THE GREAT ERA OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY by Rev. J. A. Wylie, LL.D., of Edinburgh

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 2, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 46.

THE GREAT ERA OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

By Rev. J. A. Wylie, LL.D., of Edinburgh

The Papacy: Its Position, Policy, and Prospects.—No. 1.

THESE five centuries past, the outer and inner Papacies have been running two entirely different and opposite courses. Looked at on its political side, the Papacy is seen to be undergoing a process of decay; its political props have been mouldering into dust. Looked at on its religious side, it is seen, century by century, waxing in stature and consolidating in power.

The Papacy these centuries past has been perfecting the chain of its dogmas, laying deeper and broader the foundations of its authority, and riveting its hold upon the human conscience; in short, its career has been not unlike that of man itself, when his body decays by lapse of years, while yet his mind grows in moral and intellectual strength. The body of the Papacy has been returning to the dust out of which it was taken, but its soul, loosened from the political fetters that cramped it, and relieved from the earthly burdens that weighed it down, has been shooting higher and higher into the heavens, as if to persuade men that it is instinct with an immortal life, and endowed with a god-like strength.

The Papacy attained its political noon in the days of Innocent III., in the thirteenth century. It continued to flourish in power unimpaired, and splendor undimmed, for a century longer. In the days of John Wickliffe—whose colossal figure stands at the parting of the ages, marking the point where the modern times begin to dawn—the first great blow was dealt the political power of Rome. Then it was that the famous schism fell out. There were not one but three Popes, each claiming to be the true successor of Peter, and the real vicegerent of God, and each anathematizing the other as an undoubted impostor and a veritable Lucifer. This flagrant scandal entailed great loss of prestige on the Papacy, which it never after fully recovered. The princes of Europe were now better able to make their own terms with the Tiara, and this contributed to the emancipation of the temporal from the spiritual power.

The next stroke that befell the Papacy was the Pragmatic Sanction, in France. This arrangement guaranteed the French church in a considerable amount of independence of the Papal See, and to the same extent abridged the Pope's power in that influential kingdom.

There followed the Statutes of Provisors, of Premunire, and of Mortmain, in England. These enactments inflicted great financial as well as great political damage on the Papacy; inasmuch as in few countries of Europe had the Pope been able to reap, from year to year, so rich a revenue, or to exercise so large a measure of power, as in England. There came next

THE GREAT ERA OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

The numerous and sore disasters which the Reformation brought with it to the Papacy I need not dwell upon. One-half the kingdoms of Europe revolted from under its scepter. It was laboring to repair these immense losses, and had already recovered Bavaria, Bohemia, Hungary, and Belgium, when suddenly its sky was overcast by the darkness of the French Revolution. On the wings of that tempest came new and strange calamities to the church of Rome. Her priests were massacred; her revenues confiscated; her dignities cast down; the very chair of her Popes was for a time suppressed—a cup all the more bitter that Papal hands held it to her lips and compelled her to drink it.

The hurricane passed and there came a pause; the wonderful recuperative energies of Rome were put forth in effacing the ravages of the tempest, and restoring the church to something like her former estate. But the calm was treacherous. We have seen in our own days the work of despoiling the Roman Church resumed. One Italian province after another has been torn from the Papacy, and, last of all, we have seen the top stone put upon the political humiliations of that church in the loss of Rome, the throne of her temporal dominion, and the chief seat of her spiritual authority. And now what do we behold? A spectacle that may well fill us with amazement and awe. The political Papacy in ruins; but out of its ruins there stands up a vast spiritual colossus! Its feet more firmly planted on the earth, and its head lifted higher into the heavens than in any former age.

Let us pause and mark the great and solemn lesson taught in this to the men now living, and to the ages to come. The power of systems for good or evil lies in their hidden springs. It is eminently so with the Papacy. Its great strength lay not in the array of princes and kingdoms that stood around it, but in its inner principles. It was these, and not the swords, and faggots at its service, which enabled it to blind the understanding, to affright men with imaginary terrors; to make them call evil good and good evil, to subjugate the conscience, and sink society into political and moral serfdom. But the world did not understand this, and now God is about to give us a new experience of the Papacy. He has compelled it to come out of its political organization; to stand forth naked and disembodied before the world, clothed with tremendous spiritual sanctions and attributes which enable it to awe the conscience and dominate kingdoms as much as ever. Does not this show that it was the spiritual Papacy which all along was the world's oppressor?

OUTWARD DECAY; INWARD GROWTH.

This brings us to the second branch of our subject, namely, the growth and consolidation which has been going on within, contemporaneously with decadence in the exterior of the Papacy. The increase of its spiritual forces has kept pace with the decay and waste of its political appliances. The grand aim of the Papacy from the beginning was to be as God, and to rule all men with a divine and infallible authority. It has never lost sight of this great idea, it has never parted with the hope of realizing it, it has never turned aside from the pursuit; and with a consistency and success of which there is no other example in all history, it has gone steadily onward, century after century, through defeat this hour and triumph the next, to that great consummation. But the hope of reaching that dazzling eminence rested mainly on its spiritual, not on its earthly appliances. It knew that the fashion of the world changeth; that laws, institutions, and dynasties are mutable; that thrones may be lost by weakness or overturned by revolution, but that principles are eternal; and therefore never did it suffer check or defeat outwardly but it cast itself anew upon its fundamental and abiding principles; it refurbished and perfected those ethereal weapons, which alone could give it such a conquest as it aimed at achieving. But for this, the Papacy would have fallen long ago; it would have disappeared with the medieval kingdoms amid which it arose. But so far from this, while its companion monarchies are in the grave, the Papacy still flourishes; and here it is, engaged in a greater muster of its spiritual forces, now complete in number and perfect in strength, preparatory to a more deadly encounter with liberty and Christianity than it ever yet waged.

Let me briefly describe how this has come about, and at the same time offer a forecast of what it is likely to end in. The late pontificate—I mean that of Pius IX.—was wholly passed in recasting the dogmas of the Papacy, and in giving them their fullest possible development. Conclusions to which the Papacy had all along logically pointed, but to which no one, at least in modern times, had dared to push it, were decreed as dogmas, and marshaled in hostile array against modern society. This was the life work of Pius IX.—I mean of the doctors and Jesuits of the Curia; for, personally, the Pope himself was not equal to so great a labor. And for what end was this work undertaken? Not merely to recover the temporal sovereignty—in other words, the Papal States—a comparatively small matter; but to put the Papacy in a position to resume that far vaster temporal supremacy which the Popes of the middle ages had exercised over the whole of Christendom.

THE SYLLABUS AND INFALLIBILITY.

In order to this it was necessary, first of all, to set full before the world's eye, and fix deeply in the world's belief, the idea of a divine vicegerent—a great spiritual authority on whose shoulder God had laid the government of the world, and whom he had qualified to bear so great a burden by the superhuman qualities with which he had endowed it. Hence the two great outstanding acts of the late Pontificate; I mean, the proclamation of the Syllabus and the Infallibility. The first, the Syllabus to wit, is a store-house of the laws of the church of Rome, as they have come at last to be stamped with the impress of perfection and unchangeableness. The second, the Infallibility, is the focus into which the whole legislation of Rome has been gathered, and whence it again radiates forth over the world in a tyranny which absorbs all rights, crushes all consciences, nullifies all laws, and dominates all kings and nations. In these two documents is presented the perfect image of that superhuman vicegerent which, according to Papal teaching, God has set up upon the earth.