearance of a great number of books, pamphlets, and essays the most re- markable as to bulk being one by the late Baron von Bunsen, who, having originally contem- plated a pamphlet, ended by putting forth the accumulated collections and theories of many years in seven thick volumes, which bear the title of " Christianity and Mankind/' The subject is one of much interest ; yet it bears but little on our present theme. The book is, indeed, very contrary to the modern Roman theories, and on that account writers in 28 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. the Roman interest have tried to set aside its authority arguing, as the very eminent and learned Professor von Dollinger, of Munich, 1 has done, that the writer was not an orthodox bishop of Portus, but a schismatical presbyter of Rome, who set himself up in opposition to the bishop ; or, as has been maintained by Mgr. Cruice, an ecclesiastic of Irish birth, who after- wards became Bishop of Marseilles, that it is a work of Tertullian, who was a man of very vehement and impatient spirit, and ran into the fanatical errors of Montanus. We can easily see why such attempts should be made to weaken the authority of the book ; for the author represents both Zephyrinus and Cal- listus Bishops of Rome, and canonized saints of the Roman Church as having given in to the Sabellian heresy, and himself as having withstood them to the face, in the interest of the orthodox faith. But in so far as I re- member, there is nothing in it which would throw light on the relations of the Bishop and the Church of Rome to the whole Church ; so that we need not dwell longer on it. But, passing on to the middle of the third 1 It will be remembered that since Dr. v. Dollinger wrote his "Hippolytus and Kallistus," he has been forced by the Vatican Council into opposition to Home. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 29 century, we come on something which, is very much to our purpose in the writings of St. Cyprian, and those which are connected with them. Cyprian, who, in the year 248, was elected as Bishop of Carthage, the chief city of Africa, was a man of great abilities and of very lofty character. He was brought into close relations with the Church of Rome ; and the effect of the evidence which is to be drawn from his writings tells very strongly against Rome, so that on this account some Romanists have endeavoured to throw over them a suspicion of spuriousness, although with such bad success that their labours have found no favour with the more reasonable members of their own communion. In the year 1851, however, an attempt was made in a very different quarter to prove the writings ascribed to Cyprian to be spurious, and himself to be probably an imagi- nary person. The author of this attempt was an English clergyman, the late Rev. E. J. Shepherd, who started from the astonishing position that the bearing of the Cyprianic writ- ings was favourable to Rome, and therefore argued that they must have been forged in the Roman interest, at a date much later than that which they profess to bear. Although, how- ever, this argument is maintained with great 30 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. learning and ingenuity, I am not aware that Mr. Shepherd's book has made any converts among persons who have gone patiently into the matter (as I myself have attempted to do) ; and the world in general has gone on believing in the reality of St. Cyprian's existence, and in the genuineness of the writings ascribed to him. But even if the story of St. Cyprian were (as Mr. Shepherd supposes) mere romance, and the writings ascribed to him were impudent forge- ries, I do not believe that any one could be found to hold with Mr. Shepherd that the bear- ing of them is favourable to Rome. In his communications with Bishops of Rome, Cyprian always writes and treats on terms of perfect equality. He addresses them as "brother and colleague ;" while he holds up the general dig- nity of the episcopate, he never owns, or even shows that he was aware of, any right in the Bishop of Rome to rule over the whole Church ; nay, he finds it necessary to remonstrate with one Bishop of Rome, Cornelius, for lowering by his weakness the dignity common to all bishops. After mentioning that Cornelius had been moved by the violence of some persons who had carried letters from Carthage to Rome, and had threatened to read them publicly if the bishop would not receive them, Cyprian continues : THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWKR. 31 " But if the case be so, dearest brother, that the audacity of men most abandoned is to be feared, and what the bad cannot accomplish by right and equity they can by temerity and desperation, then is the vigour of Episcopacy, and the majestic and divine power of governing the Church, perished ; nor can we any longer continue, or are we now, Christians, if it is come to this, that we are to dread the menaces and snares of the abandoned. For Gentiles and Jews and heretics menace, and all, whose breast and mind the devil has possessed, daily attest their envenomed madness by furious language. We must not, however, therefore yield, because they threaten ; nor is the adversary and enemy therefore greater than Christ, because he claims and assumes so much to himself in the world. With us, dearest brother, must the strength of faith abide immoveable, and our courage, firm and unshaken, as with the strength and mas- siveness of an opposing rock, should endure against all the inroads and violence of the roar- ing waves."