THE TITLE selected for this book pretty exactly, I trust, expresses its character and defines its limits. I do not profess to write the history of the Roman Church; I do not profess to write a minute and detailed history of the popes: but I do profess to tell with some fullness and comprehensiveness the story of the popedom, to follow it from its origin to the present time through all its changes, revolutions, triumphs and disasters, to linger over its most striking personages and its most important passages, to set it forth in its twofold character as a spiritual and a secular power, and to consider its relations to other powers, its place in history, and its part in the great drama of human affairs.
While striving after strict accuracy in the statement of facts and perfect fairness in the estimate of character, I lay no claim to the impartiality of religious indifference. While in no wise blind, I trust, to intellectual greatness or moral worth in a pope, I look upon the popedom as the supreme corruption of Christianity. Disbelievers in the divine origin and the divine authority of the Christian religion may regard the papacy with feelings of mingled complacency and dislike, as an institution serviceable and beneficent in ages past though worn out and pernicious now. But every earnest believer in Christianity as the full and final revelation of God, must look upon the popedom either as the perfection or as the nethermost