the world of the Middle Ages, the church, converting the barbarians and humanizing their ferocity, was among the foremost powers. The Catholic Church, with its one ubiquitous priesthood, with its superstitions and imposing ritual, with its ever-growing splendor and grandeur, with its government centralized under the supreme Pontiff at the historic seat of universal empire, and with what still remained to it of intellectual culture and aspiration, and of the Christian spirit and doctrine, became the bond of union among nations of diverse races and dissonant languages. Its canon law was a distinct body of jurisprudence, supposed to be authoritative over all men, touching all human relations, and having force as law wherever the primacy of Rome was acknowledged—whether on the Tiber or on the Thames, whether in France or in Germany. Its tribunals were every where co-ordinate with the courts of secular justice, and every where the magistrate was bound to respect and obey their decisions.

But while the church was thus encroaching on the state, it came to pass that the state in its turn transcended its. legitimate powers and invaded the province of the church. At every stage in the progress of the hierarchy and of the superstitions which made it powerful, there was a corresponding increase of the wealth devoted to religious uses and controlled by ecclesiastical functionaries. The election of bishops, after being transferred from the people to the clergy of the cathedral churches, had been virtually given to the pope, whose approval was considered necessary to the validity of an election. By similar methods the control of appointments to lucrative or honorable stations in the church, throughout all the countries subject to papal authority, was gradually centralized in the court of Rome. The power of the pope in these respects, together with the taxes which he levied under various names and pretenses, became burdensome. In one country and another, the drain on the national wealth gave rise to loud and frequent complaint. It was a

serious question whether the ever-growing wealth of the ecclesiastical power should bear its part, with the wealth of laymen and of secular corporations, in the tribute which wealth pays to government for protection. When the ecclesiastical power had become so great and so formidable, there could not but be resistance unless the state were content to be merged in a spiritual despotism. Some limit must be set to the power that was centred at Rome, or there would soon be no other power. If princely archbishops, with princely dignity and power, and bishops with the wealth and state of barons, were appointed by the pope, and were responsible only to him for the exercise of their most formidable powers, the king-the secular and civil government, under whatever name-must have a voice in the appointment; and the ecclesiastical lord, no less than the lay lord, must be invested with the lands and temporal possessions of his office by the sovereign to whom he owed allegiance. The conflict about ecclesiastical investitures which runs through the history of the Middle Ages was essentially a conflict between the church and the state about the appointment of church officers. No such conflict could have arisen had the churches retained their original simplicity of constitution. But when the church had become a hierarchy with immense possessions, and that hierarchy had become complicated with all the machinery of government in the state, the long conflict between the popes, on the one hand, and emperors and kings on the other hand, was an inevitable consequence.

The celibacy of the clergy was not a papal invention. In the early churches-as early, perhaps, as the latter part of the second century-there was an ascetic sentiment which forgot that "marriage is honorable in all," and ascribed superior sanctity to a life of voluntary celibacy. Before the schism between the Greek Church and the Latin, before the excision of the Oriental churches, that sentiment had acquired almost the force of law. Yet to this day, in the Greek Church, in

the Armenian Church, and in the Nestorian, celibacy is required only of bishops, who are therefore selected generally, not from among the parochial clergy, but from among the monks in convents. But in the Latin Church of the Middle Ages, an unmarried life became at last, after many conflicts, the indispensable rule for all orders of the hierarchy. The priests of that great organization which, in the name of Christ, aspired to universal dominion, were excluded from the most important and sacred of human relations, and were to be an isolated class incapable of the sympathies, so tender and so powerful, which live in the atmosphere of home and of household love and duty.

Yet the parochial clergy, dwelling in their own parishes, watching over their own flocks, serving their neighbors in the ministrations of religion, and responsible each to his own bishop, were thought to be not sufficiently cut off from human relations and sympathies. Though doomed to ignorance of parental and conjugal affections, though exempt from all ordinary duties in society and from responsibility to civil government, they were, after all, citizens in some sort, and capable of patriotic sympathies. As being in the world, they were called the secular clergy. The monastic orders, those great fraternities organized under vows of obedience as well as of celibacy, were the regular clergy-exempted from the jurisdiction of the bishops, withdrawn from the world, generally secluded in monasteries, governed by their own officers like a military organization-the standing army of the great High-Priest at Rome.

Into those bodies many of the best men, in those ages of ignorance and violence, were attracted, by whose withdrawal from their natural relations to society, the world, which might have been the better for their example and their direct beneficence, was really made worse. Doubtless the monasteries and the monastic orders were instituted, originally, with the best intentions. Doubtless they served some good purpose. under that divine Providence which makes all things in

some way subservient to itself. It may be that, without them, learning, in those ages of barbarism, would have perished. It may be that, without them, Christianity, finding no place of refuge, would have degenerated into a religion of ferocity, or into a superstition as besotted as that which exists in Abyssinia. But we know that human nature in those ages was just what human nature is to-day. We know that neither human passions nor human infirmities can be laid down at the gate of a monastery, and that the community within, which receives the neophyte into its bosom and subjects him to its ascetic rules, is only a community of men in a most unnatural and unmanly condition. We know, too, that a sentimental Christianity, shirking all natural duties, retreating from conflict with the world's temptations, and shutting itself up in a cell for communion with God, is Christianity misguided, morbid, and deformed, and that it can not recover its vigor or its divine beauty but by going forth to walk and to work in the sunshine. Nor can we forget that as the idea of monastic life had its origin partly in the exaggeration, but still more in the perversion of Christian sentiments, so the monastic orders, instead of having any tendency or fitness to restore the true ideal of the Christian life, were the foremost supporters of superstition and the most efficient instruments of spiritual despotism.

CHAPTER III.

WHAT THE REFORMATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY DID FOR CHURCH POLITY.

THE great Reformation in the sixteenth century was an attempt to recover the primitive Gospel. Its success, so far as it was successful, resulted from a concurrence of various forces adverse to that huge system, compacted of superstition, scholastic theology, and spiritual despotism, the growth of fourteen hundred years, which had usurped the name and place of Christianity. The revival of learning, the invention of printing, and the general movement toward a new stage of civilization, were among the influences which contributed to the result. What was, at first, the experience of individual souls, struggling with the great question, "How shall man be just with God," driven back from tradition to the Scriptures, and finding rest in Christ the one mediator between God and men, became, at that juncture, a new announcement of the primitive Gospel. As in the first century, so in the sixteenth, the Gospel, "to wit, that God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself," was the power that took hold of human souls to bring them out of darkness into light, and out of bondage into the liberty of the sons of God. Agitation ensued, opposition, conflict, papal excommunication, and at last a permanent revolt of Protestant nations against the power enthroned at Rome.1

In what ecclesiastical forms did Protestantism organize itself? When we ask this question, we meet the fact that every where a political element was combined with the simply religious element in effecting the Reformation.

1 See "History of the Reformation," by Prof. George P. Fisher.

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