* At a later time we find Cyprian brought into violent collision with Stephen, Bishop of Rome, 2 Ep. 59. The translation in the Oxford " Library of the Fathers " has been used in these extracts from St. Cyprian. 32 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. a man evidently of proud and overbearing cha- racter. The question between them related to the manner of admitting into the Church per- sons who had received baptism from sectaries. According to the judgment of the later Church, Cyprian was mistaken on this point for, filled as he was by a strong sense of the necessity of ecclesiastical unity, he disallowed the sectarian baptism altogether, and insisted that those who had received it should be bap- tized afresh. It does not appear exactly what Stephen's opinions were whether he main- tained the sufficiency of all sectarian baptism whatever (in which case he too would have erred, but in the opposite direction to Cyprian) or whether he limited this principle, as the Church has since done, to cases where the sec- tarian baptism was right as to the matter and the form of administering the Sacrament. The subject with which we have now to do, how- ever, is not the correctness or the incorrectness of the opinions maintained, but the relations which this correspondence shows to have then existed between the Roman and other Churches. Stephen, then, broke off communion with the Africans on account of their difference from him as to baptism, as he had already on the same account broken off communion with the THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 33 Churches of Asia Minor, and he denounced Cyprian, in language borrowed from Scripture, as " a false Christ, a false Apostle, and a deceit- ful worker/' Cyprian, however, was undis- mayed by all this ; he opened a communication with the Asiatics, who were in the same con- demnation with himself, and from the most eminent of them, Firmilian, Bishop of Caesarea, in Cappadocia, he received a letter which deals with the Roman bishop's pretensions in the most unceremonious manner. For instance : " And herein I am justly indignant at such open and manifest folly in Stephen, that he who so boasts of the seat of his episcopate, and con- tends that he holds the succession from Peter, on whom the foundations of the Church were laid, introduces many other rod's, and buildcth anew many churches, in that by his authority he maintains baptism among them. For they who are baptized, without doubt, fill up the number of the Church. But whoso approves their baptism, must needs also maintain of those baptized, that the Church also is with them. Nor does he perceive, that he who thus betrays and abandons unity, casts into the shade, and in a manner effaces the truth of the Christian Rock. Yet the Apostle acknowledges that the Jews, though blind through ignorance, and i) 34 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. bound through, that most dreadful sin, have yet a zeal of God. Stephen, who proclaims that he occupies by succession the chair of Peter, is roused by no zeal against heretics, conceding to them no small, but the very greatest, power of grace, so far as to say and assert that through the Sacrament of Baptism they wash off the defilement of the old man, pardon the old deadly sins, make sons to God by heavenly regeneration, renew to eternal life by the sanc- tification of the Divine laver. He who con- cedes and assigns to heretics such great and heavenly privileges of the Church, what else does he than hold communion with them, for whom he maintains and claims so much grace ? And in vain doth he any longer hesitate to consent and be partaker with them in the rest, to join in their assemblies, and mingle his prayers with them, and set up a common altar and sacrifice." 3 This may serve to give an idea of Firmilian's style. As to the history of the letter, it may be worth while to mention that the first Romanist editors to whom it became known withheld it from publication, and that some later writers, although they could no longer suppress it when it had once been pub- lished, openly justify the original suppression, 3 Ep. 75. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 35 and regret the indiscretion which allowed so mischievous a document (as in their opinion it is) to get abroad. Take again a specimen of Cyprian's own tone, from his address to an African council assembled for the consideration of the baptismal question : " It remains that we severally de- clare our opinion on this same subject, judging no one, nor depriving any one of the right of communion, if he differ from us. For no one of us setteth himself up as a bishop of bishops, or by tyrannical terror forceth his colleagues to ' a necessity of obeying; inasmuch as every bishop, in the free use of his liberty and power, has the right of forming his own judgment, and can no more be judged by another than he can himself judge another. But we must all await the judgment of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has the power both of setting us in the government of His Church, and of judging our acts therein." 