"By this all is made clear; not only Bishops, but also Apostles, have received the keys and the power from Christ, in Peter, and, in their manner, through Peter, who, in the name of all, received that for all, as bearing the figure and the person of all."
He then shows that this tradition had gone down even to his own times: "This holy and apostolic doctrine of the Episcopal jurisdiction and power proceeding immediately from, and instituted by, Christ, the Gallic Church hath most zealously retained." "Therefore,[[161]] that very late invention, that Bishops receive their jurisdiction from the Pope, and are, as it were, vicars of him, ought to be banished from Christian schools, as unheard of for twelve centuries."
It is precisely "this very late invention" which is urged against the Church of England. Unless this be true, her position in itself, supposing her to be clear of heresy, with which, at present, I have nothing to do, is impregnable.
Such is the most Catholic interpretation by which Bossuet sets in harmony with the teaching of all antiquity a few expressions, which are all that I have been able to find that are even capable of being forced into accordance with the present Papal system, and which, as soon as they are so forced, contradict the whole history of Councils, and the whole life of the most illustrious Fathers.
Now there is no doubt that Bellarmine's doctrine is the true logical development of the Papal Theory; it alone has consistency and completeness; it alone is the adequate expression of that prodigious power which was allowed to enthrone itself in the Church during the middle ages; it would fain account for it and justify it. Grant but its postulate, that the Pope is the sole vicar of Christ, and all which it requires must follow. On the other hand, that school which ranks Bossuet at its head, and which sought to limit, in some degree, by the Canons the power of the Roman Pontiff, and maintained that Bishops were, jure divino, successors of the Apostles, in a real, not in a fictitious sense, however well-founded in what it maintained on the one side, was certainly inconsistent. It gave either too much or too little to the Roman See;—too much, if its own declarations about the succession of Bishops and the authority of General Councils be true, and founded in antiquity, as we believe; too little, if the Pope be indeed the only Vicar of Christ on earth, and the supreme Ruler of His Church; for then these maxims put their partisans very nearly into the position of rebels, and, in truth, brought the Gallican Church to the brink of a schism, in 1682. However this may be, that school is extinct; the ultramontane theory alone has now life and vigour in the Roman Church. It seems to absorb into itself all earnest and self-denying minds, while the other is left to that treacherous conservatism which would use the Church of Christ as a system of police, for the security of worldly interests. What the ultramontane theory is, we see from Bellarmine. It proclaims that the government of the Church is a monarchy, concentrating in one person all the powers bestowed by Christ upon the Apostles. In this the student of history is bound to declare that it stands in point-blank contradiction to the decrees of General Councils, to the sentiments of the Fathers, and the whole practice of the Church for the first six hundred years; for much longer indeed than this, but this is enough. Well may Bossuet ask, "if the infallible authority of the Roman Pontiff is of force by itself before the consent of the Church,—to what purpose was it that Bishops should be summoned from the farthest regions of the earth, at the cost of such fatigues and expense, and Churches be deprived of their Pastors, if the whole power resided in the Roman Pontiff? If what he believed or taught was immediately the supreme and irrevocable law, why did he not himself pronounce sentence? Or if he pronounced it, why are Bishops called together and wearied out, to do again what is already done, and to pass a judgment on the supreme judgment of the Church? Would not this be fruitless? But all Christians have imbibed with their faith the conviction, that, in important dissensions, the whole Church ought to be convoked and heard. All therefore understand that the certain, deliberate, and complete declaration of the truth is seated not in the Pope alone, but in the Church spread everywhere."[[162]] "This too is certain, that when General Councils have been holden, the sentence of the Roman Pontiff has generally preceded them; for undoubtedly Celestine, Leo, Agatho, Gregory the Second, Adrian the First, had pronounced sentence, when the third, fourth, sixth, seventh Councils were held. What was desired therefore was, not a Council for the Pontiff about to give judgment, but, after he had given judgment, the force of a certain and insuperable authority."
In fact, on this theory, as we have seen above, St. Cyprian, St. Firmilian, St. Hilary of Arles, the African Bishops in 426, the Fathers of Chalcedon in 451, in passing their famous 28th Canon, the Fathers of Ephesus in 431, in passing their 8th, the Fathers of Constantinople in 381, in passing their 2d and 3d Canons, and in the synodal letter addressed to the Pope and the Western Bishops, the Fathers of Nicea, in passing their 6th, nay, all ancient Councils whatever, in all their form and mode of proceeding, were the most audacious of rebels. But what are we to say about the language of St. Gregory? Did he then betray those rights of St. Peter, which he held dearer than his life? When he wrote to Eulogius of Alexandria, "If your Holiness calls me Universal Pope, you deny that you are yourself what you admit me to be—universal. But this God forbid:" are we to receive Thomassin's explanation, that he meant, as Patriarch, he was not universal, but, as Pope, he was, all the time? or when he says to the same, "in rank you are my brother, in character my father," was Eulogius at the same time, as Bellarmine will have it, merely his deputy? "In the beginning, Peter set up the Patriarch of Alexandria, and of Antioch, who, receiving authority from the Pontiff (of Rome), presided over almost all Asia and Africa, and could create Archbishops, who could afterwards create Bishops."[[163]] And this, it appears, is the key which is to be applied to the whole history of the early Church. Those Bishops, Metropolitans, Exarchs, and Patriarchs, throughout the East, who had such a conviction of the Apostolic authority residing in themselves as governors of the Church, who showed it in every Council in which they sat, who expressed it so freely in their writings and letters: St. Augustin, again, in the West, himself a host, who speaks of a cause decided by the Roman Pontiff being reheard, of "the wholesome authority of General Councils," who assents to St. Cyprian's proposition, that "every Bishop can no more be judged by another, than he himself can judge another," with the single limitation, "certainly, I imagine, in those questions which have not yet been thoroughly and completely settled;" who, in a question of disputed succession, which more than any other required such a tribunal as the Papal, had it existed, appeals not to the authority of the Roman See, but to the testimony of the whole Church spread everywhere, not mentioning that See pre-eminently; or when he does mention "the See of Peter, in which Anastasius now sits," mentioning likewise "the See of James, in which John now sits:"—all these were nothing more, at the same time, than the Pope's delegates, and received through him their jurisdiction.
