of Ritschl's Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche '-now unfortunately out of print-have found general acceptance, and represent the point of departure of modern research. These principles are:

(a) The divergence of the Christianity of the sub-Apostolic from that of the Apostolic age is to be explained by the fact that the Gentile Christians either did not know or did not understand the Old Testament beliefs which the Jewish Christians possessed.

(b) The Gentile Christians brought into Christianity the religious interests, hopes, and aspirations which animated them; and could accept at first only some of the fundamental ideas of a Gospel which rested on the Old Testament.

(c) Where, therefore, we find among the Gentile Christians any peculiarities of doctrine, cultus, institutions, &c.-and such peculiarities occur from the very first-we must not, in order to explain them, draw in the Pauline theology, still less Jewish Christianity, but must consider as factors (1) certain fundamental thoughts in the Gospel; (2) the letter of the certainly not understood Old Testament, which the Jewish Christians treated as a collection of divine oracles; and (3) the state and institutions of the Græco-Roman world at the time of the first preaching of the Gospel.

(d) The resultant, the Catholicism which has in the third century become fully formed, is therefore not to be understood either through Paulinism or through Jewish Christianity, or apprehended as a compromise between the two; but the Catholic Church is rather that form of Christianity in which every element of the ancient world has been successively assimilated which Christianity could in any way. take up into itself without wholly losing itself in this world.

If these considerations be borne in mind, the difficulties presented by the history of Christian dogma and institutions are, if not solved, at least on the way to solution. The constituents of historical Christianity-that is, of Catholicism-are not to be found in Galilee and Jerusalem alone, even if Alexandria be thrown in; but in Greece, at Rome, and generally in the ancient world as a whole.

II

The passage from the earlier, or patristic, to the later, or mediæval, Catholicism was not so much from old to new as from less to greater definiteness: it was rather an explication than an evolution in the proper sense of the term. The Church of the Fathers, rapidly as it underwent the catholicising process, retained traces of its former freedom, though less frequently and less distinctly as time went on. The Episcopate, the fixed creeds, the canon of

6

Scripture, were slow to establish themselves in certain communities-notably (with the exception of Asia Minor and Constantinople, where stereotyping influences, spiritual and secular, were dominant) in the East. In Egypt and Syria the old freedom died out slowly at Carthage, authoritative as was the African temper, it flashed out in Tertullian and even in Augustine. Ecclesia spiritus per 'spiritalem hominem, non ecclesia numerus episcoporum ;' and differentiam inter ordinem et plebem constituit ' ecclesiæ auctoritas et honor per ordinis consessum sanctifi'catus. Adeo ubi ecclesiastici ordinis non est consessus et 'offers et tinguis et sacerdos es tibi solus.'* Again, Numerus ille justorum qui secundum prepositum vocati 'sunt, ipse est (ecclesia). . . . Sunt etiam quidam ex eo 'numero qui adhuc nequiter vivant aut etiam in hæresibus ' vel in gentilium superstitionibus jaceant, et tamen etiam illic novit Dominus qui sunt ejus. Namque in illa 'ineffabili præscientia Dei multi qui foris videntur intus 'sunt, et multi qui intus videntur foris sunt.' It is impossible to fit such sentiments into the mechanical conceptions of later theology: the divergence is too radical to be bridged. The evolution of religious beliefs may be compared with that of the fauna and flora of a continent: Christianity emerges from a conflict between competing and incompatible candidates for existence; the weaker perished, the stronger survived. This strength and weakness are of course relative to the particular stage of the struggle: an idea too great at a given time for its environment may perish temporarily but prevail in the long run. Rome stood from the first for centralisation: the triumph of this tendency was in effect the conquest of Christianity by Rome. This conquest, politically if not religiously the most momentous in history, has been variously estimated and accounted for. It was provided for, urges the Catholic, by the promise of Christ to Peter, and is of the essence of religion and society. It was the downfall of the Gospel, answers the Protestant; the victory of anti-Christ over Christ. Such estimations and solutions lie outside history: the historian will judge the event by other standards, and account for it by other causes than these.

It is difficult for a later age and a new civilisation to realise what Rome meant to the ancient and mediæval world.

* Tertullian, 'De anima,' xi. 21. 'De Monog.' 7.
Augustine, 'De Bapt.' v. 38.

'Rome, par des prodiges de vertu civique, a créé la force dans le monde; et cette force, en réalité, a servi à propager l'œuvre grecque et l'œuvre juive, c'est-à-dire la civilisation. La force n'est pas une chose aimable, et les souvenirs de Rome n'auront jamais le puissant attrait des choses israélites et grecques; l'histoire romaine n'en fait pas moins partie de ces histoires qui sont le pivot des autres, et qu'on peut appeler providentielles, parce que leur place est comme marquée dans un plan supérieur aux oscillations de tous les jours.'

