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of the pettiest achievement, of yielding a not unbearable civil government, and has become intolerable to those who know it best and have had most to do with it. Infallibility has failed in the humblest sphere of earthly duty. The Vicars of Christ have scandalously misgoverned a petty principality. The head of the Church is abominable in the eyes of his temporal subjects. What an argument against the spiritual papacy is this! incapable of refutation, defying evasion; of a force not to be lessened by the subtlety of Bellarmine and not to be overpowered by the rhetoric of Bossuet.

Italy may not become Protestant; the offer rejected by her at the Reformation may not be renewed. She may not unswear her spiritual allegiance to the papacy; she may still allow the Pope to be the Viceroy of Heaven. She may still concede that out of his spiritual jurisdiction there is no salvation. But she declares this Viceroy of Heaven to be an intolerable earthly ruler; she pronounces it the woe of woes to be a subject here of him who holds the key of the Blissful mansions. She casts off as ruinous to all the best interests and noblest ends of this life the political rule of him apart from whose spiritual supremacy there can be no salvation for any soul. Her spiritual adhesion has a bitter mockery about it. Italy may remain impervious to the sharp rhetoric of Protestant tracts and the weighty arguments of Protestant treatises. But she cannot refute herself. Her past history, her present plight and her present mood compose a Dissuasive against Popery' of overwhelming force. Who can gainsay, who can pervert the damning witness of that Italy, which has known the popedom so intimately and possessed it so peculiarly? Never was that exact retribution, that sublime poetical justice which so delights the heart and imagination of man and which lends so awful a charm to every great drama whether of fiction or of history, more sovereignly and solemnly present than throughout the papal drama; especially in these latter scenes of it where the popedom is wounded and entangled by the princedom, is taken in the device of its own heart, is caught in its own net and wounded with its own sword; in these wondrous scenes where Italy stands forth the great assailant and main afflicter of that very papal power of which she was for ages the closest intimate and the chief victim.

2 Massimo d'Azeglio (La Politica e il Diritto Cristiano, pp. 37, 38) strongly utters this conviction.

409

BOOK XII.

FRANCE AND AUSTRIA AS ACTORS IN THE PAPAL DRAMA.

O toi. chétif pape, considère et regarde du Monseigneur le Roi de France la bonté qui te garde et défend de tes ennemis, ainsi que ses prédécesseurs ont toujours gardé les tiens. Nogaret to Boniface VIII. (Du Puy, Histoire du Différend, p. 72).

O thou wretched pope, think and reflect upon the goodness of my lord the king of France who guards and protects thee from thy foes, just as his predecessors have always guarded thine.'

THE wonderful story of the papacy combines every ingredient and property of a grand, terrible and perfect drama. There has been a rapid succession of striking and most diverse scenes: there has been an endless variety of startling incidents; there has been an astonishing variety of remarkable characters. For twelve centuries almost every great event in history has had relations with the popedom, has served either to help or to hurt it, to advance or to bring it low; every prominent historical personage has been connected with the papacy either as friend or foe, either as servant or antagonist. The invasion of the German tribes, the early conquests of Islam, the warfare against images, the rise of the Carolingians in France, the glories of Charlemagne, the resurrection of the Western Empire, the fall of the Carolingians and the rise of the Capets, the Norman conquests of Naples, of England and of Ireland, the Crusades, the struggle between the Italian Republics and the German Emperors, the extirpation of the Albigenses and Magna Charta, the conquests of the Mongols under Zingis, the growth of the French monarchy, the growth of English freedom, the councils of Constance and Basle, the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, the revival of learning, the invention of printing and the discovery of America, the acquisitions of the House of Austria and its long rivalry with France, the invasion and subjugation of Italy by foreign powers, the greatness of the Spanish monarchy, the Reformation, the struggle of the Netherlanders against Spain, the civil war in France, the Thirty Years' War, the peace

of Westphalia, the supremacy of France under Louis XIV., the Revolution of 1688 and the consequent supremacy of England, the rise of Prussia, the growth of Russia, the partition of Poland, the French Revolution, the French Empire, the Congress of Vienna, the Revolution of 1830, the civil war in Spain, the discontent of Italy, the outbreak of 1848, the reaction of 1849, the Second French Empire, the Russian War, the Austrian Concordat, the uprising of Italy, the conflict between France and Austria;—not one of these events has come to pass without the papacy being the better or the worse for it. Phocas, Mohammed and the first khalifs, the great Greek Iconoclasts Leo and Constantine Copronymus, and the great Lombard kings, Luitprand and Astolf, Charles Martel, Pepin and Charlemagne, Archbishop Wilfred and Archbishop Hinkmar, Otho the Great, Dunstan, Lanfranc and Anselm, William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard, Henry IV., Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon, Bernard and Arnold of Brescia, Becket and Henry II., Frederick Redbeard and Frederick II., Philip Augustus and John Lackland, Dominic and Simon de Montfort, St. Louis and Charles of Anjou, Philip the Fair and Dante, Petrarch and Wycliffe, John Hus and Cæsar Sigismund, Mohammed II., Gutenberg, Erasmus, Columbus and Savonarola, Luther and Loyola, Charles V., Francis I., Henry VIII. and Gustavus Vasa, Philip II. and Elizabeth, William the Silent, Henry IV., Gustavus Adolphus and Ferdinand II., Cardinal Richelieu and Cromwell, Louis XIV. and William III., Voltaire and Pombal, Frederick II., Catharine II. and Joseph II., Napoleon I. and Alexander I., Prince Metternich and Czar Nicholas, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Francis Joseph and Victor Emmanuel, Count Cavour, Viscount Palmerston and Louis-Napoleon;- all these, more or less, directly or indirectly, unconsciously or rejoicingly, have wrought weal or woe to the popedom.

