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He had taken an active part in the politics and fightings of these troubled times, and when the opposite party got the upper hand he came to be deposed. Well, it has been noticed that the most important steps taken against Ebbo, which according to the old Church law would have been quite valid, would, according to the law of these new decretals, be altogether wrong. However this may be, the main point is, that the decretals are not a Roman forgery, but a Gallic one, however much they helped the growth of Roman power. That they did help it enormously is certain; yet, now that the spuriousness of these documents is universally acknowledged, Romish advocates think that they can remove the foundation, and yet that the edifice built on it can remain. They boldly assert that these letters really taught nothing new; that they ascribed no more power to the see of Rome than it had long possessed. I think this is as impudent an assertion as has been ever made by controversialists. It would be as reasonable, supposing they had been for centuries circulating Bellarmine's chapters on the pope as part of Holy Scripture, to say, as soon as they were found out, that it really made no difference; that, after all, Bellarmine said no more than was already taught in the text, Thou art Peter.'

If we want to know what share these letters had in the building of the Roman fabric we have only to look at the Canon Law. The 'Decretum'* of Gratian quotes three hundred and twenty-four times epistles of the popes of the first four centuries; and of these three hundred and twenty-four quotations, three hundred and thirteen are from the letters which are now universally known to be spurious. I will not pledge myself to the genuineness of the remaining eleven. In writing a former Lecture I had occasion to refer to Bellarmine, to see whether he could cite any Father as applying to Rome the text in which Christ prays that Peter's faith should not fail. I found he could allege no writer who was not a pope;

*This work, published in 1151, was intended as a collection of everything that Gratian could find having the force of law in the Church; and it had such success that it became the standard work on the law of the Roman Church.

and the popes he begins by citing are taken from the spurious decretals. The treatise of Bellarmine is founded on that of Melchior Canus; and of twenty quotations which he gives on this subject, eighteen are out of the false decretals. So idle is it to deny that this forgery is the foundation on which the Romish belief in papal power has been founded.

But it is said that you must grant that this is not a Roman forgery. Well, if a man presents a forged cheque, and gets money for it, it is something to say in his defence that he did not forge it himself; but if he were an honest man, as soon as he discovered the forgery he would give back what he had wrongfully acquired. Have the popes any idea of abandoning the pretensions they were led by these documents to assert? Not the very slightest. Of course the moral guilt of the party who first utters a forged cheque depends on the question: Did he do so, knowing it to be forged? It is a true maxim, that we easily believe what is in accordance with our wishes; and it has so often happened that good Protestants have received, without the smallest sifting, untrustworthy authorities produced on the right side, that I am not in a hurry to accuse Pope Nicolas of conscious imposture. That the pope asserted what was not true is certain; and it is equally certain that he asserted what, if he had taken any trouble to inquire, he would have found not to be true. When the Gallican bishops refused to accept these decretals because they were not included in any previous code of canons, he stated positively that they had been preserved in the archives of his own see, and declared that they might as well reject the Old or New Testament, because it, too, had not been included in the code of canons.*

Some of Dr. Littledale's critics lift up their hands in holy horror at the idea of a saint like Nicolas being accused of wilful forgery. What the character of this individual was is a matter with which we have no concern; we are concerned, not with the man, but with the pope. Now, when you catch a man presenting a forged cheque, it is all very well to say he could not possibly have known it to be forged, he is such

* See his letter in Baronius, Ann. Ecc. 869, xii.-xv.

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ROMAN FORGERIES.

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a very respectable clergyman. But if you find that this very respectable clergyman makes a constant trade of presenting forged cheques, and living on the proceeds, our judgment can hardly be quite so charitable. Now there never was a case so gangrened with forgery as that for the papal claims; that which we have been discussing is the most stupendous; but it had been preceded by a constant succession of forgeries, of which there can be no doubt that Rome was the birthplace. I told you already of the attempt to pass off the Sardican canons as Nicene. At the Council of Chalcedon the Roman legates were detected in presenting the sixth canon of Nicæa with a forged preface, that 'the Roman Church always had had the primacy.' The string of subsequent Roman forgeries is so long that it would tire your patience to go through it. One of them is mentioned in Burnet: The Fable of P. Marcellin.' It was invented to establish the principle that the pope was inviolable, and could not be tried by any human tribunal: the story being that Pope Marcellinus had sacrificed to idols, and that a synod of 284 bishops being assembled at Sinuessa, they had not the hardihood to presume to try the pope, but asked him to pass sentence on himself, which he accordingly did, by confession and self-condemnation. Then comes a series of forgeries falsifying the history of the great Council of Nicæa. Constantine was made out to have been baptized at Rome; the Council of Nicea was summoned by the pope's authority; a letter was forged from the council, asking the pope to confirm its decrees, which he accordingly does at a council held at Rome. Then there comes the Liber Pontificalis, in which the scanty record of the bishops of Rome is enriched with fictitious stories of the doings of their pontificates, these fictitious stories being largely made use of in the forged decretals. It would be too long to tell how Cyprian, who in his lifetime had been an opponent of papal ambition, and whose works had, consequently, been rejected by Pope Gelasius, was thought too great a man to be allowed to remain permanently on the wrong side, and was therefore converted to Roman orthodoxy by means of a judicious interpolation into his works. I suppose you have heard of the famous donation of Constantine. The older fiction

