not indeed for the episcopate of Peter, but for the handing on by Peter of his exceptional powers, this was cited as genuine by the Synod of Vaison in 442, was excepted from the apocryphal works condemned by Pope Innocent I, and was not included in the Index ascribed to Pope Gelasius I. Finally, in the ninth century it was placed at the head of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, which were the strongest support of the Papal claims throughout the Middle Ages and were universally accepted as genuine until their falseness was proved beyond doubt at the time of the Renaissance.

Even if it be admitted, in spite of the meagreness of the evidence, that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome, and handed on his special powers to a successor, this is by no means enough to substantiate the claims of the Papacy. The Popes must prove, not only that they are the successors of Peter in the Roman See, but that they have inherited his special powers and continuously exercised them down to the present time. As Bishop Gore has pointed out, if ever there was need for an infallible voice in the Church it was in the second century, when there was no fixed canon of Scripture, no established creed and no definitely ordered hierarchy, when the scattered Churches, clinging to their different traditions, were diverging in doctrine and worship, and everywhere strange crops of heresies were springing up. Yet in all the documentary evidence that has survived from this period there is no sign that it occurred to anyone to appeal for a decision on questions of faith to an infallible successor of St. Peter. The traditions handed down in the Churches founded by the apostles were, indeed, treated as of peculiar authority, and of these Churches that of Rome, informed by the teaching and consecrated by the blood of the two leading apostles, was perhaps the most important. But the Roman Church, for all its eminence, was clearly not regarded as possessing any authority differing in kind from that of the other apostolic Churches. Tertullian* held that the apostolic Churches were of equal authority, and there is nothing contradictory to this view in the passage from Irenæus which is often cited in support of the Papal claims. When Irenæus wanted to confound the Gnostic heretics by enumerating the succession of bishops through whom the apostolic tradition had been handed down he chose as typical

*See de præscriptione hæreticorum, 36.

the great and illustrious Church founded by the glorious apostles Peter and Paul in Rome . . . for to this Church, on account of its superior pre-eminence, it must need be that all Churches come together, that is, the faithful from all sides; and in this Church the tradition that comes from the apostles has always been preserved by men from all parts.*

That is to say, in the Church of the imperial city, to which sooner or later everyone came, it was more possible than elsewhere to arrive at that consensus as to the true apostolic traditions which it was later the object of general councils to obtain. Even if the Roman Catholic version of the passage be accepted, and for convenire ad hanc ecclesiam we read "agree with " instead of "come together to," the lesson of the passage remains the same; for Irenæus expressly states that he selects Rome because "it would be very tedious to rehearse the lines of succession in every Church," and he clearly has in mind, not any supreme pontifical authority in the successor of Peter, but the general "illustriousness" and catholicity of the Christian community in Rome.

In probing into the foundations of the modern Papacy there is, indeed, no necessity to belittle the primitive importance of the Roman Church. The other apostolic Churches-Smyrna, Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria-had special claims, but none to preeminence. The Church of Jerusalem which, as the mother of all, might have claimed pre-eminence, vanished when Titus destroyed the holy city; it was not till the fourth century that it regained religious importance as a place of pilgrimage. The Church of Rome had from the first a special position, not only owing to its association with the two chief apostles, but as the Church of the capital of the Empire. Throughout the west especially it was natural for the Churches to look for religious leadership to Rome, which was not only the centre and source of political authority but the seat of the only apostolic Church in the west. Even the Eastern Churches, though very jealous of their separate traditions, could not but feel the influence of this great Church, whose numbers and wealth enabled it to be the almoner of all Christendom.

Yet, during the second and third centuries, even those who

*Contra hæreses, III, 3. The translation here given is Bishop Gore's (Roman Catholic Claims, p. 93), which is substantially the same as that in "The See of Peter," but makes the meaning clearer.

extolled the pre-eminence of the Roman Church acknowledged no special powers and prerogatives in the bishops who presided over it. Irenæus, whose panegyric has been quoted, made no apology for his presumption when he reproved Pope Victor for excommunicating the Eastern Churches, which had refused to conform to the Roman use in the matter of Easter. St. Hippolytus did not shrink from making a violent attack on Pope Callistus, whom he accused of heresy and the abetting of heretics (Refutatio omnium hæresium, ix, 2, 5-7). Tertullian poured scorn on this same Pope-" this Pontifex Maximus, this bishop of bishops who had arrogated to himself the vast power of the forgiveness of sins, whereas all that he had was "the duty of maintaining discipline, the headship not of an empire, but of a ministry." Even Cyprian, while exalting " the See of Peter, the principal Church, the source of sacerdotal unity" (Epist. lv.), spoke of the bishop of Rome as his "excellent colleague" and, as we have seen, did not hesitate to attack Pope Stephen in violent terms for what he considered his heresy.

