We cannot pretend to criticise in detail the professor's work; its established reputation justifies us in assuming its accuracy, on all the points upon which we have no means of better information; and we think our readers will not be displeased, if we lay before them some outline of the history, guided, for the most part, by his materials.

In the early world each nation had a partial civilization of its own, purely national and isolated, and bound up with certain national religions, the fruit of particular localities. Hence, to cast off one's religion, was in those ages to cast off one's country, to act the traitor to the state. As in Judaism, idolatry was treason against Jehovah, and punishable with death, so in every state of antiquity, to leave the national religion was a treasonable act. To subvert the national creed, was to subvert the state; to question it, was to sap the foundations of patriotism. Thus persecution of apostates was the universally received system in all known nations, approved alike by the statesman, the moralist, and the priest.

The enlightened policy of the Roman government, at first went a great way to break down this. To mould into one so many states, they carefully protected the religious rites of each, when not cruel and horrible to nature. But when special superstitions were transported beyond their own limits, and ceremonies the most discordant were celebrated, side by side, in the same metropolis, they destroyed each other's credit; and general unbelief became widely diffused. On the blending of so many nations into one empire, the old separate religions were no longer in appearance useful; they were a wall of separation, not a wall of strength. In this 'fulness of times' Christianity was preached, as an extra-political religion; separating the things of Cæsar from the things of God, which had never before been done. The Church and State were now no longer one. The personal responsibility of each separate conscience to God was proclaimed, and religion was made a right and a duty of the individual. Such was the great revolution in thought, introduced by the preaching of the apostles.

*

Meanwhile, Rome had been setting up a new universal religion that should bind together all their subjects, in the worship of the emperor's own image. The obstinate resistance of the Christians to all such practices was treated as a seditious principle, and was punished more and more cruelly, in the vain hope of crushing it. At last, as we know, the Christian cause triumphed somehow; paganism was nearly suppressed within the empire, when the

*To this, in the opinion of many enlightened commentators, the Apocalypse alludes, under the title of worshipping the beast and his image.'

invaders from the north overturned the whole fabric of society. The Church had previously been rent in twain by factions; and miserably depraved by fanatical asceticism; she now had to struggle for her existence. One nation alone of the barbarians in the fifth century embraced the doctrine of Rome; namely, the rising German confederation, called Franks; all others were pagans or Arians. In these times, national bonds hardly existed; but sectarian agreement stood in the place of patriotic union. Accordingly Clovis, the Frank, gained great military advantage from his new profession, and was named the eldest son of the Church. From this time forward, the Frankish monarchs stood forth as the great patrons of Romish Christianity. Charles Martel, in the tremendous battle near Tours, saved all Europe from the Mahommedan yoke; Pepin his son, and Charlemagne, the son of Pepin, first bestowed on the pope a temporal sovereignty in Italy. The history of the popedom, in a political aspect, may be dated from the era when Charlemagne was crowned in Rome, A.D. 800.

But the Carlovingian line presently lost its energy; and its power passed over to the Germans. In the tenth century, Otho the Great invaded Italy, occupied Rome, deposed the pope, and took into his own hands the nomination to the pontifical office. This did but crown all that had been previously habitual to the German princes, who in each newly-conquered province appointed bishops instead of barons or dukes, merely as a more efficient means of governing and civilizing them. Various minor efforts were made by the papacy, to escape this bondage; but the energy of the German emperors unflinchingly upheld that essential prerogative of their crown, the right of ecclesiastical appointments. At length, the minority of Henry IV. offered a tempting opportunity to the daring and haughty pope, Gregory VII., the celebrated Hildebrand. He commenced the much-famed struggle for investitures, which convulsed the whole empire, and indeed all Christendom. His strength lay with the aristocracy of Germany, whose pretensions he in part favored, yet it was not for him to achieve the triumph he sought. Many years of blood were needed, ere the popes finally effected their emancipation, and established the principle that the clergy of the West must look to the supposed successor of St. Peter as their earthly head. In the beginning of the twelfth century, the monarchs were enfeebled, and the pope at the height of power over the whole continent. Only in England did our first Norman kings steadily maintain their prerogative against his encroachments. The rising crusades knit all Christendom together, and made it conscious of its common faith; an event of vast importance for the consolidation of the pope's dominion. Soon after, our cruel and contemptible king John received England from him as a fief, for which he was to pay homage; Arragon was transferred to him by its king, Naples

was given over into his hands. It was an age of enthusiasm, and must (in the eyes of devout Romanists) appear the most glorious period which history has recorded. So stood matters in the thirteenth century.

The decided ascendency of the Roman ecclesiastical power during the two centuries of the crusades, has had vast influence on Europe. It has impressed upon us those common features which make Christendom different from the rest of the world. Happening at the time when Spain was being re-conquered from the Moors, and when Christianity was pressing to her farthest limits over Prussia and Poland, it united almost all Europe into a single system. Russia was as yet unthought of, unknown, and thoroughly barbarous. Whether we have paid too high a price for Europeanism,' is a separate question; but that it has been principally produced by the papacy, must be admitted.

