ceeded eternally from the Father Filioque,- and from the Son. That was the point from which came the great division between the East and the West. That is the way we have the Greek Church and the Church of Rome. So that, although the Church of Rome has claimed to be catholic,that is, universal,- it never has been catholic. It claims that its doctrine is that which has been believed always and everywhere and by everybody. That is the definition of the orthodox catholic doctrine; but the only way by which a definition of that sort can be made to hold is by counting nobody as Christians except those who always and everywhere have believed that which is regarded as the essential truth by the Church of Rome. I do not see why, on a smaller scale, we Unitarians might not make the same claim, provided that we leave out of the question everybody who does not agree with us. The Church of Rome, then, has never been in any true sense the catholic, or universal, Church; for not only has its jurisdiction been denied. throughout the entire East, but from the very beginning there have been communities, like the Waldenses, the Huguenots, the Unitarians of Poland and Hungary, who have refused to admit her supremacy; so that all down the ages there have been respectable bodies of men who have not acknowledged the government of the Roman See, though of course, during long periods of time, they have had to remain quiet and hidden, as a matter of personal and public safety.

I wish now to show how naturally throughout the Roman Empire the supremacy of the Pope of Rome, as he came to be called, was accepted. It was no miracle. It was nothing out of the common. There was a distinct but natural preparation for it in the history and the thought of the last years of the Roman Empire itself. I need, then, to take you back to that, for a moment, to remind you of a few salient points.

After the turbulence and the long-continued civil wars of the time immediately preceding the empire, the people were rejoiced to find under Augustus and his successors a wonderful, universal, prolonged peace. There was what

came to be called the Pax Romana, the peace of the empire. From the one end of the civilized world to the other, under Roman government, there was peace. Agriculture prospered, people throve, everybody was at rest. They were guarded from the barbarians without, and from the turbulent spirits within. The overshadowing authority of the Cæsar was recognized everywhere, repressing all turbulence, and making itself felt as universally as the sunshine itself. There grew up along with this what was practically not politics at all, but religion, the worship of embodied Rome, Rome, so to speak, incarnated in the emperor. From one end of the empire to the other, in those days, was to be found, just as there was in France under the reign of the first Napoleon, a likeness of the emperor in every peasant's cottage; in every town there was to be found a statue or a bust of the emperor. He was looked upon as a god. He was worshipped. He was deified at first, immediately after death, when he was transferred to Olympus. In later years he was deified and worshipped actually during his life. I called your attention to this deification of the emperor recently, to show you the temper of the popular mind at that time, and how easily a story like that of the incarnation of Jesus would find acceptance. That was the state of mind prevailing throughout the entire Roman world. The emperor was the incarnation of a god, and was worshipped as the source of this great peace and of the good that had come after the long years of turmoil and war.

When, then, the time for the crumbling and the falling apart of the Roman Empire had come, there was this preparation on the part of the people to accept an incarnate representative of God as ruling from Rome. For two or three hundred years the popular mind had been saturated with this idea, so that it was one of the most natural things in the world, as the outward empire crumbled, that this spiritual empire, which had been growing up in the mean time, should take the vacant throne, and wield the authority which all people were ready to concede to it. So the Pope of Rome was

no new thing in the history of Roman thought. There had been a Pope of Rome for centuries, only under the name of the Cæsar, an incarnate divine authority sitting on the throne of Rome; and all that was needed was that faith should be transferred from the emperor to the pope. So naturally did this authority spring up and come to be generally conceded.

We find, then, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries that the papacy had spread until, with the exception of the domain of the Greek Church, it covered the entire civilized world, from Britain on the north to the north of Africa on the south, from spain and France on the west to Asia Minor on the east. It had come to be so mighty a power that it ruled not only the individual man, who believed in it, but it ruled the kingdoms and empires as well. For, the pope being recognized as the voice of the divine, kings became as nothing before him; and, if now and then some rebellious emperor dared to dispute his sway, all that the pope needed to do was to lay that kingdom under interdict. to bring him speedily to his senses. No emperor in those days was mighty enough to stay the tide of public opinion of his own people. The pope, as was universally conceded, had the power not only to blast their prosperity in this life, but, by taking away from them the sacrament and denying them Christian burial, he shut even the gates of eternal life in the face of a whole kingdom. So great had the power of the papacy become.

