For centuries, the Church, like the Berserkers of northern romance, seemed to possess the soul and strength of each antagonist it slew. But its hour struck. The work it required ten centuries to mature, stood in its glory not one. Each transient institution has a truth, or it would not be; an error, or it would stand for ever. The truth opens men's eyes; they see the error and would reject it. Then comes the perpetual quarrel between the Old and the New. “Every battle of the warrior,” says an ancient prophet, “is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood;” but the battle of the Church was a devouring flame.
In the time of Boniface VIII., or about the end of the fourteenth century, an eye that read the signs of the times, and saw the cloud and the star below the horizon, could have foretold the downfal of the Church. Its brightest hour was in the day of Innocent III. A wise Providence governs the affairs of men, and never suffers the leaf to fall till the swelling bud crowds it off. Out of the ashes of the old institution there springs up a new being, soon as the world can give it place. No institution is normal and ultimate. It has but its day, and never lasts too long nor dies too soon. Judaism and Heathenism nursed and swaddled mankind for Christianity, which came in the fulness of time. The Catholic Church rocked the cradle of mankind. In due season, like a jealous nurse, assiduous and meddlesome, but grown ill-tempered with age and disgust of new things, she yields up with reluctance her rebellious charge, whose vagaries her frowns and stripes will not restrain; whose struggling weight, her withered arms are impotent to bear; whose aspiring soul her anicular and maudlin wit cannot understand. Her promise will not coax; nor her baubles bribe; nor her curses affright him more. The stripling child will walk alone.
The Protestant “Reformation” came from the action of Ideas which had not justice done them in the Catholic Church, just as the Christian Reformation from Ideas not sufficiently represented in Judaism and Heathenism. It did not, more than the other, come all at once. There was “Lutheranism” before Luther, as Christianity before
6 vols. 8vo, Paris, 1833–1841, Vol. I. II., Leçons X.-XII., Vol. III. ch. iv.-vi., Vol. IV. ch. v.-vii., et al., and Mrs Child's Religious Ideas, N. Y. 1855, Vols. II. and III.
