of orphans, thus literally giving a stone when bread was asked for, as St Bernard honestly called it.[1] It was greedy of gold and power, and at one time had well-nigh half the lands of England held in mortmain. It absolved men from oaths; broke marriages; told lies; forged charters and decretals; burned the philosophers; corrupted the classics; altered the words of the Fathers; changed the decisions of the Councils, and filled Europe with its falsehood.[2] It has fought the most hideous of wars; evangelized nations with the sword; laid kingdoms under interdict to gratify its pride.
The Church boasts of its uniform doctrine, but it changes every age; of its peaceful spirit, but who fought the crusades, the wars of extermination in Switzerland, France, the Low Countries? To whom must we set down the ecclesiastical butchery that filled Europe with funeral piles? It quarrelled with the temporal power, and built up institutions of tyranny to suppress truth; kept the Bible to itself; made the Greek Testament a prohibited book; brought dead men's bones into the temples, for the living to worship, and worked lying wonders to confirm false doctrine. It loved the night of the Dark Ages, and clung to its old dogmas.
The Church came at length to be a colossus of crime, with a thin veil of hypocrisy drawn over its face, and that only. The vow of purity its children took, became a license for sin. The corruptest of courts was the court of the Pope. What reverence had the Archbishops for the doctrine of the Church? Cardinal Bembo bid Sadolet not read St Paul, it would spoil his taste. In early ages the Apostles were the devoutest of men; in later days their “successors” were steeped to the lips in crime.[3]
- ↑ Dante touchingly complains of the evil which Constantine brought on the church by the gifts which the first wealthy Pope received of him! Inferno, XIX, 115, et seq.
- ↑ See instances of this forgery in Hallam, ubi sup. Ch. VII. p. 391, et seq. et al., ed. Paris; Daillé, on the right Use of the Fathers, &c., London, 1841, passim.; Middleton, ubi suprà. But see, on the side of the Church, Bossuet, Defense de la Tradition et des Saints Peres, and Manzoni, Osservazioni sulla Morale Cattolica, Firenze, 1835.
- ↑ See Hallam, ubi sup. Ch. VII. De Potter loves to dwell on the faults of the church, for which there is sufficient opportunity; Neander, as much too lenient, errs on the other side. Much information in a popular form may be found in M. Roux-Ferrand, Histoire des Progrès de la Civilization en Europe,