4 Cyprian, as I said before, was certainly in error as to the question of baptism, although it is doubtful whether Stephen was wholly or but partially in the right. Yet so far was the Bishop of Rome from having at that time established a power over all other Churches, 4 Cypr. Epistles, p. 286. D 2 36 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. that the Bishop of Carthage, even when in the wrong, was able successfully to resist the Roman bishop, and to assert his perfect equality with him. At another time these bishops were brought into conflict as to the affair of two Spanish bishops, Martial and Basilides, who, after having been deposed by councils in their own country, obtained from Stephen an acknowledgment of their being in communion with Home. The Spanish Church was disturbed by this, and requested Cyprian's advice. Thus, then, he writes as to Stephen's proceedings in this affair : " Basilides, after his crimes had been detected, and his conscience laid bare even by his own confession, canvassing to be unjustly restored to the Episcopate from which he had been justly deposed, went to Rome and de- ceived Stephen our colleague, residing at a distance and ignorant of what had been done and of the real truth. The effect of this is not to efface but to swell the crimes of Basilides, in that to his former sins is moreover added the guilt of deceit and circumvention. For he is not so much to be blamed, who through negli- gence was imposed upon, as he to be execrated who through fraud imposed upon him. But if Basilides could impose on man, on God he THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 37 cannot, for it is written, 'God is not mocked.'" 5 Again: "Wherefore, although amongst our colleagues some are found, dearest brethren, who think that the Deific discipline is to be neglected, and who rashly communicated with Basilides and Martial, this ought not to dis- turb our faith, since the Holy Spirit threatens such in the Psalms, saying, 'But thou hatest instruction, and castest My words behind thee : when thou sawest a thief thou consentedst with, him, and hast been partaker with adulterers/ Moreover, Paul the Apostle writes the same." 6 On another occasion, when Marcian, Bishop of Aries, in France, had been accused of favour- ing the errors of a sectary named Novatian, and Stephen had neglected an application for assistance in the matter from the Bishop of Lyons, and other neighbours of the accused, these, too, apply to Cyprian ; and thereupon he writes a letter to Stephen, telling him that it was the duty of all bishops to interfere in such a case for the defence of the faith, and urging him to do his part. 7 Both the French and Spanish affairs are plainly inconsistent with the present Roman notion of the papal rights ; * Ep. 67. c Ibid. 7 Ep. 68. 38 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. and the whole matter may be summed up in the words of Mosheim : " If any one, after reading the language held by the Africans and the Bishops of Rome, can still maintain that the Roman prelates in that age had any power or jurisdiction over other bishops, such a person must either be beyond measure obstinate, or vehemently in love with opinions imbibed in his childhood/' 8 There are, indeed, passages in the Cyprianic writings which speak loftily of St. Peter, and of the Roman Church as founded by that Apostle. Some of these passages have certainly been tampered with, for instance, the most famous of them in the treatise " On the Unity of the Church/' which runs as follows the interpolated words being marked by brackets : " The Lord speaketh unto Peter, ' I say unto thee' [saith He], 'that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven/ To him again, after His resurrection, He says, ' Feed My sheep/ Upon 8 Do Rebus Christianorum ante Constantinum, p. 541. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 39 him being one He builds His Church [and commits to him His sheep to feed] ; and though He gives to all the Apostles [after His resur- rection] an equal power, and says, 'As My Father sent me, even so send I you; receive ye the Holy Ghost; whosesoever sins ye remit, they shall be remitted to him, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they shall be retained : yet in order to manifest unity, He has by His own authority so placed the source of the same unity, as to begin from one. Certainly the other Apostles also were what Peter was, endued with an equal fellowship both of honour and power; but a commencement is made from unity [and primacy is given to Peter, that the Church of Christ may be set forth as one, and the see (cathedra} as one. And they