XXIII.] THE POPE'S LOCAL SOVEREIGNTY. 467 with his subjects, and the great Charter was obtained not merely from a reluctant king, but in defiance of papal excommunications. On the contrary, a sovereign so acceptable to her subjects as Queen Elizabeth was excommunicated and deposed by two successive pontiffs-a futile act, by which they injured their own religion more than anything else. Even Roman Catholic states disregarded the excommunication; and treaties, alliances, business, commerce, went on as before. Meanwhile, the fanatical believers in the pope's power, who were driven by his instigation into rebellion, suffered death, and yet did not gain for their religion the moral victory which was won for ours by the constancy of our martyrs in the Marian persecutions, because those men were understood by all to have suffered death, not as heretics, but as rebels and traitors. The case of King John, to which I have referred was made the subject of a special apology by Cardinal Manning. His defence is in substance this:-The excommunication is not to be understood as implying the pope's disapproval of the provisions of the great Charter. Many of these related to the correction of local abuses, which the pope, by reason of distance, was quite incapable of understanding. But it was the means which the barons took to obtain the Charter which put them clearly in the wrong. In the early stages of the conflict, when the tyrant king was trampling impartially on civil liberties and ecclesiastical rights, the pope and the barons were united in resistance, and the latter were consequently in the right. But when their ally, having obtained his own objects, had made a separate peace, they had no business to carry on the fight any longer. If the king did not redress their wrongs they might appeal to the pope, and be content with whatever satisfaction he might be pleased to give them; notwithstanding that, as Manning himself has reminded us, the pope's want of local information made him an incompetent judge of the matters in dispute. I have no doubt that Manning's theory of the duty of subjects coincides with that of Innocent III. But, as even in John's time it was rejected as an innovation, and the English declared that the ordering of secular matters belongeth not to a pope, so it is not likely that the doctrines will find favour now which we rejoice were not accepted by our fathers. I have said that the popes abused their power by exercising it, not in the interests of the peoples whom they claimed to govern, but in their own; and I must add, not in the interests of anything that can plausibly claim the high name of religion, but of the most vulgar ambition. For the popes were not content with the lofty position of being supreme judges over temporal princes: they wanted to be temporal princes themselves; and when they sought to aggrandize their dominions they freely used the spiritual weapon of excommunication. You know that they were successful in this endeavour; so much so, that if it were mentioned that I was lecturing 'on the temporal power of the popes,' it would be popularly imagined that I was discussing the right of the popes to rule over a certain portion of Italy. I think, therefore, that I must not wholly omit to say something about this claim; but you will observe that it is a different thing from what I have been really discussing, viz. the pope's right to interfere in temporal matters in any part of the world. The latter right, if it exist at all, is an inalienable possession of the see, and must have belonged to it from the first, being inseparably connected with the pope's office as head of the Church and infallible guide to Christians on questions of faith and morals. The former right only belongs to the see accidentally. It was some centuries before it possessed it; and the pope might cease to be a temporal sovereign without any loss of his spiritual powers. In my private opinion his spiritual power would then be all the greater, and therefore I never thought it matter for controversial triumph that the pope, in 1870, ceased to be an Italian prince. I do not believe the assertion that temporal sovereignty is necessary for the free exercise of his spiritual power; for I believe that in the present state of public opinion the pope would be quite as free to excommunicate any person whom he thought unfit to be a member of his Church, if he lived in London or New York, as if he lived in Rome. Nay, I count that his direction of spiritual matters was far more XXIII.] THE POPE'S LOCAL SOVEREIGNTY. 469 liable to be influenced by extraneous considerations when he was dependent on foreign powers for his possession of a precarious throne than since he has had nothing to hope for from the good-will of secular princes. However, I will not dispute that the pope may be a better judge than I as to what the interests of his religion require; and I must acknowledge that Pius IX. held it to be essential to those interests that he should be king as well as pope. It was judged that at the bottom of his claim to infallibility was anxiety on his part that his word should be taken on this subject; and it was believed that if the Vatican Council had been prolonged it would have been asked to ratify his opinion. A list of doctrines with respect to which Cardinal Manning says that the Church cannot be silent, cannot hold her peace-begins with the Trinity and Incarnation, and ends with the necessity of the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See. Still I cannot but think it likely that future Roman Catholic divines will count it as a providential escape that their