We have sufficiently considered the originative character of Catholicity under the aspect of constructed form. We have contemplated her moulding and shaping matter in her flexible fingers, and evolving that wilderness of artistic grace and loveliness which, in the ruins of a Tintern or Melrose Abbey, compels the admiration, but defies the rivalry, of the apostate sons of Catholic sires. We shall now consider her influence in the building up of states and the organization of societies.
Christianity took its rise under a universal military despotism. It sustained for three hundred years the superincumbent pressure of a hostile heathen empire. It exhausted the malice and the power of a pagan and brutalized temporal order; and when the Roman empire shook the world with its fall, Christianity survived the death-throes of that mighty organization.
When she rose from the catacombs, she did not sweep away the temples of the heathen gods; she drove from those fanes the unclean spirits which so long had dwelt within them; she rescued them from their demon desecration, monuments of her triumph, trophies of her victorious agonies; she made them the basilicas of her majestic worship.
When the fierce tribes from the north poured over Southern Europe, the church preserved what was sound in the Roman civilization, instructed the barbarians in agriculture by the example of her laborious monks, and taught them all the arts of life; instituted laws and polity; tempered and restrained tyranny; planted and nourished the seeds of liberty; developed civilization and refinement, and built up the whole grand fabric of Christendom.
In this formation of new states out of new populations, they did not become perfect exemplars of Christian ethics and morals, nor exact exponents of the formative power of Catholicity. The church encountered in those ages, as she does in this, incessant obstacles, difficulties, and resistance. Whatever was good and admirable in those constitutions came to them from the Catholic religion and was derived from the papal see.
The canon law had, under the emperors, tempered and modified the civil code; and among the new states it operated a beneficial change in the feudal principles. Both these systems prescribed for the mass of men an unchristian servitude. Enlightened equity and justice, and equality before the law, originated in the jurisprudence of the church, and not in barbarous feudalities, nor in the capricious and tyrannical decrees of Roman emperors. There are men in this age and country who profess great love for the people and great regard for the rights of labor, but who are stanch partisans of the tyrants of the middle age in the contentions which arose between them and the papal see. Inherited ill-will blinds them to the fact that the only power in those days which could hold tyranny to an accountability or check kingly license was that of the pope. The exercise of the papal protectorate not only tended to prevent causeless wars, but it controlled the corrupting influence of royal vices by stamping them with reprobation and, where needful, with degradation. It was the bulwark of the feebler states, the barrier against princely ambition, and everywhere the advocate, the friend, and the defender of the toiling multitude.
The new organization of states was to be marked by a characteristic which was also new. Human government is ordained of God. Christianity was to recognize and to exemplify this truth. She was to legitimate and ennoble human government in its own separate order. To effect this in the fullest manner, there must be an exemplification directly from the personality of the hierarchy; for, sacrifice being the most exalted human action, the priest, whose office it is to offer sacrifice, is by his function first among men. The highest recognition must therefore derive from the priesthood. But there would always be something lacking of the highest, unless the head of the hierarchy were a temporal ruler. The temporal power of the pope is the consecration of human government. Unlike others, he receives no dignity from the office, but confers grace upon it and upon its order; and Christendom, created by the church, receives the key-stone of its strength and its crowning symmetry when the first of Christian priests becomes a ruler among the nations. And consequently, religion suffers its direst outrage when, reversing the order, the temporal power lays its unfaltering hand upon the vessels of the sanctuary.
The church not only created the interior coherency of states by introducing just principles into their constitution; she not only bound them in links of fellowship whose nexus was at Rome; she also organized their exterior defence. In uniting Christendom during the crusades to repel the Moslem invasion, the popes caused the reconstruction of systematic and scientific strategy, which had disappeared with the Roman legion, thus furnishing to civilization a needful defence and a desirable superiority, while at the same time the narrow spirit of the feudal method and its local strifes were rendered obsolete.
For a thousand years the struggle begun by Mohammedan invasion continued to rage on the confines of Europe. At its early period it penetrated to Tours in France, where it was checked by Charles Martel, in 732. But the triumph was not completed on that wing of Christendom till the capture of Granada, and the annihilation of the Moorish power in Spain in the year of the discovery of America. On the other border, the Turks besieged and took Belgrade, and suffered a final repulse at Vienna from John Sobieski, King of Poland, in 1683.