all are shepherds, yet the flock is shown to be one, such as to be fed by the holy Apostles with unanimous agree- ment], that the Church [of Christ] may be set before us as one ; which one Church, in the Song of Songs, doth the Holy Spirit design and name in the person of our Lord : ' My dove, My uiidefiled one, is but one ; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. He who holds not this unity of the Church, does he think that he holds the faith ? He who strives agrainst and resists the 40 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. Church [he who deserts the see of St. Peter, on whom the Church is founded] is he assured that he is in the Church ? " 9 &c. The history of the interpolations is worth noticing. They were not in the early editions of St. Cyprian, from the first, which was pub- lished in 1471, to that of 1547. They appear for the first time in the edition of Manutius, 1564, having been found by that editor in some manuscripts. But it is proved on further in- vestigation by later editors, that the words in question are wanting in by far the greater number of manuscripts, and that those manu- scripts which are reckoned to be of the highest antiquity and authority do not con- tain them. Rigault, a French editor, although he kept them in the text, gave them up in his notes. Bishop Fell, the English editor of St. Cyprian, rejected them, as he was well warranted in doing ; and in this he was followed by the eminent French scholar Baluze. But Baluze died while his edition of Cyprian was in the press ; and thereupon this passage underwent a treatment which is very remark- able. The learned Benedictines into whose hands the publication of the book fell, cancelled the leaf on which the passage had been printed, 9 De Unitate Eccles., c. 4. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 41 and substituted another leaf. They preserved in the notes a part of the reasons which Baluze had given for rejecting the suspicious words, and at the same time they reinstated the words in the text, giving their motives for so doing with all possible candour viz., that they wished to preserve uniformity with other late editions which had been printed in France. 1 Hence it appears that, while the text sent forth by the Benedictines agreed with those of the earlier French editions, their own critical judg- ment as to the passage in question agreed with that of Fell and of Baluze. As to passages of this kind in general, it is obvious that the presumption is against the genuineness of language which tends to the exaltation of Rome, inasmuch as in the ages to which these manuscripts belong there was no temptation to erase such language, while there was a strong inducement to insert it ; for in those ages the Roman interest engrossed all the learning of Western Christendom. But even if we were to admit all that appears in the text to be genuine, the passages in question contain no acknowledgment of Roman supre- 1 " Propterea quod servata fuerunt in omnibus editioni- bus quse in Gallia ab annis centum et quinquaginta pro- dierunt." Maran. in Migne, Patrol, iv. 499. 42 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. macy. The dignity which St. Cyprian, even according to the interpolated form of his writings, assigns to the Church of Rome, to its supposed apostolic founder, and to his suc- cessors, is rather purely symbolical than in any way practical. He regards St. Peter as the type of Apostleship, and the Roman Church as the representative of unity ; an opinion of which Barrow says, "I can discern little solidity in this conceit, and as little harm." 2 He interprets the promise of the keys of the kingdom of Heaven as given to the Apostle for the whole episcopal order ; his language and his actions are alike inconsistent with any idea of subjection to Rome as a higher authority, entitled to interfere with other Churches, or to overrule their determinations. He allows the Bishops of Rome no other authority than that which he claims for every member of the one universal episcopate, " of which," according to a famous expression of his, borrowed from the language of Roman law, " every one who shares in it enjoys full possession." 3 2 On the Pope's Supremacy, ed. Napier, p. 73. 3 " Cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur." Do Unit. Eccles., o. 5. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 43 LECTUKE III. THE COUNCIL OF NIC^EA, A.D. 325. FROM the time of St. Cyprian, who was martyred in 258, we may go on to that of Constantino the Great, the era when Chris- tianity was legally established in the empire. Here we find in our way some statements which were received as true for many hundreds of 3 r ears, and which have for their object the exaltation of the Roman see. There is the story of Constantino's conversion and baptism by Sylvester, Bishop of Rome, and there is that of the Donation which the emperor is represented as having made to the Roman Church. Constantino, although he professed Christianity ; although he kept company con- tinually with bishops ; although he was fond of conversation on religious subjects, and