Imatges de pàgina
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dressed by the writers, "to Dionysius" (Bishop of Rome) "and Maximus" (Bishop of Alexandria), "and their fellow-ministers, bishops, presbyters, and deacons, throughout the world;" in which they also signify that a new bishop had been appointed in Paul's stead, and request that letters of fellowship (roάupara zoroviza) may be transmitted on both sides. * Such was the

unity of the Church in the third and fourth centuries; exhibiting no inadequate exemplification of the Apostle's words, "If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or if one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it." In this respect, justice has not been done to the Christianity of those ages. Corrupt as it was in many important points, it yet presented a phenomenon which the world had never yet beheld. A vast association, extending over every part of the Roman empire, and beyond it, maintained its ground, not only without the aid, but in spite of the hostility, of the state; exhibiting everywhere the same general features, and pervaded through all its parts by an electric sympathy of feeling, and a compactness of adhesion, which to the heathen statesman or philosopher must have been inexplicable. It is easy, with the infidel historian, or with the sectarian Christian, to attribute the characteristic features of the visible Church, at the period in question, to priestly ambition, or other evil tendencies of human nature; but the Christian of larger views, and greater candour, will see in it a striking proof of the power of his religion, even when disfigured with many errors, to knit men together in a bond of union, far exceeding in power, and in comprehensiveness, any that mere political or social relations can furnish.

The papacy itself, the topmost stone of the edifice, followed, as a matter of course, in due time. When once the Cyprianic idea of the unity of the universal episcopate had taken hold of men's minds, that of a living centre, in whom the whole body should see its unity visibly represented, speedily suggested itself, and began to work its way towards its realization. And, regarded merely as the efflorescence of the episcopate, the ecclesiastical centre of Western Christendom, it must be admitted that there is nothing in the idea of the papacy positively anti-christian. If it be not antichristian for the faithful of a diocese to gather themselves round a bishop, or for the bishops of a province to evolve out of their body a metropolitan centre, no more was it anti-christian for the episco

Euseb. lib. vii. c. 30.

pate of an empire, or of the whole Church, to develope from itself a living centre of unity, which should have the effect of consolidating, and binding together, the whole body.

To refer the papacy of the middle ages to a purely satanic origin is as wide of the truth as it is to make it the institution of Christ Himself: it was the result of natural causes, and can lay no claim to a supernatural character, whether diabolical or divine. Every successive step from the commencement to the completion of the church system can be distinctly traced in history; and an impartial survey of the whole field thus opened to our view will probably convince us that, in the construction of the papal edifice, human passions, human sins, and even human virtues, had the largest share. The successive popes as much obeyed as they led the tendencies of the age: Western Christendom was as ready, nay anxious, to confer upon the bishop of Rome the prerogative of supreme power, temporal and spiritual, as he was to receive the fatal boon. De Maistre has reminded Protestants, and the justice of his remark no one can deny, that where there is on one side a voluntary surrender of inherited rights, it is idle to talk of usurpation on the other; and, in fact, the medieval bishops of Rome only exercised powers which had been delegated to them with the free, or apparently free, consent of the Church and the State. If the Church was willing that unlimited ecclesiastical power should be deposited in the hands of a single bishop, and if emperors were content to hold their dominions as fiefs of Rome, can we wonder if the Holy See did not feel itself bound to reject the proffered dignity, or to take pains to remind its suitors of the primitive equality of bishops, and of the spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom? Especially when, to a pious mind contemplating the social disorders of the age, it might well seem that no remedy that could be applied to rectify those disorders was so likely to succeed as the erection of a central authority, feeble in a temporal point of view, but wielding spiritual powers before which the haughtiest princes must bow, and standing in the relation of a common father to all the nations of Europe. The sentiments of disapprobation with which we must view the language and actions of certain popes will probably be considerably mitigated if we bear in mind that they were men, and that their position was one of peculiar difficulty and temptation. Who, in fact, shall venture to attribute to such a man as Leo the Great a deliberate design to establish the papal throne upon the ruins of apostolic Christianity? The event, indeed, has proved that to no human hand can the sceptre of universal empire, spirit

ual or temporal, be safely confided; but the intolerable evils which sprang from the papal rule, in its fully developed form, were yet in the womb of time, and were unforeseen. In short, regarding the papacy as a natural result, the slowly accumulated concretion of many ages; as the visible symbol of the unity of the whole Church; as a sheltering inclosure which preserved the great objec tive truths of the Gospel during periods of wide-spread heresy and political anarchy; we can neither feel surprise at the appearance of the phenomenon, nor refuse to recognise in it a permissive dispensation, which divine providence made subservient to its own purposes. At what point, then, it may be asked, did the system of which papal Rome is the head and centre assume a decidedly antiChristian character? we reply, when to the fact of the chief patriarchate of the See of Rome the doctrine of the Roman pontiff, as laid down in the formularies of Trent, and expounded by the great writers of the papal communion, was appended; an addition which totally changed the relations between the church of Rome and the other churches of the Christian commonwealth. With some observations upon this important point, the more important because a similar change of fact into doctrine meets us in every page of Church history, the present section shall be brought to a close.