But in the fourteenth century, internal stability of governments had lasted long enough to produce fixed national languages, and with them a sense of national existence. So long as Latin had been the sole cultivated tongue, the ecclesiastical element predominated in all literature, and the priesthood had a practical monopoly of the higher posts of legislature and administration. The rise of English poetry, the use of English in our courts of law, the assembling of English parliaments, are but symptomatic of the change simultaneously working over all Europe; viz. the development of nationality. An immediate result was, a jealousy of foreign influence, and determined opposition to the papal claims. All readers of English history know with how much spirit our parliaments under Edward III. checked the encroachments of Rome; but all may not be aware that it was a truly European phenomenon. The French nation was the first to resist Boniface VIII.; the German electors were next; England was third in awakening to her rights. A schism in the papacy itself followed, which, by reason of the obstinacy of the antipopes, the ecclesiastical power could not terminate. Then came the celebrated council of Constance, by which the pope was deposed, and important restrictions imposed on the new pontiff; an event, which accustomed men to the thought, that he was not, after all, infallible. The secular authority now seemed to be the real arbiter of spiritual questions.

Thenceforward proceeded the steady aggrandisement of monarchy and centralization in Europe; until, at the end of the fifteenth century, the barons were generally subjected to the crown, and the pope was looked on politically rather than spiritually. It would have been inconvenient to a European prince to be at enmity with him, because it was hard to calculate how the clergy might behave if the quarrel were personal, not national; but the jealousy which, in the preceding age was felt by the nation, was

now concentrated in the bosom of the monarch. The outward decorum paid to the pope, might have seemed to indicate that his power was as absolute as ever; but time had wrought a silent revolution; and it was quite certain that the national churches must in any case have emancipated themselves from his intrusion, whenever it passed beyond the limit at which it was felt to be beneficial. The sovereigns had clearly learned, that temporal affairs were not within the province of priests, and universally declined to obey the pope farther than they found it convenient.

But so eminently was this the era of monarchical growth, that the popes themselves were infected with the example, and in the last half of the fifteenth century were busy about nothing so much as to found an Italian empire. Greek literature had been recently imported into Italy by the learned men who fled from Constantinople when it fell into the hands of the Ottomans; the rage for classical Latin was already at its height, and cardinals were projecting it as a valuable work to rewrite the old papal bulls into a Ciceronian idiom. The learned Italians sympathised so intensely with the ancients, and despised so thoroughly the impostures passed off as religion, that infidelity was widely spread; and the pope found no check in public opinion against his assuming the air of a mere secular prince. So little restraint did the clerical profession place on any of them, that it excited not a whisper of disapproval that these men, who were too holy to marry, had avowed sons and grandsons. The son of Innocent VIII. was married to the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, the magnificent;' the son of Alexander the VI. was a monster whom we must more particularly notice; the grandsons of Paul III. broke his heart by rebellion. When such things were too common to excite reproof or wonder, the affairs of the church were likely to be administered with barefaced secularity. Ecclesiastical offices were conferred for any or every reason rather than the spiritual fitness of the receiver; direct payment of money for them was far from uncommon; the purchaser was of course greedy to indemnify himself by every extortion: children were made bishops and cardinals; the pope's sons or nephews* were always first to be provided for, and (when it was to be had) a dukedom was still better than a bishopric. Sixtus IV. (1471-1484) conceived the plan of founding a principality for his nephew Girolamo in the rich and beautiful plains of Romagna; but the Medici of Florence were in his way. Most opportunely, a conspiracy was formed by a Florentine family, the Pazzi, to assassinate both brothers on the steps of the cathedral altar. Guliano de Medici was killed, but Lorenzo escaped. The father of the faithful, careless that all the world believed him an accomplice in the murder, proceeded to excom

Hence the term nepotism.

municate Lorenzo, and laid an interdict on the whole territory of Florence. Hostilities followed, in which the pope induced the Venetians to join him; but when he found it convenient to make peace, he excommunicated all Venice, because they persisted in the war. In Rome he acted the usual policy of despots against an aristocracy, ferociously and treacherously murdering the noble Colonnas, the political opponents of Girolamo.-His successor, Innocent VIII. gave but a short respite to Italy; for in 1492 the ambitious sensualist Alexander VI. began his impudent career. He and his son, Cæsar Borgià, having conquered their opponents by help of the Orsini family, and others of the Guelf faction, entrapped their own supporters with long-calculated falsehood, and put them to death in cold blood. But Cæsar tyrannised over his father too. He murdered his brother, and threw his body into the Tiber, because the father was fond of him. For the same offence he hired assassins to stab his brother-in-law on the palace steps; but the wounds not being mortal, Cæsar himself burst into the chamber, where his sister was nursing her sick husband, and had the unfortunate prince strangled before his eyes. Alexander had another favorite, named Peroto; whom Cæsar remorselessly stabbed to death, while clinging to the pope's side for protection, and hiding under his mantle. The blood gushing out sprinkled the pope's face. But he was too deeply drenched in innocent blood himself to have any redress, and Cæsar remained pre-eminent in Italy while his father lived. To signalize the end of such a reign, the pope died by eating a poisoned dish, which he had intended for one of the cardinals.

One more scandal, different in kind, was yet to be added. Pope Julius II. laboured to extend the papal dominion in Italy for the benefit of the papacy itself, not for the aggrandisement of his own family; and, bold in his comparative innocence, appeared himself at the head of his troops as their general. At the storming of Mirandola, the aged pontiff marched through the breach over the frozen ditches. By his military talents and indefatigable exertions, he reduced the fairest part of Italy under his power; and, as Machiavelli observed, 'caused even a king of France to stand ' in awe of it.'

Such was the state of things when the sixteenth century dawned upon Europe, destined to open a new conflict, and work changes wholly unsuspected. The time of the struggle divides itself into four principal eras. The first begins with Luther's preaching in 1517, and ends with the decisions of the council of Trent, in 1562. This is the spring-tide of the Reformation, in which it overwhelmed Germany, Hungary, and Transylvania; prevailed very decisively in Scotland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Poland; in England and Switzerland gained the upper hand; was very vigorous in France, highly promising in Italy,