even occasionally composed little religious discourses or sermon ettes, which he delivered to the epis- copal and other members of an admiring court ; although he presided at the great 44 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. general council of Nicaca, and made many regulations in matters concerning the faith ; although he is spoken of by Eusebius as " a sort of general bishop," l and described himself as " a bishop of externals " 2 was yet not admitted as a member of the Church by baptism until a few days before his death. He died on Whitsunday in the year 337 ; the place of his baptism and death was a palace near Nicomedia, his favourite residence in Bithynia; and the person who baptized him was the bishop of the neighbouring city, Eusebius. 3 These circumstances are as certain as any facts in history. Yet a very different story afterwards grew up, and was long gene- rally believed. Constantine, it was said, was at first a persecutor of the Christians, and put many of them to death among others his own wife for refusing to sacrifice to the gods of Rome. He was struck with leprosy, and, in order to a cure, it was prescribed that he should bathe in infants' blood. The' mothers of the children who were destined to furnish this very uninviting' bath, however, prevailed on him by their tears to give up the idea, and 1 Vita Constantini, i. 44. 2 Ib. iv. 24. 3 A different person from the historian Eusebius, of Caesarea. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 4>3 he was warned by a heavenly vision to apply to the Bishop of Rome, Sylvester, who had been driven by the persecution to take refuge on Mount Soracte. Sylvester, by the washing of baptism, administered in a font which still exists in the baptistery of St. John Lateran, cleansed the emperor at once from his bodily leprosy and from his sins ; and thereupon all Rome at once embraced the faith of Christ. It will be seen that this tale tended to the glory both of Rome and of its bishop. It implied that the emperor who first embraced the faith could nowhere be baptized with pro- priety except in the capital of the empire and of the Church ; the Sacrament could not fitly be administered to him by any one less than the Church's chief pastor. The motive for such a fiction is evident. But there is another story relating to the same time which is of far greater importance I mean that of Constantino's " donation." By this tale it is represented that he bestowed on Sylvester and his successors great privileges and honours, both ecclesiastical and secular, with the possession of the Lateran palace, and the government of Rome and all the west removing the seat of his own power to Byzan- tium. We shall return to the history of these 46 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. things by and by, when we come to the time when they really were invented ; for the present, let it be enough to say that they are forgeries of much later date than Constantine's age, and that I mention them merely in order to set them aside. But now let us look at the facts of Constantine's time which bear on our subject. The Council of Nicaea met in 325. It was summoned chiefly for the discussion of the doctrines which had been put forth by Arius, who denied the very Godhead of our Lord, and for the settlement of the old question as to the time of keeping Easter ; and it was to be a general council i. e. a council assembled from all parts of the Church, that by the concurrent testimony of the representatives of all Churches the matters in question might be decided. Who then summoned it? The answer must be The Emperor ; because this is distinctly stated by historians, even if a document which has been lately published as his citation be given up as spurious. " As if drawing up a sort of divine phalanx against the enemies of the Church," says Eusebius, in his Life of Constantine, 4 " he called together a general synod, inviting the bishops from every quarter, by respectful letters (rt^ri/coi^ ^pap^aa-i) to 4 Book iii. c. 6. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 47 appear as soon as might be at Nicaea. . . . And when the emperor's command had been conveyed into all the provinces, they flew to the spot with the greatest alacrity, as if they had been discharged from a sling." It is not clear what was the exact meaning attached by Constantino to the term general council ; for, as the Greek word oltfovpevr) (from which the word ecumenical is derived) was used sometimes to signify the universe, and sometimes the Roman Empire, an ecumenical or general council might have been under- stood either as one gathered from the whole empire, or as one gathered from the whole world. In fact, there appeared at the council one or two bishops who were subject to other sovereigns than the emperor ; but as it is clear that the emperor could not have had any power to summon these, we may most pro- bably suppose that they attended as volunteers, and that his citation was confined to his own subjects. But now let us observe what this implies. It implies a Christian emperor ; for no other than the