Church has not irrevocably committed herself to a claim likely to bring her less honour than disgrace. I know no part of Church history less calculated to impress a truly religious man with respect for the papacy than the history of those popes who did most to gain its Italian States for the Church. There have been worse popes: indeed, their immediate predecessors were worse who, instead of working for the benefit of the see, aimed only at gaining principalities for their sons and their nephews. But all alike seem to have their whole thoughts bent on things of earth, and to be men from whom no one would dream of coming to obtain spiritual counsel. I have already said something as to the frauds used in order to gain that power, beginning with the famous forgery of the donation of Constantine, by which the Frankish monarchs were induced to believe that the Italian provinces rightly belonged, not to the Greek emperors, but to the Roman pontiffs; and this forgery was succeeded by others with similar objects. But many a power has proved a benefit to the world, the first origin of which will not bear investigation. I should not care, therefore, to mention the frauds by which the papal power was built up, if a more sacred origin had not been claimed for it; but the best justification of the power would have been in the use that was made of it. Surely we should say that the happiest of men must be that chosen people who were so fortunate as to be under the direct rule of him whose office it was to punish all instances of misgovernment in others, of him who was appointed to feed Christ's sheep, who was the divinely constituted guardian of truth and justice in the world. His dominions, we should expect, would rapidly increase by the voluntary cession of peoples, anxious to place themselves under his beneficent rule. Godliness has promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come. Surely he whose infallible wisdom prescribes such laws as best secure men's eternal happiness might be expected to rule in such a way as most to promote the happiness of his subjects in this life. If there be any force in the a priori arguments which have made men believe that God will be sure to fulfil all their expectations as to His government of this world, and in particular that He will supply an unerring guide, able to resolve correctly every theological problem about which the members of His Church may dispute, surely we might argue that God would not bring discredit on His gift by refusing to His appointed minister in things spiritual, some share at least of the human wisdom with which things temporal are managed; and that He would not put such a strain on men's faith as to require them to believe that the same man who was seen to be thoroughly unwise and incompetent in every matter on which we can form a judgment of our own, might be trusted to make decisions, guided by infallible wisdom, in those matters on which we are told we are not competent to form any judgment at all. It is not possible to state what papal government might reasonably have been expected to be without seeming to be cruelly ironical. For it is notorious that what, if the Romanist theory of its origin were true, ought to be the best government in the world, in fact turned out to be the very worst. At the time of the accession of Pius IX. it was XXIII.] HOW THE PAPAL STATES WERE RULED. 471 fondly hoped that he would distinguish himself as a reformer of previous maladministration; and in this hope. Mr. Mahony, better known as Father Prout, who was then at Rome, wrote the following description of the condition. of the Papal States at the time of that accession :-' Confessedly things had gone on during Gregory's sixteen years of reign from bad to worse, from feebleness to dotage. The finances were in an awful state; the trade and commerce of the country depressed, paralysed, and in despair; the cultivation of science in every department clogged and discountenanced; no hope, no buoyancy, in any of the liberal professions; deep-rooted discontent among the people; open rebellion in the legations; corruption in every branch of the civil and in some departments of ecclesiastical administration; dogged reluctance to adopt any system of amelioration; stupid adherence to worn-out expedients and bygone traditions of redtapery; the approach of ruin looked at with the calm stolidity of an idiot who hugs himself to the last in the cherished monotony of routine and fatalism. All was desolate, waste, barren, and dilapidated, beyond the graphic picture of the inspired writer who has left on solemn record his landscape of the field of the sluggard, with its fences broken down and other evidences of sad improvidence: "I went by the field of the slothful and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding, and lo! it was all grown over with thorns; and nettles had covered the face of it, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw and con sidered it well; I looked and received instruction; yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep; so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man." I cannot quote at greater length Mahony's picture of oppressive taxes; great waste in the collection; discouragement of arts and industry; discontent of the educated classes, there being no place for any layman in the employment of the government; sullen dissatisfaction with the overpowering predominance of Austrian power, whose bayonets secured the continuance of the existing state of things, and scared away all hope of reform. This picture, you will observe, was not drawn by an enemy anxious to |