these there is a considerable body of ecclesiastics, who do not enter directly into the governing part of the Church, although they help to discharge some of its most important functions. The most solemn tribunal is a general council, that is, an assembly of all the bishops of the Church, who may attend either in person or by deputy, under the presidency of the Pope or his legates, whose appointment necessarily emanates from the Pope. All church property is held in trust and controlled by the bishops.

$54. The proof of this stupendous system to those who accept it is easy: The infallible Church has ordained it. But to those who deny its infallibility, the proof is indeed slender. Here is the Scriptural argument as given in the order of citation in the decree of papal infallibility: "That they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be in us" (John 17: 21). "Thou shalt be called Cephas (John 1: 42). "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matt. 16: 16-19). This would indeed be a strong passage had not Christ given the same power to all the apostles (John 20: 23) and to each local church (Matt. 18: 18). What was so expressly distributed by the Lord of all can not be made applicable only to one. But there is added: "Feed my lambs;" "Feed my sheep" (John 21: 15-17). “But I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not and do thou, when once thou hast turned again, stablish thy brethren" (Luke 22: 32).

This is the whole Scriptural proof cited in the decree of papal infallibility. In other connections several other pas

sages are quoted or referred to, but they apply to the whole apostolate, and not to Peter alone. On this slender Scriptural basis the huge fabric rests. But what is lacking in Scripture the system finds in the coördinate standards of faith and practice, namely, tradition, and decrees of councils and popes (§ 87).

Such is the Papal Theory of the Christian Church in its present completed development. It is grand, imposing, consistent, reducible to one constitutive principle, and claiming with logical daring to be the one only true Church of Christ because identical with the kingdom of heaven. We can hardly wonder that some Protestants are so awed by its grandeur that they turn back to Rome.

§ 55. Yet on this Papal Theory, as it has risen to completeness, it is obvious to note several things:

(1) The Papal Theory is a living power. It is met everywhere, full of vigor and hope, with unbroken front, and until recently confident of a speedy and universal acceptance or conquest. It had great consistency and strength as a system even while maturing; and now, while a fatal cleavage is going on, separating the governing clergy from the Roman Catholic laity, its power is tremendous. It was the laity of Roman Catholic Italy that stripped the Pope of his temporal power the very year in which the clergy decreed his infallibility. And all other Catholic countries acquiesced in spite of papal anathemas.

(2) The Papal Theory is unassailable by argument. The infallible is above argumentation. No proof can reach it; no logic can harm it. For more than three and one-half centuries the. theory has flourished and gained some lost ground, under the convicting proofs which reason, history, and the Bible hurl against it.

(3) The Papal Theory is irreformable. The infallible can not, of course, err. Hence the Papacy can never be reformed. This hope must be abandoned.

(4) The alternative with the Papal Theory is either vic

tory or death. There can be no compromise, no middle ground. The Syllabus of Errors, issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864, is the formal indictment of modern progress in science and liberty. It denounces, as a principal error, that "every man is free to embrace and profess the religion he shall believe true, guided by the light of reason" (Error 15); that "Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which it is possible to be equally pleasing to God as in the Catholic Church" (18); that "the Church has not the power of availing herself of force, or any direct or indirect temporal power" (24); that "national churches can be established, after being withdrawn and plainly separated from the authority of the Roman Pontiff" (37); that "the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church" (55). Among other errors infallibly stigmatized is this: "The abolition of the temporal power, of which the Apostolic See is possessed, would contribute in the greatest degree to the liberty and prosperity of the Church. . . . N. B. Besides these errors, explicitly noted, many others are impliedly rebuked by the proposed and asserted doctrine, which all Catholics are bound most firmly to hold, touching the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff" (76). The next day after the Vatican Council, in 1870, had declared the Pope infallible, which made this syllabus and all it contains infallible, France declared war against Germany, in consequence of which the Roman Pontiff was soon stripped of every vestige of temporal sovereignty and power. The King of Italy, on entering the States of the Church, proclaimed: "In the first place, all political and lay authority of the Pope and Holy See in Italy is abolished and will remain so." 20 By the decision of the supreme court of Italy the king has jurisdiction within the walls of the Vatican, the palace of the Pope. The infallible primate, the vicar of Christ, is thus made subject to the laws of Italy.21 This is

20 Appleton's Cycl. for 1870, 414.

212 Andover Review, 171.

the reason the Pope keeps up the fiction of being a prisoner in the Vatican, being deprived as he is of his temporal power. For unless he can recover that temporal power, so necessary to "the liberty and prosperity of the Church," that "all Catholics are bound most firmly to hold it," the Pope will have been proved by the providence of God to be a false teacher the very year the Vatican Council declared him to be an infallible teacher. It was the stress of this contradiction, unless speedily remedied, of which there appeared no hope, that wrung from the very Pope who called the council to decree his infallibility the despairing cry: "All is lost!" To recover his temporal power, and so to escape the demonstration of his fallibility, which this contradiction involves, the Pope, as the Hon. William E. Gladstone shows,22 has been, and still is, engaged in stirring up a general European war, that out of the strife he may emerge clothed with temporal sovereignty again. Necessity compels him thus to feign imprisonment, and to foment strife, until he wins or the Papacy dies. We may hope with confidence that the cleavage going on between the Papacy, which is clerical government wholly, and the Roman Catholic population will end in the overthrow of the Papal Theory, in a conflict indeed of its own making. With violence shall it be cast into the sea.

(5) When the Papal Theory perishes, and not till then, the Roman Catholic churches may be reformed. Parts may possibly again be broken off, separated entirely, and so reformed. But its adherents can not be reformed until there ceases to be a Papal Theory on the earth. For it is the Papal Theory that divides the Greek and Protestant communions from the Roman Catholic. Were there no Pope, the local churches in the Roman communion could break into provincial or national bodies and be reformed, as preparatory to a more comprehensive union. And, if it be true, as held by some, "that the order of bishops was craftily abolished by

22 Vaticanism, 85.

the Council of Trent (A.D. 1563), and the theory of certain schoolmen was made into dogma, to this effect, namely, the Pope is universal bishop, and possesses the whole episcopate; all other bishops are but papal vicars, that is, presbyters only," then the end of the Papacy is the end of the episcopacy in that great communion. Be this as it may, we have no doubt that the rise of this theory into completeness in papal infallibility is the beginning of its end.

(6) If, however, the Papal Theory should prevail — which it will not it could easily become ecumenical. It once embraced, with the exception of the Greek Church, all Christendom. It has now all the ecclesiastical machinery and institutions needed to express in itself, in visible form, the unity of the invisible kingdom of heaven.

II.

THE EPISCOPAL THEORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

§ 56. The Episcopal Theory is older but less imposing than the Papal. The church of Jerusalem and not the church of Rome was the mother church. The gospel was preached, beginning at Jerusalem. The Eastern or Greek Church is the source and background, as we have shown (§§ 49, 50), of the Western or Roman Church. There can be no doubt of this, nor of the fact that Episcopacy arose before the Papacy in the Christian Church. That the former is less imposing than the latter does not result so much from the nature of the system as from its incomplete development. Episcopacy has for some reason been largely confined to national boundaries. It has never called, in modern times, a central council having authority over, and giving laws. and unity to, all the communities and nations embracing the theory. Lacking this central, authoritative, and unifying body, the Episcopal Theory does not impress the imagination as profoundly as does the Papal.

§ 57. The origin of the Episcopal Theory may be quite accurately traced. In many, if not all, of the primitive