imperial authority could bring all these bishops together and there- fore the assembling of general councils is a new feature in the Church's history, marking that time from which the imperial power 48 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. became Christian, inasmuch as no such council had been possible before. That the emperor summoned the council is al- lowed by every one ; but then there is a question behind this, In what character did he issue his summons ? And here we find that a certain school of Romanists put in their claim for the Bishop of Rome. Constantine, they say, acted in concert with and in obedience to the Pope, whose right it was to summon general councils, although he found it convenient to make use of the im- perial power as his instrument. This is main- tained with great strength of assertion by such writers as Baronius; but when they are put to the proof of their assertions, they make a very poor show. They cannot produce any hint in the acts of the council, or in the accounts given of it by contemporary writers, or by writers who lived near the time of it, that the Bishop of Rome had anything what- ever to do with the assembling of the council. They can only tell us that the Pope must have summoned it, because it was his right to do so, and so forth ; but in proof that he actually did so, they can offer no evidence whatever. Other writers, of a more moderate kind, although members of the Roman communion, take a different line. Those of the old Gallican THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 49 school that school, fruitful in men of genius and learning, which is disowned and contemned by the dominant party in the French Church of our own day say that the summons pro- ceeded from Constantino's sole authority, and that there is no ground for the Ultramontane fancy as to the Pope's having shared in the matter. And perhaps the state of the case cannot be better set before you than by an extract from the very valuable History of Councils by Dr. von Hefele, formerly a pro- fessor in the Roman Catholic theological faculty of Tubingen, and now Bishop of Rottenburg, in "Wurtemberg. You will ob- serve how curiously the writer is divided between the wish to say as much as he can for the theory prevalent in his Church, and the wish to deal with the question as a man of learning and candour. "It remains undecided," he says, " whether Constantino in summoning the bishops to Nicooa acted entirely for himself alone, or in agreement with the Pope. Eusebius and the other most ancient authorities speak only of the emperor's action, yet without positively denying the Pope's co-operation. The sixth general council, however, in the year 680, says 'Arius, arose as an opponent of the Trinity, E 50 THE GROWTH OF TliE PAPAL POWER. and thereupon Constantine and Sylvester as- sembled the great synod at Niccea.' The like is asserted in the Pontifical book of Damasus. "From that time the view spread continually more and more that the emperor and the Pope jointly summoned the synod ; and, how- ever vehement individual Protestant writers may be against this, it is yet probable in itself that the emperor, having such a purpose in hand, held it necessary not to proceed without the concurrence and co-operation of that bishop who was acknowledged as the first in Chris- tendom. Add to this that so early a writer as Rufinus says that the emperor called the synod ex sentential sacerdotum(\. e. according to the opinion, or advice, of the bishops). If, there- fore, he asked several bishops about the matter, as these words intimate, he must assuredly have asked the first of bishops before all others. And this bishop's share was assuredly more important than that of other bishops ; for otherwise the sixth synod would necessarily have expressed itself otherwise." 5 Dr. von Hefele then goes on to argue that as the sixth council was not held at Rome but at Constantinople, and as the Bishops of Con- stantinople had at that time begun to set up 5 Conciliengesciiichtc, i. 256, cd. 1. THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 51 a rivalry with Rome, its testimony is not so worthless as might be supposed if the place of meeting had been Rome. That is to say, he fancies that, in speaking of Sylvester as having taken part in summoning the Council of Nicsea, the Sixth General Council had some genuine tradition or authority to rest on which is now lost. But observe what these authorities amount to : (1) a council held 360 years later ; (2) the "Pontificals/' a set of legendary lives of Popes which have been enlarged and interpolated with- out limit, so that it is never safe to rely on them without careful inquiry ; and lastly, (3) the statements of Rufinus, nearly seventy years after the date of the Nicene Council, that Constantine consulted some bishops (for this is certainly the meaning of saccrdotes in the passage, agreeably to the usage of the age) before he called it. It is quite possible, I admit, that the Bishop of Rome may have been one of these bishops, although the words more naturally suggest that Con- stantine, who