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THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH

I.

A PROTOCOL.

THERE was once what was known as

"the peace of the Empire." There is destined to arrive the peace of the Church. The peace of the Empire meant a civil tranquillity, brought about and held secure by a strong central force posited at Rome.

From this huge dynamo went out the threads that carried light and heat to the farthest extremities of the old Mediterranean world. It was a powerful plant that could propel energy along such tenuous conductors, and to such distances. The strength and wit of many generations had gone to the construction of the machine; but once created, it acquired a certain momentum of its own, a running force largely independent of circumstances. It was not like one of those delicate mechanisms which a grain of sand or a knot in the thread brings to a stand-still; the rollers kept their motion, and the long arms their thrust, quite regardless of petty obstructions of whatever sort. The Cæsars were merely men intrusted

with the running of the dynamo; oftener than not, they were themselves crushed among the wheels. So impressive was this self-perpetuating aspect of the Empire that men came to look at the vast organism as immortal, a thing that could not die; and secular poets, eager to welcome back the Golden Age, could picture to themselves no better fulfilment of their hopes than such a stretching of the peace of the Empire as would make it cover the whole earth. A world

"lapt in universal law,"

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and that law Roman law, was the goal of their most sanguine dreams.

The Christian mind of to-day sees in all this a divinely ordered preparation for the spread of the gospel. The peace of the Empire made the spiritual conquest of the Empire possible. The military roads were as available for the evangelist as for the legionary, and the imperial posts could carry epistles as easily as rescripts.

Hence it is no wonder that when the time was fulfilled for the so-called conversion of the Empire, the notion should have taken possession of the minds of many that the City of God was already come. But really, in point of fact, the Empire never was converted. Doubtless manners were softened, jurisprudence modified, the general look of things a good deal altered for the better; but the Empire, as such, exIt continued what it

perienced no change of heart.

had always been,- a wonderfully well-contrived administrative framework, penetrated and backed by physical force. The painting of a new monogram on the plate of the machine may have served in some measure to discredit Cæsar; it implied no real enthronement of Christ.

But just because the Empire was ineligible for conversion, it became liable to fall, — and fell.

To the bulk of its immemorial possessions, some of them precious, a good many of them embarrassing, a few deadly, — the Roman Church fell heir; and notably to the old tradition that associated efficiency with centralization. We have come, in modern times, to know more about the structure of the human body than the ancients did, and we have learned from that best of all object-lessons to anticipate in a perfect organism the distribution of centres of force.

To the Roman mind such a thought as this was wholly foreign. Unless the law went forth from Rome, how could there be unity? As this question had seemed to the emperors to admit of but one reply; so it came to seem also to the popes. Hence when the consciousness of nationality awoke strongly in the northern races, the clash followed that passes in history under the name of the Reformation.

I am not attempting a complete statement of the causes of that momentous quarrel. Besides its political character, the movement had also its still more serious doctrinal aspects. The indictment found against the Latins included the charge of a

superstitious adulteration of the ancient faith with Pagan ingredients, as well as that of an infringement of the ancient liberties. Were I inviting you to a thorough analysis of the Roman Catholic controversy, all this would have to be taken into account; but for our immediate purpose, the effect of the Reformation upon polity is more important than its effect upon dogma.

We are working our way towards an understanding of the ecclesiastical state of things that confronts us in America; and it is essential to a just appreciation of facts as they are that we should remind ourselves of facts as they were. There was a time then, and that not so very long ago, when there had succeeded to the peace of the Empire something that was supposed to be, in an equally real sense, the peace of the Church. To be sure it was ruffled by disturbances and heart-burnings not a few; but so, for that matter, had the peace of the Empire been, even at its best estate. Nevertheless, the great fact stared men in the face that there existed a region, bounded by geographical lines more or less definite, known under the comprehensive name of Christendom.

Throughout this tract of country certain great religious institutes found unvarying recognition and acceptance.

One could go from land to land and find everywhere the same priesthood, the same sacraments, the same pious usages, with which he had been familiar in his own home from childhood. I am not now

speaking of the blemishes and drawbacks that attached to this order of things; I am calling attention to what was attractive, and, upon the surface at least, admirable in it all. Certainly a traveller would not find such privilege of sanctuary amiss to-day if he could share it. It would add to the enjoyment of a journey in Spain, for instance, if in a homesick moment one could cross the threshold of Cordova's great church, or kneel down on the floor of some lesser house of God by the roadside, and feel that he did so by as good a right and with as sincere a welcome as if he were native to the soil.

How can we wonder, then, that devout minds of a conservative cast, and keenly alive to the excellencies of the then existing system, should have felt disposed to fight to the death a movement which by implication threatened, even if it did not avowedly assail, the integrity of this same Christendom? And how can we wonder that in our own days ardent and imaginative souls, viewing the past in the warm golden light that smooths rough outlines and makes the hard exterior of distant objects beautiful, should have felt disposed to insist that only by retracing their steps and going back to the Catholic beliefs and usages of the old days before the quarrel, could Christendom be re-achieved?

But before we take up with that timid philosophy of history which can see in the Reformation nothing better than a blunder, we must consider whether any such return to cover as the one proposed is practicable.

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