1. The Church and the Churches; or, The Papacy and the Temporal Power. An Historical and Political Review. By DR. DÖLLINGER. Translated, with the Author's permission, by WILLIAM BERNARD MACCABE. London: Hurst and Blackett. 1862. 2. Cathedra Petri: a Political History of the Great Latin Patriarchate. By THOMAS GREENWOOD, M. A. Camb. and Durh., F. R. S. L., Barrister at Law. [4 vols.] London: Thickbroom Brothers. [1856-61.]

3. Histoire des Révolutions d'Italie, ou Guelfes et Gibelins. Par J. FERRARI. [4 vols.] Paris: Didier et Cie, Libraires-Editeurs. 1858.

IN a former number we undertook to sketch the outline and report the substance of the two lectures delivered in Munich, in 1861, by Dr. Döllinger, upon the temporal power of the Pope, which excited so much apprehension, and provoked so many controversies. From those lectures has arisen the work the title of which we have given above. It is a very full exposition, from the Catholic point of view, of the tendency and condition of the churches which contrive to do without the Pope. As an indication and a result of the progress of liberal opinions in the Roman Church, it has a significance and an interest which neither its false statements nor its feeble theories can wholly extinguish.

The first three volumes of Mr. Greenwood's very learned history have been noticed in our pages as they appeared.t The brilliant work of Ferrari, as eloquent as it is exhaustive, well deserves the applause it has received. In its method and its style the concluding part, upon modern Italy, is a masterpiece of philosophical narrative. Upon the problems these books suggest upon that strange condition of the world they indicate, upon that history so full of sadness, if never wanting in promise, which they rehearse it cannot but be wholesome for us at times to dwell.

Amidst the silence and the gloom of ages, amidst the

* See Christian Examiner for September, 1862, p. 286.

† Christian Examiner for September, 1857, and January, 1862.

shadows and the wrecks of empire, over the very pavement that rang once with the tramp of armies reeling home from a conquered world, you may pass along the Appian Way, by the tombs of the Scipios and the palaces of the Cæsars, under the Arch of Constantine, to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum and the Capitol Hill. And the new Rome which lies beyond, crowded with temples and palaces, sombre and sad, is but the creation of the old Rome you have traversed, repeating at once its aspirations and its decay. Wherever you walk, in the galleries of the Vatican, by the column of Trajan or the tomb of Hadrian, among the violets of the Campagna or the ilexes of the Ludovici Gardens, this double character of the Roman world, this mysterious continuity of the Roman · life, impresses the mind as at once the striking characteristic and the solemn lesson of Rome.

Christian Rome is but a repetition in another form of the pagan Rome it supplanted. The primitive Christianity was a reaction against the desolation of a worn-out world; its simplicity and its purity were in themselves a revelation to the jaded minds and the disordered conscience of men. As Eusebius said, it lighted the earth like a sunbeam. But when the novelty of its freshness was gone, the lower tendencies of men asserted themselves. The old world came back, with its superstitions and its ceremonies, with its worship of form and its craving for symbols. The Popes succeeded to the Cæsars, and the world-wide dominion of the Church followed that of the Empire. It was through the Papacy that for many centuries the religion of the world was controlled. Thus the modern civilization has taken its color, in part, from the paganism of ancient Rome.

The struggle of the Protestant mind with the Catholic Church has been but the old effort of the free will and the pure thought to throw off the impurities of superstition which tend to gather about the civilization they corrode. The progress of the world has come through reaction as often as through revolution. The will of man seldom keeps pace with his convictions; and at no period have the convictions of men embraced the whole of life. Thus a progress absorbing, violent, in one direction, excluding all other elements, and con

tradicting all former experience, soon comes to an end. The inevitable law of reaction begins to operate; the tide-floods and the old evils come surging back. But no truth is ever lost, no ground ever permanently yielded. Over the turbulent waves of change the world passes on to its better life. That disintegrating process in philosophy which characterized the last age is still carried on in religion in this; the old superstitions are decaying, the old idols falling. But over all the earth, tyrannical, corrupting, the paganism of the past still confronts the civilization of the future. And the strongholds of that paganism are to-day, as they have been for ages, on the banks of the Tiber, within the walls of Rome.