habitually lived in the East, acted on the advice of those bishops with whom he was accustomed to associate and to confer. But even if the Bishop of Rome was con- sulted by letter or by messengers, this goes no E 2 52 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. way at all to prove that the emperor acted otherwise than on his own authority. Bishop Hefele has shown us all that a candid advocate can suggest for the Roman view ; he has also, I think, shown pretty clearly what his own judgment would be, if he did not feel him- self trammelled by opinions prevalent in his Church. It is not easy to say who was the earliest Pope that claimed the right of summoning general councils. Pelagius II. has been very generally supposed to have first advanced this claim in a letter which bears the date 587. But it seems now to be held on all hands, that that letter was part of the great forgery of the Decretals, which was executed in the ninth century, and on which I shall have more to say hereafter. Next, as to the presidency of the Council of Nictea. It has been claimed for the Pope in later times that he should be entitled to preside over General Councils, either in person, or by his representatives. But we do not know who presided over the Nicene Council. Some say the Bishop of Antioch ; others, the Bishops of Alexandria and Antioch by turns ; others, Eusebius of Csesarea ; others, Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, a venerable man, of great autho- rity in the Church, and much trusted by Con- THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 53 stantine. It seems most likely that Hosius was the president, as his name stands first of all in the list of signatures. Next to him. came Vitus and Vincent, presbyters of Rome, de- puted by the Bishop, Sylvester, whose age and infirmity prevented his attendance ; and they expressly state that they subscribe "for the venerable man our Pope " (that is, father), " the Bishop Sylvester." 6 But Hosius signs as for himself alone, and there is no ground at all for supposing that he too attended as a legate of the Bishop of Rome, and in that character got the presidency. The first appearance of this idea is in the history of the council by Gelasius of Cyzicum, a writer of no authority in the latter part of the fifth century, whose book is generally printed in collections of councils. 7 And now let us inquire what light the canons of the council throw on the question of the Roman bishop's authority. In the sixth Canon we read as follows : " Let the ancient customs prevail which have been in Egypt and Libya, and in Pentapolis, so that the bishops of the Alexandrian Church have the authority over all these, forasmuch as this also is customary for the Roman bishop. And in like manner, at Antioch also, and in 6 Concilia, ei. Labbe, ii. 50. 7 L. ii. c. 5. 54 THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. the other provinces, let the privileges of Churches be preserved." Here we see, first, that three great sees Borne, Alexandria, and Antioch are men- tioned as having by custom enjoyed peculiar privileges and jurisdiction. As a late schism in the Alexandrian patriarchate had been one of the subjects which engaged the council's attention, it is decreed that the Alexandrian see shall continue to enjoy its ancient and customary rights ; and the case of the Roman bishop is cited as a parallel and a model. No other right over the bishops subject to him is ascribed to the Bishop of Rome than that which is also acknowledged to belong to the Bishop of Alexandria; and the privileges of all the three great sees alike are traced to ancient usage as their common source. There is no idea of a special divinely-conferred pre- rogative as belonging to Rome. Next, as to the extent of the Roman bishop's jurisdiction. The canon, as you have heard, says nothing definite on this point. But the Nicene Canons are in Greek, and there exist certain old Latin versions or summaries of them, which show what was then understood with regard to the matter now before us. Thus,, in the free translation which is styled THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER. 55 the Versio Prisca, and which is supposed to have been made in the middle of the fifth century, 8 we read, " Antiqui moris est ut urbis Roma) episcopus habeat principatum, ut sub- urbicaria loca, et omnem provinciam sua solli- citudine gubernet." 9 And Rufinus, in his " Ecclesiastical History " (about the year 400) , gives as the sense of the canon, " Et apud Alexandriam et in urbe Roma vetusta con- suetudo servetur, ut vel ille .^Egypti, vel hie suburbicariariiiii ccclesiarum sollicitudinem gerat." ' The Bishop of Rome, according to these representations, was to govern the sub- urbicarian Churches ; but while Romanists admit that the old version and Rufinus are right in this account of his jurisdiction, there are disputes as to the meaning of what is said. Baronius and Bellarmine, the champions of the most ultra-Roman views, attack the question with an audacity which is really dazzling. Suburbicarian Churches, says Cardinal 8 Gieseler, I. ii. 184.