§ 49. THE REFORMATION AND THE PAPACY. 2617
Vatican Council. The Pope has lost his temporal power by the momentous events of 1870; but he seems to be all the stronger in spiritual influence since 1878, when Leo XIII. was called to occupy the chair of Leo X. An aged Italian priest shut up in the Vatican controls the consciences of two hundred millions of human beings, — that is, nearly one-half of nominal Christendom, — and rules them with the claim of infallibility in all matters of faith and duty. [0 is a significant fact, that the greatest statesman of the nineteenth century, and founder of a Protestant empire, who at the beginning of the Kulturkampf declared that he would never go to Canossa (1872), found it expedient, after a conflict of ten years, to yield to an essential modification of the anti-papal Maylaws of 1873, without, however, changing his religious conviction, or sacrificing the sovereignty of the State; he even conferred an extraordinary distinction upon the Pope by selecting him as arbiter in an international dispute between Germany and Spain (1885).! But it is perhaps still more remarkable, that Leo XIII. in return sent to Prince Bismarck, the political Luther of Germany, the Christ Order, which was never given to a Protestant before, and that he supported him in the political campaign of 1887.
3. How can we justify the Reformation, in view of the past history and present vitality of the Papacy ?
Here the history of the Jewish Church, which is a type of the Christian, furnishes us with a most instructive illustration and conclusive answer. The Levitical hierarchy, which culminated in the high priest, was of divine appointment, and a necessary institution for the preservation of the theocracy. And yet what God intended to be a blessing became a curse by the guilt of man: Caiaphas, the lineal descendant of Aaron, condemned the Messiah as a false prophet and
1 Alexander VI., by a stroke of his pen, divided America between Spain and Portugal: Leo XITI., in 1886, gave the insignificant Caroline Islands in the Pacific to Spain, but the free commerce to Germany.
258 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
blasphemer, and the synagogue cast out His apostles with curses.
What happened in the old dispensation was repeated on a larger scale in the history of Christianity. An antichristian element accompanied the papacy from the very beginning, and culminated in the corruptions at the time of the Reformation. The greater its assumed and conceded power, the greater were the danger and temptation of abuse. One of the best of Popes, Gregory the Great, protested against the title of “universal bishop,” as an antichristian presumption. The Greek Church, long before the Reformation, charged the Bishop of Rome with antichristian usurpation; and she adheres to her protest to this day. Not a few Popes, such as Sergius III., John XII., Benedict IX., John XXIII, and Alexander VI., were guilty of the darkest crimes of depraved | human nature; and yet they called themselves successors of Peter, and vicars of Christ. Who will defend the papal crusades against the Albigenses and Waldenses, the horrors of the Inquisition, the papal jubilee over the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and all those bloody persecutions of innocent people for no other crime but that of opposing the tyranny of Rome, and dissenting from her traditions? Liberal and humane Catholics would revolt at an attempt to revive the dungeon and the fagot against heresy and schism; but the Church of Rome in her official capacity has never repudiated the principle of persecution by which its practice was justified: on the contrary, Pope Gregory XVI. declared liberty of conscience and worship an insanity (deliramentum), and Pius IX. in his “Syllabus” of 1864 denounced it among the pernicious and pestilential errors of modern times. And what shall we say of the papal schism in the fifteenth century, when two or three rival Popes laid all Christendom under the curse of excommunication? What of the utter secularization of the papacy just before the Reformation, its absorption in political intrigues and wars and schemes of ©