Together with this astonishing variety of incidents and characters, there has been a wonderful unity of action maintained throughout this tremendous and most complicated drama. Nothing can exceed the sustained self-consistency of the chief actor. Throughout twelve centuries and a half the popedom has remained true to its character as a secularised and perverted spiritual power; with extraordinary vigour and fidelity has it sustained the part of a kingdom of this world calling itself a kingdom not of this world. With every variety of mood it has always preserved the same character; through a multitude of

mistakes it has always pursued the same end. But this unchangeableness and self-consistency are not only thus awfully conspicuous in the chief actor, but are also strikingly apparent in such of the subordinate actors as were capable of any continuance during the long drama; in the leading nations, empires and dynasties grouped around the papacy during the whole or a portion of its existence. In the parts which these states and dynasties have played in the great papal drama, in their dispositions towards the papacy, and in their dealings with the papacy, there has been a singular steadfastness and well supported consistency. The nation of France, the empire of Germany, the House of Hapsburg and the people of England have each exhibited a striking uniformity both of feeling and of action towards the See of Rome.

But there is one power in which this harmony of character with respect to Rome is especially wonderful; a power too connected for the longest time and in the closest manner with the popedom. The French monarchy arose before the Roman bishopric swelled into the papacy; while its founder Clovis was accomplishing his work (480-511), the Roman bishops were the submissive subjects of the Gothic sovereign of Italy, Theodoric. France stood forth as the protector of the pontiffs in the eighth century just as she stands forth their protector in the nineteenth. During the intervening eleven centuries the connection between France and Rome has been most intimate; and throughout these ages the deportment and dealings of the French monarchy towards the Roman See have been unvarying and very peculiar. The eldest child of the Roman Church,' France though not violently untender or flagrantly disobedient, has been a froward and wilful child who has had her own way much more than her Holy Father liked. Her love of him has always had a selfregardful and imperious character. Often fanatical Roman Catholics, her monarchs have never been servile Papists. She has not seldom bestirred herself in behalf of the papacy; she has sinned often and horribly in behalf of the papacy; but she has never crouched before the papacy. Her services have been those not of a blind votary and self-forgetful vassal to whom service was reward enough, but those of a protector who would not protect for nothing and of a benefactor who exacted a large return. Alone among nations who have not renounced the Roman communion, France has more than once got the better in a conflict with Rome. Alone of European crowns, the crown

of France has never been lowered beneath the triple crown. The realm of England was once a tributary of Rome; the imperial throne of Germany has been given and taken away, has been trafficked with and trampled under foot by the pontiff; the House of Hapsburg has been ever his devoted and degraded vassal; but the throne of France has never had its lustre dimmed by dependence upon the papal chair. Alone among sovereigns a French monarch has reduced the popedom into his tool and thrall. While her warriors rejoicingly perpetrated the horrors of the Albigensian crusade at the bidding of Innocent III., no king of hers ever stooped to the baseness of John of England in casting down his crown before the same pontiff. Capable of a Bartholomew massacre, she has been ever incapable of an Austrian Concordat. It has been the portion of this eldest child, of this foremost and fiercest champion of the Roman Church to bring more detriment and degradation upon the popedom than any of the nations who have forsaken it has done. This spirit of imperious attachment, of self-seeking and exacting beneficence has been conspicuous throughout their intimate connection of eleven centuries. If in the middle of the eighth century Pepin twice led a French army across the Alps to the rescue of the pontiff from the Lombards, Pope Stephen II. crossed the Alps to crown with his own hand the founder of the second French dynasty. Charles the Great found in Pope Adrian I., whom he defended against the last Lombard king Desiderius and in Pope Leo III. whom he defended against a Roman rival and who placed upon his head the crown of the revived Western Empire, pliant instruments and obedient subjects.

The early Capetian kings were not slack in combating papal pretensions. But it was Louis the Saint, Louis the Crusader, the pattern of medieval devotion, who in the first of the many famous documents entitled Pragmatic Sanctions, upheld the freedom of the French church and the rights of the French crown, and set up against Roman aggression a barrier strengthened and improved by subsequent illustrious champions of the Gallican liberties. His intense piety, sometimes dimmed by superstition, never dwindled into pusillanimous servility; the saint of the house of France was a combatant of papal exactions and encroachments; he was a saint of God's making as well as of the pope's creating and deserves reverence although he underwent canonisation. In his grandson Philip the Fair the popedom found the most terrible and victorious antagonist that

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