It does not affect the bearing of this evidence on the question of the Papal claims that, in the particular matters at issue, the bishops of Rome happen to have been right and their opponents wrong. What is clear is that Victor, Callistus and Stephen, in turn, advanced pretensions which came as an unwelcome surprise to the Church at large. There is no record to show which of the Roman bishops first put forward claims which were considered subversive of the whole constitution of the Catholic Church, nor of the exact nature of these claims; for there is nothing to show that Victor spoke in his own name and not merely as the mouthpiece of the Roman community in an effort to secure universal acceptance of the well-known Roman tradition. All that is certain is that, whereas up to that time it was the Church, rather than the bishop of Rome, which had enjoyed a certain pre-eminence, at the beginning of the third century there was a sudden flare of resentment against the Roman bishop personally, as against one who was not content with his dignity as president of his great see, but was groping after the office of "bishop of bishops.'

The Church, as it emerged from the chaos of the first century, was constituted as a loose federation of autonomous units, each governed by its own bishop; and each bishop was the equal of every other bishop, supreme over his own flock and answerable

to God alone or, in cases of flagrant misdoing, to a provincial council of his fellow-bishops. The idea is summed up by St. Cyprian, who for all his willingness to concede to the Roman see an honorary primacy, said in his address to the third council of Carthage :

No one among us sets himself up as a bishop of the bishops, or by tyranny and terror forces his colleagues to compulsory obedience, seeing that every bishop in the freedom of his power has the right to his own opinion and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another. We must all await the judgment of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has the power both to appoint us to the government of his Church and to judge our acts therein.

It was a protest against Pope Stephen's conception of the government of the Church as a monarchy, a congeries indeed of bishoprics, but all of them subject to the one bishop who sat upon the throne of the prince of the apostles. The protest, coming from such a quarter, may be taken as proof that in the middle of the third century the idea of any supremacy residing in the bishop of Rome as inheritor of the prerogatives of Peter was a startling novelty.

The issue thus raised by Pope Stephen was obscured by the period of persecution that followed, and the fragmentary records of the succeeding years throw but little light on the history of the Papacy. In the year 272, however, we find the contesting parties in the Church of Antioch appealing not to the Roman bishop, but to the pagan Emperor Aurelian, who referred them to the judgment of " the bishops of Italy and the city of Rome." This was considered a triumph for the Roman party, but it has little significance for the Papal claims; for, as our authors suggest, it probably meant only that the emperor, who was very contemptuous of Christian disputations, thought it convenient to treat the bishop of Rome and his associates as responsible for the whole widespread and troublesome body of Christians, in much the same way as the Sultan Mohammed II, after the conquest of Constantinople, made the Patriarch of the East responsible for the good behaviour of the Orthodox population of Turkey. If it served as a precedent for anything, it was for the ingerence of the civil power into the affairs of the Church.

Certainly when, some half a century later, Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Empire, the last

thing he contemplated was the setting up of a Papal monarchy beside his own. Constantine was himself summus episcopus; as his biographer Eusebius said, "he exercised a special care over God's Church and... like a general bishop appointed by God, convoked councils of his ministers." So long as he lived there was no question of any supreme jurisdiction in the Roman bishop, and still less of any supreme authority in defining the faith. The Emperor, in the interests of imperial peace and unity, desired to heal the divisions in the Church, which was then torn in pieces by the Arian controversy; and for this purpose he hit upon the device of summoning a general council of bishops, so as to arrive at a consensus of the Church on the matters in dispute. The first general council, which met at Nicæa in 325, was convened and presided over by him, and its decisions were made binding on the Church by imperial decree. The influence of the Roman Church was naturally powerful in the council, but it was in no sense decisive; and there was no question of an endorsement of any such claims as had been put forward by Pope Stephen. On the contrary, by the famous Canon VI the jurisdiction of the see of Rome was specifically limited. "Let the ancient customs in Egypt, Lybia and the Pentapolis prevail," it runs, "that the bishop of Alexandria shall have jurisdiction in all these provinces, since the like is customary for the bishop of Rome also."* That is to say, Rome is ranked with other sees having patriarchal jurisdiction over neighbouring bishoprics.

The

It was not till after the death of Constantine, in 337, that the Roman bishops had the opportunity of reviving and developing the pretensions of Victor, Callistus and Stephen. The conditions both in the Church and the Empire favoured them. Churches of the speculative and argumentative East were distracted by the endless quarrels arising out of the Arian heresy, and it was natural for those who shared the homoousian creed of Rome to turn for support to the only apostolic see that seemed to stand firm and unmoved amid the turmoil, so that appeals began

*Translated from the earliest Greek texts. The variants favouring the Papal claims are discussed by the authors of " The See of Peter,' P. 485, note 92. In the west there was afterwards added the introductory clause: "The Roman Church has always held the primacy." Against this unwarranted interpolation the Eastern bishops protested at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.