of his cure from leprosy and baptism by Sylvester was improved by a narrative, that the emperor, out of gratitude, bestowed Italy and the western provinces on the Pope; this forgery having been made in order to induce King Pepin to secure these territories to the pope, who, under the cover of this forgery, could ask them, not as a gift, but as a restitution. The success of this forgery induced others to swell the temporal power of the pontiffs. Never have men incurred the woe'Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong'-more than the popes have done, both in respect of their temporal and their spiritual power. It is impossible to think that if Roman prerogatives had rested on any Divine gift, it would have been necessary to bolster up the fabric with so enormous a congeries of fraud and lies.

Roman pretensions reached their height when the pope claimed to be the supreme ruler of Christendom, administering directly such territories as he was pleased to keep under his immediate control, and with power to depose any sovereign over the remaining parts who might be disobedient to his will. It is well to let you know what a plausible defence is made at the present day for even this extreme power of the pope. The popes are represented, in teaching the maligned doctrine of their deposing power, to have been but the champions of what are now recognized as the just rights of subjects. There was, indeed, a time when this doctrine of the deposing power could not have been harmonized with what was taught in the pulpits of the Church of England. After the Restoration, the evils which had been keenly felt as attending the disturbance of an established government were still fresh in men's memory, and were in their estimation incomparably worse than the half-forgotten evils which it had been hoped by rebellion to redress. So experience seemed to them to justify the doctrine of the absolute unlawfulness of resistance to the civil rulers. The question of defining the limits of the power, prerogatives, or jurisdiction of sovereign princes was then easily settled; for it was held that there were no limits, or rather that, if there were, the transgression of them was an offence which it must be left to God to detect and to punish. Subjects must not presume to make

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themselves judges of their superiors; for if it were lawful for them to be judges in their own cause against the prince, then no one who had a mind to rebel need be at a loss for a lawful cause. It was recalled to mind that when St. Paul wrote the words, 'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,' the sovereign whom he instructed his disciples to obey was Nero; whence it was inferred that the best of saints were bound to be in subjection to the worst of men, if he were their lawful ruler. No impieties or faults in the man could invalidate his office. Though Nero deserve worthily to be abhorred, yet still the emperor is, and ought to be, sacred. A man cannot be so wicked, but that he is still a man by God's creation; a magistrate cannot be so vile and unjust, but that he is still an officer by God's institution. He holds his government by deputation from God, as God's officer; and to rebel against him were the violation of government, which is the very soul and support of the universe, and the imitation of God's providence.

This doctrine is what we should pronounce servile; but when it was delivered it had, at least, the recommendation that it certainly was not popish. South, in a sermon,* some points of which I have here reproduced, casts odium with great dexterity on the doctrine of the lawfulness of resistance to princes, as taught by the Puritans of his time, by showing its identity with what had been taught by the popes and the Jesuits, from which he argued that the sons of Geneva and the sons of Rome were as truly brothers as were Romulus and Remus, both having sucked their principles from the same wolf.

If this identification was then used to the damage of the Puritans, it has been so used in our time to the benefit of the Romanists. Their doctrine concerning the pope's power to depose temporal princes, and to release their subjects from the obligation of oaths which had been taken to them, had been treated by Protestant divines as so clearly indefensible, that it was supposed only neces

On Rom. xiii. 1. In verifying this quotation, I find in the second sermon on Isaiah, v. 20, a curious opinion, which I forbear to quote, as to the value of the distinction whether or not the pope speaks ex cathedra.