Temporal Power of the Papacy.
At the late annual meeting of the Scottish Reformation Society, a great speech was made by Dr. Duff, from which the following is an extract. “Of late much has been said and written about the temporal power of the pope. Now, what is meant by this temporal power? Many, I find, are apt, hastily and inconsiderately, to conclude that it denotes merely his civil power as sovereign over the States of the church, which is now lost by the absorption of these States into the kingdom of Italy. If this were all, it were comparatively a small and harmless matter. But this is so far from being all that it is scarcely the thing at all. A brief statement of facts may best serve to indicate what it really meant. As far back as the sixth and seventh centuries, Romish prelates throughout Europe began in many ways to mix temporal with spiritual jurisdiction; and this incongruous mixture of things temporal and spiritual or things ecclesiastical and secular, proved, as might be expected, highly detrimental to religion. In the eighth century they carried their insolent encroachments on the civil power still further. In the coronation of monarchs they came to occupy the chief place, and by that ceremony they pretended to bestow on the king his kingdom, and that, too, by an authority which they professed to have derived from God. “They also began to assume the right of sitting in judgment on civil rulers in their own ecclesiastical councils, and if they proved refractory, of deposing them. In the case of certain royal but timid superstitious weaklings this was literally done; and the kings, with bowed down and craven spirits, actually submitted to the gross indignity and humiliation. In other cases, however, where they had manlier natures to deal with, there was a stout and stubborn resistance to such ignominious treatment. At length the pope, looking out from his lofty eyrie in the seven-hilled city, with envious and jealous eyes on the usurping proclivities of his underling prelates, not unnaturally concluded that he himself had fully as much right as any or all of them put together to regulate the affairs of sovereign princes, not by way of proffered friendly mediation and counsel, but of autocratic plenipotentiary authority—even to the extent of summarily disposing of their crown and sceptres, or of giving and taking away their temporal dominions. In the eleventh century this increasingly ambitious disposition on the part of the popes attained its climax when the celebrated Hildebrand was made pope, under the title of Gregory VII. Of him it has been truly said that he was the first who completely “subverted all the ancient privileges of kings and princes, of councils and bishops, of clergy and laity, and established the dominion of the pope as king of kings and lord of lords.” He did not hesitate fearlessly to proclaim his paramount right as head of the church and successor of Peter, for whom he impiously claimed all in Heaven and on earth; to create kings, by investing them with royal title and dignity; to pronounce judicial sentence upon princes as vassals of the Church of Rome, who, as such, were bound to take the oath of fealty, and humbly render to her due homage and tribute; as well as his paramount right, in the last resort, to dethrone all sovereigns who might persist in contumacy and rebellion against her divine and infallible authority. This latter right he based chiefly on his plenary power of excommunication. Now, let it be borne in mind that an excommunicated person was placed under a ban, and became simply an outlaw from all society—to be studiously shunned as a moral plague or pestilence—his wishes or commands to be utterly disregarded—all intercourse with him to be rigorously interdicted, and himself to be contumeliously treated and scornfully abandoned by the whole world. “In this way he literally dealt with no less a personage than the emperor of Germany, whom he excommunicated and thereby deposed—declaring his throne vacant, absolving his subjects from their oath of allegiance and imperiously commanding them to choose another in his stead; thus distracting and filling his dominion with sedition and tumult, strife, contention, and bloody wars. And in the following centuries other popes, imitating his example, and arrogating the same temporal supremacy over the governments and kingdoms of the earth, enacted a precisely similar part toward other monarchs and States, with precisely similar disastrous results. Of this daring and blasphemous claim of the popes to be absolute lords and proprietors of the whole world we find, toward the close of the fifteenth century some notable and striking illustrations. When Columbus, for example, returned to Spain after his famous discovery of western realms of fabled wealth, the Spanish sovereigns, though greatly elated by the glowing prospects thus opened up by them, and burning with intense desire to take immediate possession of the dazzling prize, durst not venture to do so till they had first humbly asked and obtained leave from their supreme lord and proprietor the pope. On being formally applied to for this end, His Holiness, with unbounded generosity, was generously pleased to grant his royal petitioners a free gift of all countries already discovered lying west of a certain named meridian—including, of course, the whole of the West India Islands, with North and South America! In like manner not long afterward, when the pope was similarly applied to by the king of Portugal, a free gift was made to him of all the countries already discovered, or to be discovered, east of a certain named meridian—including, of course, all Africa, Asia, the Indian Archipelago, and Australia—while at the same time, he graciously conferred on the king the magnificent title of “Lord of the Navigation, Conquests, and Trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India”—a title still retained by his royal successors. Here, surely, was a marvelous exercise of the usurped temporal power of the pope, on a scale of stupendous world-wide magnitude! Soon, however, was to be verified the sacred adage of pride going before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Amid the assertion and display of these high-handed prerogatives, the Reformation suddenly burst upon Europe with the upheaving force of an earthquake—in some countries shattering the colossal fabric of the papacy into pieces, dealing heavy blows and discouragements to it in others, and greatly lowering its prestige and authority in all. No47wonder that the proud tyrant of the Vatican should be exasperated beyond measure when he descried millions of once crouching and cowering devotees, now treating his baseless and impious pretensions with derisive scorn. No wonder that his bosom should be surcharged with a redundancy of bile and chagrin that could only find vent for itself in a succession of angry bulls and cursing anathemas which, though fulminated with all the old volcanic rage, fell on the newly-awakened and resuscitated manhood of the nations like the dash and froth and spray of the foaming billow as it furiously breaks on the solid rock that bounds the ocean’s shore, and soon sinks down into impotent exhaustion at its unshaken base. Now, it is the exorbitant temporal power and ascendancy thus partially lost in some lands at the time of the Reformation, and wholly so in others, which the popes have ever since been striving with might and main to recover and reassert in all. It is the arrogant and overbearing claim to this temporal power and ascendancy, under its new name of Ultramontanism, which the noble Emperor William and his grand Oliver Cromwell-like Chancellor Bismarck (applause) have of late been so strenuously resisted in their beloved Fatherland. And unless we soon learn to shut our ears to the plausible lies of Jesuitism and Jesuit-inspired Romish priests and prelates, and wholly repudiate the temporizing schemes of a spurious and hollow Liberalism, this is the arrogant and overbearing claim to temporal power and ascendancy which, through the cowardice, treachery, or ignorance of rulers in church and State, our children or grandchildren may have yet to resist, and that too, it may be, like our heroic forefathers, at the rekindled stakes and re-erected scaffold of martyrdom.”