Can a claim be true which is driven to shifts such as this for its maintenance? Or can the truth of Christianity and the unity of the Church rest upon a falsehood? Is infidelity itself in such "a hopeful position,"[[164]] as regards Christianity, that it is really come to this, that we must either receive a plain and manifest usurpation, or be cast out of the house and kingdom of God? That we must reject the witness and history of the first six hundred years of the Church's life on the one hand, or be plunged into the abyss of infidelity on the other? If it be true that the Pope is Monarch of the Church, which is the present Papal theory, the Church of England is in schism. If it be not true, she is at least clear of that fatal mark. All that is required for her position is the maintenance of that Nicene Constitution which we have heard St. Leo solemnly declare was to last to the end of the world, viz. that every province of the Church be governed by its own Bishops under its own Metropolitan. And who then but will desire that the successor of St. Peter should hold St. Peter's place? Will the Patriarch of Constantinople, or the Archbishop of Moscow, or the Primate of Canterbury, so much as think of assuming it? Be this our answer when we are accused of not really holding that article of the Creed "one Catholic and Apostolic Church." Let the Bishop of Rome require of us that honour and power which he possessed at the Synod of Chalcedon, that, and not a totally different one under the same name, and we shall be in schism when we do not yield it. At present we have no farther separated from him than to fall back on the constitution of the Church of the Martyrs and the Fathers.
But, it may be said, is the Catholic Church unanimous on the one hand, and the Anglican communion, restricted to one small province, left alone in her protest on the other? Did not she, whom they would call "the already decrepit rebel of three hundred years," submit from 596 to 1534 to that very authority which she now denies? It would be quite beyond my present limits to trace, as I had first purposed, the Roman Bishop's power from that point at which it stood when St. Gregory sent our Apostle Augustin into England, to that point which it had reached in the thirteenth century, and which it strove to maintain in the sixteenth. I can only now very briefly point out a few of the steps in that most wonderful rise. The two centuries, then, which succeeded St. Gregory, were even more favourable to this growth than those which went before. While the confusion and violence of secular governments by the breaking in and settlement of the various northern tribes were greater than ever,—while the ecclesiastical constitution was all that yet held together the scattered portions of the shattered Western empire—the single Apostolical See of the West, whose Bishop was in constant correspondence with the spiritual rulers of these various countries, whose voice was ever and anon heard striving to win and soften into mercy and justice those temporal rulers, would be, as it were, "a light shining in a dark place." The Bishops, everywhere miserably afflicted by their own sovereigns, found a stay and support in one beyond the reach of the feudal lord's violence. The benefit they thus derived from the Roman Patriarch was so great, that they would be disposed to overlook the gradual change which was ensuing in the relation between themselves and him, the deference which was deepening into subjection. Or, if here and there, what Leo would have called "a presumptuous spirit," such as Hincmar of Rheims, or our own Grossetête, in after times, set himself against the stream, it would all be in vain. However good his cause might be, if he did not yield, he would be beaten down like St. Hilary of Arles. Moreover, as the great heresy of Mahomet invaded and hemmed in three of the Patriarchal Sees of the East, their counterpoise to the originally great influence of the Roman See was removed. Political separation from the East, and the difficulty of communication, would of themselves greatly tend to this result. To this must be added the great increase of power which the house of Charlemagne, for their own political purposes, bestowed on the Roman See; it was worth while building up a popedom for an imperial crown. De Maistre says, "The Popes reign since the ninth century at least."[[165]] But it is a somewhat naïve confession, "The French had the singular honour, one of which they have not been at all sufficiently proud, of having set up, humanly, the Catholic Church in the world, by raising its august head to the rank indispensably due to his divine functions; and without which he would only have been a Patriarch of Constantinople, miserable puppet of Christian sultans, and Musulman autocrats." Just, too, when it was most difficult to detect imposture, and to refer to the acts of ancient Councils, that singular counterfeit of the false decretals made its appearance, which so wonderfully helped the Roman Patriarchs in consolidating the manifold structure of their authority. This, indeed, assailed the Bishops of the West by their most reverential feelings, and added to the force of a great present authority, almost always beneficially exercised, the weight of what seemed an Apostolical tradition. Besides these causes, the Popes found in the several monastic orders throughout Europe the most unceasing and energetic pioneers of their power. From the very first there appears to have existed a desire to exchange the present superintendence of the local Bishop for the distant authority of the Pope. The great orders, indeed, were themselves so many suspensions of the Episcopal system. With reason do the statues of their founders adorn the nave of St. Peter's, not only as witnesses of the Church's exuberant life, but as those whose hands, more than any others, have helped to rear that colossal central power, of which that fane is the visible symbol. Thus the Papal structure was so gradually built upon the Patriarchal, that no one age could accurately mark where the one ended and the other began, but all may see the finished work. It requires no microscopic eye to distinguish the authority of St. Leo or St. Gregory from that of St. Innocent the Third. The poet spake of a phantom what is true of a great reality:—
"Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo,
Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit."