صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني
[ocr errors]

grand-father and father had maintained this jurisdiction in full force, and that he neither could nor would divest himself of it to the prejudice of the Empire and his successors*. The Emperor Albert indeed was compelled by the exigencies of the times to own, that kings and emperors received the power of the temporal sword from the Pope†: but afterwards, when Pope John declared the imperial dignity to be a fief of the holy see, the Emperor Louis assembled all the learned men of Germany, both of the clergy and the laity, to give their opinion of the bull which contained such a claim. These all concluded, that it was unjust, unreasonable, and contrary to the Christian religion, as tending to abolish the sovereign power of princes; and the states of the Empire requested the Emperor to take care that the imperial dignity should not be trampled upon, nor the Germanic liberty reduced to bondage. Finding however that the Popes still from time to time renewed their pretensions, the princes of the Empire, ecclesiastical as well as secular, at length enacted the famous constitution by which the Empire was declared to be for ever independent of the Pope §.

If from the Empire we pass to Hungary, we shall find, that the temporal supremacy of the

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Pope was in the year 1303 so steadily resisted in that country, that his holiness himself was excommunicated by the Hungarian bishops, in consequence of his having presumed to lay the city of Buda under an interdict, because his pretended right to dispose of the crown of that kingdom was resolutely denied *.

In our own country, when Pope Hildebrand summoned William the Conqueror to do homage for the kingdom of England, as a fief of the Roman see, William replied, that he held his crown only of God and his own sword; and, when the nuncio threatened him with the censures of the Church, he published an edict forbidding his subjects to acknowledge any Pope but such as he should approve, or to receive any order from Rome without his permission. England indeed submitted to the Pope in the disgraceful reign of king John ; but in that of his successor the English agents at the council of Lyons protested against the act, and declared that John had no right without the consent of his barons to reduce the kingdom to so ignominious a servitude.

As for France, when Boniface the eighth claimed a temporal superiority over Philip the Fair, the states of the kingdom formally disavowed the au

*Mod. Univ. Hist. vol. xlii. p. 32.

+ Smollet's Hist. of England, vol i. p. 418.

Mod. Univ. Hist. vol. xxxix p. 1743

thority

thority of the Pope, and maintained the independent sovereignty of that prince *.

So likewise, when Gregory the seventh claimed the same superiority over the different kingdon:s of Spain, Don Alonso and the other sovereigns unanimously declared, that they were independent princes, and would own no superior upon earth.

Thus it appears, when we descend to facts, upon what very slender grounds Bp. Newton makes the Pope to be the last head of the secular beast," the head of the state as well as of the "church, the king of kings as well as the bishop of bishops."

[ocr errors]

Nor is this the only objection to which the system of Bp. Newton is liable. In a prophecy of › Daniel already considered, four great beasts, or universal empires, are described as rising successively out of the sea. The last of them, like the apocalyptic beast now under consideration, is said to have ten horns, to be exceeding terrible, and to be different from those which preceded it. Hence I collect, that the fourth beast of Daniel, and the first beast of St. John, are designed to symbolize the same power. No doubt however is entertained, that Daniel's fourth beast is the Roman empire: it. follows therefore, agreeably to Bp. Newton's original proposition, that St. John's first beast is the Roman empire likewise at some period or other of

VOL. II.

* Mod. Univ. Hist. vol. xxiii. p. 385.

+ Ibid. vol. xx. p. 63.

its

its existence. Now this fourth beast of Daniel is said to have a little horn, springing up among his ten larger horns; which little horn has been shewn to be the Papacy. If then the little horn be the Papacy, and if Daniel's fourth beast be not the Papacy, but the Roman empire out of which the Papacy sprung; St. John's first beast, being the same as Daniel's fourth beast, must assuredly be the Roman empire likewise, and therefore cannot be the Papacy. To me, I must be free to confess, it is a matter of no small wonder, that the first beast of St. John should ever have been thought to symbolize the Papacy: for, if this beast be the same as Daniel's fourth beast, a point maintained even by Bp. Newton himself, he certainly cannot be likewise the same as only the little horn of that very identical beast. The reason is manifest: such a supposition as this does in fact make Daniel's fourth beast precisely the same as his own little horn; a supposition to the full as unwarrantable, as to conclude that he is the same as any one of his other ten horns*. Yet does Bp. Newton, not regarding

* This opinion cannot be better confuted than in the following passage. "Si Malvendæ et Lessio fides habeatur, «bestia hæc Johannis decacornis et septiceps nihil aliud erit

[ocr errors]

quam cornu illud parvulum bestiæ quartæ Danielis: et

proinde decem cornua apud Danielem non erunt cornua "bestiæ, sed parvi istius corniculi, quod tamen post illa de«cem exortum est, septemque capita apud Johannem ejusdem "corniculi capita erunt. Quo quid absurdius? Certè si « bestia il'a quarta Romanum est imperium, sunt hæc cornua " ipsius

19

regarding this manifest violation of symbolical analogy and figurative propriety, adopt the inconsistent scheme of typifying the Papacy both by the eleventh horn of a beast, and by the identical beast himself to whom that eleventh horn belongs *.

The

"ipsius bestiæ, h. e. Romani statûs, vel reges provinciarum, "in quas imperium illum dividendum est." Downham.

apud Pol. Synop. in loc.

* It was observed to me with his usual acuteness by Bp. Horsley, in a conversation upon this very subject, that it is impossible for one of the horns of a symbolical beast to mean the same thing as the symbolical beast himself. A heud, importing as it does a form of government, must necessarily be in some sort identified with the beast or empire over which it presides, because they jointly form only a single body politic: but a horn, importing one of the kingdoms which have sprung ́out of an empire, can never be identified with the whole empire of which it constitutes only a single part. Hence St. John does not say, that the six first heads of the beast are respectively the same as the beast himself; because such an observation would have been plainly superfluous, the empire under all its six heads being in an undivided state, and therefore of course universally subject to its six successive forms of govern ment: but he specially observes, that the last head should be the beast himself; because, although the empire previous to the rise of this last head had branched out into ten horns, yet this last mighty head should at its first rise so completely swallow up most of the ten separate horns, as to become, like each of its six predecessors, the whole beast, however unexpected such an event might be after the division of the empire. A power may indeed be symbolized both by the little horn of one beast, and by the whole body of another distinct beast, as is the case with the spiritual kingdom of the Papacy expanding into a spiritual empire: but it certainly cannot be symbolized both

« السابقةمتابعة »