Such was the function of Rome in history; and its discharge was provided for by a corresponding prestige. This prestige was as unlimited as it was commanding. Outside was barbarism; Rome was not only the centre, it stood for and was the equivalent of the civilised world: what was found elsewhere fragmentarily and in isolation was contained in it in plenitude and in union with the other elements which constituted civilisation as a whole. What could be more inevitable than that this conception should pass over into the Church? that when the Gentiles, at first barely tolerated, became in virtue of their numbers, wealth, and attainments the predominant partner in the Christian community, they should have brought into it the sympathies, the instincts, the patriotism of their past? To the fanatic Jew, taking as his ideal separation from all that was not Jewish, the Empire was the abomination of desolation, standing where it ought not. The Gentile judged more justly: he saw in it the greatest and most efficient instrument for the good of mankind that the world had yet seen. It gave its subjects peace, security, law, and such liberty as could be granted without injury to larger than individual interests. The writer of the Acts of the Apostles brings out the wisdom and equity of Roman administration: Gallio is a representative type. The world went well when such men, reasonable, just, indifferent, were its rulers: and, independently of the later weakening and final transfer to the East of the Imperial Government, the traditions of place and temper made a communicatio idiomatum between the secular and the religious easy. Hence the primacy of Rome. The Roman Church was the World-Church to the particular Churches, as the City was the World-State to the nations under its sway. This primacy was no mere theory; not theories but facts welded the Christian communities, often stubborn and recalcitrant, into one. Before the monarchical episcopate, which developed in Asia Minor earlier than in the West,

Histoire du Peuple d'Israël,' I. iv.

had established itself in the city of the Caesars, the Roman Church spoke with authority, and had put forward an unmistakable if inchoate claim to the potior principalitas among the Churches. Empire was, and is, in the soil: 'L'autorità papale esige perentoriamente una sede universale' says a recent writer. Roma sola ha nel mondo tradizioni 'cosi auguste, cosi grandiose, da essere la meno insufficiente 'alla maestà veneranda del successore di Pietro. Fuori 'della cinta di Roma, il Pontefice sembrerebbe perdere 'qualcosa della sua grandezza: ogni altro luogo è angusto per Lui... Oggi Roma è la città nuovamente elaboratrice del pensiero mondiale, e intorno a lei rifulge l'aureola di 'madre della civiltà. Fuori di lei potrà trovarsi la ricchezza, l'intensità di vita, il fervore dei commerci, la febbre dei 'guadagni. In lei, e in lei sola, la misteriosa suggestione 'di una esistenza storica, ricca e complessa, benefica ed 'austera, inimitabile.' That Rome should be the seat of the Papacy is matter of life or death. This idea, however misconceived, lies at the root of the struggle for the recovery of the Temporal Power; the Vatican sees more clearly, perhaps, than its opponents, that a transplanted Papacy is a contradiction; that a Pope in Malta, at New York, or at Jerusalem would be no longer Pope. The notions, Roman and Catholic, tended from the first to fuse into one another: the Church of the Universal Empire was universal or Catholic; the source and centre of this Empire, and, it came to be held, of this Church, was Rome. The Emperors, non-Christian as well as Christian, encouraged this centralising tendency; the Petrine tradition, with which in course of time the Pauline associated itself, did but confirm an existing and extending usage. With this qualification Renan's dictum-Pierre et Paul (réconciliés), voilà le chef-d'œuvre qui fondait la suprématie ecclésiastique de 'Rome dans l'avenir. Une nouvelle qualité mythique ' remplaçait celle de Romulus et Remus'-may be accepted; the legend lent the halo of religion to the fact. Theologians are on indisputable ground when they maintain the antiquity of the Roman primacy: what they overlook is the foundation on which it was built, which was not Peter but Rome. But it is as old as the hierarchy, the creeds, the sacramental system, and the whole institutional side of Christianity: it has as much and the same kind of Scriptural

* Questioni Politico-Religiose: Osservazioni di un Prelato Romano,

P. 40.

warrant; it is the outcome of the same historical and psychological process; together these things stand-or fall.

The Roman Church survived the Roman Empire, whose fall at once enhanced her pretensions and gave her greater power to enforce them than before. She stood for that older Rome, the

'Madre Roma, signora in tutti i liti'

of the poet, which lived on in idea, immortal, stimulating the imagination and the heart of men. She had retained many of its best qualities-public spirit, the instinct of authority, the sense of law. The rude nations with whom she had to deal were awed by her majesty: the story of Attila retiring from the siege of Rome at the bidding of Leo the Great in fear of the drawn sword of the Apostle that overshadowed the Pontiff is 'legend, but true legend:' the idea underlying the narrative is that of the moral pressure exercised by Roman Christian culture on a barbarian king. Where true legend was insufficient to support the superstructure in process of formation, the aid of false was freely invoked. "The time when Gregory IX. consolidated the canon law, that fertile source of fabulous ideas of history, is 'well known to coincide with a general failure of historical 'insight and veracity which operated well-nigh as strongly upon the actors in the events of this period as upon its chroniclers. Fictions were everywhere accepted as truth and ' used recklessly to explain existing facts; and among these 'fictions two had a diffusion and influence which it is difficult 'to overestimate.' † One of these was the Donation of Constantine, by which that prince was alleged to have abdicated his imperial authority in the West into the hands of the Pope-the abdication was represented later as an act of restitution, and the original donation as made by Christ to St. Peter, this being the received exegesis of Luke xxii. 38; the other, that of the Translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks by an official act of Leo III. The Venerabilem of Innocent III. put forward this audacious falsification of history as a cardinal fact in the relation of the Church to the World. The fact was moulded to the

+ R. Lane Poole, 'Illustrations of the History of Mediæval Thought,'

p. 249.

Cf. Döllinger, 'Kaiserth. Karls des Gressen,' 297.