In contemplating the history of the Church, it is a striking fact that, out of the eighteen centuries of its existence in Rome, there have not been much more than three in which the Popes have wielded the temporal power they abused. For seven centuries, indeed, the Church could show no territorial possessions at all. It was only at a later period in that darkness which came over the earth upon the fall of the Roman Empire that the minds of men, timorous and feeble, were guided by all the inspiration of the age to the only source of its power in the visible Church, with its supreme priest and its material hierarchy. It ill becomes us now, reaping the fruits of its piety and its toil, to misunderstand its character, or to undervalue its aims, in the earlier stages of its history. There is a beauty and a splendor in the work it did, which lift it above the glories of the Greeks or the achievements of the Cæsars. It was a spiritual empire, wielded with faith and courage and hope, however debased by ignorance, or clouded by superstition,-a saving element in the confusion and turbulence of a decaying civilization and a distracted world. To an exultant empire it threatened ruin, to a ruined empire it promised peace. The inspiration of its power was in the solace it breathed. For the first time since, breaking off from the primeval stock, they had occupied and redeemed the peninsula of Italy, the religious feelings of the Latin races were profoundly moved. A certain degree of intellectual progress was the condition of the Christian culture. The nations that received and diffused it could be European only.

But to be educated to a full comprehension of its truth, there was still another condition necessary, the monotonous materialism of the Empire. As the permanent assurance of virtue is found in the reaction against vice, so, in the progress of the race, the spiritual elements in our nature are most active and most beneficent when the material tendencies of men have driven them into that condition of desolation and despair which precedes the breaking up of civilization.

But, however firmly established was the spiritual supremacy of the Popes, their temporal power could not but be affected by the turbulent condition of the age it sought to control. During the whole of the twelfth century the Popes had no fixed territory of their own in Italy. Previous to Innocent III., says Dr. Döllinger, "no Pope can be named who actually reigned over a large territory." The Popes had long had possessions, indeed, to which feudal services were attached, and from which incomes were derived, but no state which they governed. When Innocent entered upon his pontificate, in 1198, the territories of the Church were all in the hands of strangers. It was his task to bring together the scattered possessions of the Church, to obtain for the authority of the Popes the reverence it claimed. Then followed the strifes with the heads of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans. By its very nature the Papacy was aggressive. It sent its agents into all countries; it interfered in all disputes; the consciences of men were in its keeping; political relations, not less than personal acts, were the subjects of its scrutiny and its censure; and it pursued throughout a certain steady line of policy. A grasping, monopolizing power, ever intent on its plans, watching and waiting, it could not but excite distrust and provoke opposition. Hence the incessant interference of foreign nations in Italian affairs, hence the dissensions and the hostilities of Italian states.

The influence of the Guelph and Ghibelline factions was felt in every state, in almost every family, in Italy. The Guelphs, everywhere the democratic party, by asserting their right to interfere in the political relations of the state, threatened the success of the very cause they protected. With the Ghibellines sided the nobles and the great families, eager to secure

their independence and advance their interests by the aid of the Imperialists. Thus nearly all the sovereign rights of the Popes were usurped and exercised by cities and nobles, by monasteries and bishops. Restless, suspicious, and hostile, the inhabitants of Rome inclined to the Ghibelline party, looking upon themselves as the heirs of the great empire of Rome, and entitled to dictate the election of the Emperor who claimed to perpetuate its name.

But the election of the house of Anjou to the throne of Sicily changed the condition of Italy. The Guelphs, ceasing to be a national, became a French party, that bastard Guelphdom which provoked the bitter hatred of Dante. For seventy years the Papacy was in the hands of France at Avignon. Already, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the free states of Italy were in decay. The tribune Rienzi revived for a moment, by the promise of a well-ordered republic, the remembrance of the ancient glories of Rome. But, unfortunately for Italy, he knew neither how to fight nor how to rule.

That tendency to disintegration, so characteristic of Italy, seemed at the close of the fifteenth century to have seized even the Popes themselves. The aggrandizement of their nephews and sons was their chief anxiety and effort; and this nepotism of theirs combined with the rankest elements of disorder to check the growth of the papal power. But the genius of Julius II. saved it from the ruin to which it was hastening. His skilful measures and his strong will restored its vigor and extended its sphere. It is from him, its third founder, that the Papacy dates one of its most brilliant periods.

In all the ruling nationalities which had been developed in the bosom of the Church, in all parts of Europe, there was observable, toward the close of the fifteenth century, a gradual change from the manners of the medieval time. And when the transition took place to the modern, the work of the Papacy was done. From that moment it has been, in spite of its fluctuating successes and its apparent bloom, in inevitable decay. The great commonwealth of Europe could have arisen only under the spiritual supremacy of a universal Church. But when the various races which compose it had taken the form of nations, centralized and distinct, emulous each of the other,