The reader will probably have already perceived that the principle which has throughout governed the construction of the Church system, especially in matters of polity, is, the transformation of points of Apostolic order, or ecclesiastical custom, into divine laws; a principle which rests for support on the dogma, that the Church is the representative, and impersonation, of Christ upon earth, and which, it is easy to see, was adopted in order to convert her into a legal institution, and to represent her as, in her postapostolic forms of polity, a divinely appointed mediatrix between man and God. Whatever part of the Church system we examine, we see the working of this principle. Thus it is that on infant baptism, a subject on which Scripture is well nigh silent a doctrinal structure is raised which, instead of confining itself within the range of pious opinion, boldly claims to be a matter of faith: thus, too, it is that the rite of confirmation, for which at most we have but the analogical precedent of the laying on of the Apostles' hands (analogical because the apostolic imposition of hands differed essentially from every subsequent one), is exalted into a divinely appointed means of grace, and made a Sacrament. By the application of the same potent instrument it

is that, as regards ecclesiastical polity, the episcopal form of gov. ernment is made to assume the character of a divine law in the same sense in which the Aaronic priesthood was; becomes a necessary condition of Christ's presence in his Church, and of immutable obligation. In another branch of the Romish controversy, this principle is employed to give a quasi-divine authority to the creeds of the Church.

There are several stages, or degrees, in the application of it. First, the apostolic appointments, or practices, recorded in Scripture, are, without any warrant from the Apostles themselves for the statement, declared to be of divine authority, and essential to the being of the Church: next, the same divine sanction is extended to such appointments as, from the testimony of uninspired history, alone, or combined with Scripture, we have reason to believe to be apostolical: the third stage is, when every custom of the Church, whether it pretend to be of apostolical origin or not, if only it be ancient and universal, is affirmed to be of perpetual obligation and last comes the distinctive principle of Tridentine Romanism-viz. that the decisions of the present church, whether as regards doctrine or practice, have the force of divine laws, and come to us with the same authority as if Christ Himself had promulgated them.

The real difference, on this point, between Romanists and Protestants should be carefully borne in mind. It is not merely that the Romish church retains certain practices which the reformed churches have abandoned; or that the former possesses, while the latter are without, a pope: the true point of difference between the advocates and the opponents of the Church system consists in the authoritative sanction which they respectively claim for this and every other development of church polity. While the Protestant views the organization of the Church as the result of natural causes, operating under apostolic guidance and control, the Romanist regards it as an arbitrary appointment, emanating directly from God. Not content with arguing that the changes introduced from time to time into the polity of the Church were conceived in an apostolical spirit, and, on this ground, are to be retained, Rome has ever claimed for them a directly divine sanction :· the pope received from Christ Himself a commission to represent Him upon earth; episcopacy was in the original draught of church government delivered by Christ to the Apostles; and so on throughout. The Protestant protests not so much against the fact of the primacy of the bishop of Rome as against the sanction which it claims, —

the ground on which it is placed: he retains episcopacy where he can, but he rejects the so-called catholic theory of it. In like manner he practises infant baptism, and the laying on of hands; but neither in the one case nor the other does he venture to allege a divine prescription for his practice.

The occasions which first gave rise to this distinctive principle of Tridentine, as contrasted with genuine-i. e. Protestant-Catholicism, were those on which the early bishops had to contend against sectarian tendencies, or the encroachments of an insubordinate spirit. From time to time there appeared in the Church men, both lay and clerical, who, whether from pure or corrupt motives, found fault with the existing state of things, and endeavoured to bring about what they conceived to be a reformation : failing in which attempt, they too often became open opponents of their bishop, and established rival communions. Such at Carthage, in the time of Cyprian, were Novatus and Felicissimus, the authors of the schism which figures so prominently in the writings of that father; and such characters there probably were in the churches to which Ignatius addressed his epistles: a supposition which explains, if not justifies, his unguarded expressions. The merits or demerits of Novatus and Felicissimus being put aside as irrelevant to the question, the facts were these: - a party among the presbyters of Carthage had, from the first, opposed Cyprian's elevation to that see, and, when their efforts to prevent his election proved unavailing, they continued to evince a strong feeling of hostility towards him: of these the most influential was Novatus, who, among other acts of insubordination, ordained a certain Felicissimus deacon, without the knowledge or consent of his bishop. At length the anti-Cyprianic party broke out into open schism, and appointed Fortunatus, one of their number, Bishop of Carthage in opposition to Cyprian. The proceedings of these men were manifestly subversive of all order, and highly censurable; but what is the ground which Cyprian takes against them? Instead of treating the schism as a breach of Christian unity, and apostolic order, he at once denounces it as a sacrilegious violation of the divine law. "There is," he says, "but one God, one Christ, one Church, one" (episcopal) "chair, founded upon a rock by the Word of the Lord. There can be but one altar and one priest (bishop). Whoever elsewhere collects, scatters. Whatever is set up by men contrary to the divine appointment, is spurious, impious, sacrilegious." "The opposite party," he writes Epist. 40. Ad Pleb.

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