I wish now to call your attention to some good things connected with this domination of the papacy. It was not all bad. It represented the beliefs, the aspirations, the hopes, as well as the fears, of the great masses of the people throughout the civilized world at that day. It was not a domination usurping human rights: it was the expression of the heart, the life, the will, of the people themselves; for it was the expression of their most sacred beliefs.

Note a few points concerning it. There is one thing I have always admired in the Roman Church as opposed to our Protestant doctrine. I think that the attitude of the

Romanist towards the great mass of religious truth is a much more rational attitude than that of the ordinary Protestant. The Protestant has pinned his belief to a printed book, the origin of which and the changes that have been made in which he knows very little about,- a book capable of any number of interpretations and misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The Catholic, on the other hand, has always held the book subordinate to its own free spirit of divine life as it has claimed it to be. The ultimate authority of the Romanist is not a book: it is the body of believers supposed to be possessed and inspired by the infallible spirit of God, so that, though they use the book, they claim the right to interpret it. Age after age it has felt itself free to adapt itself to the changed condition of the time, to fit the living utterance of the free spirit representing the continuous revelation of God. But it has always claimed that, when any new article has been added to the creed, it was not something new : it was only the unfolding of that which had been implicitly believed and taught from the first. Here, it seems to me, is

one grand advantage of the Roman Church over the Protes

tant.

Another thing that compels my admiration and praise is that the Roman Church has had such wide arms as would enable it to fold to its heart every human being. No matter what his profession, no matter what his age, no matter whether rich or poor, no matter whether bond or free, no matter whether educated or ignorant, the Roman Church has never failed to find a place and a work for every man, woman, and child in its communion. The soldier could feel that he was fighting for God, sent forth under the blessing of its priesthood; and, when old and broken, there was some place where he could retire to spend in the service of the Church the broken remnant of his years. The widow whose hopes have been blasted, or the unmarried woman with no earthly career, could find here, in the church cloisters, congenial duty, comfort, uplifting, and rest. So there was no point or phase of human life that the Roman Church has not touched

and provided for. Within her communion has been scope for all human activity. There were only a few that could be called learned in those days; but those few were her clerks.

The Church absorbed the literary life of the age. It was the patron of all the arts; and every painter of genius or power found employment in the service of the altars of the Church. Music was taught to be only the expression of her sorrows or divine aspirations; and so human life everywhere was embraced by it. Note how impossible it was for an individual believer to escape contact with the Church for a moment of his whole life. The priest must be present and baptize the newly born babe, and confer on it not only membership in the Church, but citizenship in the government as well, by this act of consecration. Then, as the child grew up, he was taken by new sacraments into full and complete membership, so that he felt his whole life was consecrated to the Church. Later the Church taught him that all love is lawless except that which is blessed by the priest, so marriage became a divine and eternal sacrament. And when weariness came upon him, and he sank down in the presence of death, the priest, with the divine unction on his forehead, prepared him for Christian burial, and fitted him for entrance into the eternal felicity beyond. Or if, for expiation of his sins and to prepare his soul for its future destiny, he must spend an indefinite length of time in the flames of purgatory, even there the Church could hasten or retard his progress as he climbed up the steps where the beatific vision might be gained. And the shipmaster and the merchant and the farmer, no matter what a man's occupation, the Church taught him that she had the power to give him success or to blast all his hopes, so that there was not an hour of the day from birth until death that the Church did not hold all her children in her arms.

Another point. I suppose it is worse than useless to wonder what the course of human history would have been, had there been no Roman Church. We are accustomed to say that we owe to the Roman Church the preservation of all