Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom Part 14

[108] St. Aug. De Civitate Dei, lib. 10, c. 6 and 20.

[109] S. Chrys. 16 Hom. on the Hebrews, tom. xii. p. 168.

CHAPTER VI.

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.

_The Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her Organic Growth._

The foundation-stone of the Church of G.o.d is the Person of our Lord, a truth embodied with marvellous force and terseness of expression in that famous symbol of the Catacombs, the Sacred Fish, denoting by its initial letters the name of our Lord as Man, His office as Messiah, the two natures in the one Divine Person, the salvation which is their result, Jesus, the Christ, Son of G.o.d, Saviour.[110] As in that Divine Person the G.o.dhead and Manhood are joined in that special union which const.i.tutes personality, as He who governs and He who teaches, He who offers sacrifice and He who is sacrificed, is one and the same Saviour throughout, so He continues to be in the life of His Body the Church. And this is very manifest during the first stadium of the Church's course, stretching from the Day of Pentecost to the decree of Constantino, which granted to it civil recognition as a lawful religion; for government and doctrine, like warp and woof, form the robe woven from the top throughout in which our Lord as High Priest appears to the world.

According to the prophecy, "He builds a temple to the Lord, and bears the glory, and is a Priest upon His throne."[111] His kingdom resides in this unity. It is one flock, and the pastures in which His people feed upon the truth make the domain of the government by which the kingdom is ruled, and to feed the flock is to rule it. It is the one temple in which the sacrifice offered is the Lord Himself, while in the sacrifice the people is fed and grows, and is reciprocally offered to the Lord.

In all this the Church continues the mystery of her Lord's life, the Divine Incarnation, the suffering of the Nature a.s.sumed, the resurrection which follows. We have, then, to deal with one particular but complex fact, the outcome of this whole period in the government, teaching, and wors.h.i.+p of the Church inseparably blent together, as borne into and upon the world by its hierarchy, as enacted in its liturgy, as contained in its sacramental life, as exhibited in the living Christian people, the invincible race,[112] which grew up in those centuries without interference by the State. It is a period during which the State's legal position of undeviating hostility served as the guardian of the new spiritual kingdom's independence.

That independence resided in a threefold sanctuary, which is one and the same, being the House, the Temple, the Tribunal which the Blessed Trinity, the source and model of the Church, had constructed for Himself in the hearts of His people. First there is the sanctuary of wors.h.i.+p, in which Christ is Priest, the starting-point of the whole economy; secondly, the sanctuary of teaching, from which as Prophet He dispenses all that doctrine wherewith He is charged; thirdly, there is the sanctuary of government, whereof jurisdiction is a necessary and inalienable part, and in this He rules as King the distribution of all powers belonging to His kingdom.

We have to consider how, in the first three centuries, all this was actually carried out; and we shall best do so by placing ourselves at the remarkable point of history, the convocation of the Nicene Council in the year 325, and by summing up the result of the long conflict which preceded that event, as regards these three particulars.

The Nicene Council was convoked to terminate the question which Arius had raised as to the G.o.dhead of our Lord. It was the remedy of the Emperor Constantine for the malady which had broken out in the Church. He had just become, by the death of Licinius, sole ruler of the Roman world.

Though not yet a Christian by the reception of baptism, he had conceived the highest veneration for the Christian Church. There can be no doubt that he trusted, by means of its spiritual unity, to weld together on a firmer basis the shaken fabric of imperial Rome. Thus he looked with much sorrow and no little perplexity upon the rise of a heresy in the important Church of Alexandria; and when its bishop, in spite of his great authority, as the head of the second Church in the world, which by a most powerful organisation governed the three secular provinces of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis, was unable to expel the mischief, he urged the convocation of a General Council. He convoked it, so far as a secular prince could do so, by giving all the a.s.sistance which the public authority could render in a State politically absolute; for he not only invited the bishops to attend, but ordered that they should travel free of cost at the public expense. Pope Sylvester, on his side, a.s.sented; he sent his legates to the Council, where they alone represented the whole West, and so by his a.s.sent and by the mission of his legates gave the Council its c.u.menical character.

By this act the Emperor, who, it should be borne in mind, was still the Pontifex Maximus of heathen wors.h.i.+p, and the official head of the old State religion, recognised the Church of Christ as a spiritual kingdom, possessing a doctrine of which it was the sole judge and bearer; recognised in its bishops the representatives of the various powers placed by Christ, its Founder, therein, as those who bore throughout his empire a priesthood, and exercised a spiritual rule and jurisdiction, and preached a doctrine all bound together in one whole; who, moreover, in virtue of this triple character, which came upon them from above, by the inst.i.tution of Christ and through the medium of consecration, which is to say, by the force of a divine unction, and not by any human authority, represented a people which likewise was spread everywhere, while it was one likewise in virtue of a divine consecration, baptism in the threefold name of G.o.d.

Such a recognition is an enormous fact, which reason and imagination flag in their effort to realise. Two hundred and ninety-six years before, a Man had died upon a cross the death of a Roman slave, and the evening before His death He had ordered His disciples to commemorate that death for ever in a certain rite which should const.i.tute the central wors.h.i.+p of His people. This Man died by the edict of a Roman procurator, which had been extorted from him by the threats of the people and their rulers over whom he maintained Rome's supremacy. This Man also died with the record over His head that the cause for which He died was, the a.s.sumption of kings.h.i.+p over a people who refused Him for their King, and chose in preference the Roman Emperor. His death was reported to the Emperor of that day; but we know not whether he took any note of the death of one recorded as a pretender to a provincial throne, or of a death enacted at the command of a very subordinate officer of his empire, a mere procurator under the Proconsul of Syria. The twelve disciples of this Man, made up of fishermen, a publican, and afterwards a tent-maker, went forth, carrying with them this rite, which they delivered to other men throughout the empire. Upon this rite grew up a whole fabric of doctrine and wors.h.i.+p; rulers who propagated the doctrine and celebrated the rite, and a people which sprung out of both. The Roman emperors, at first superciliously disregarding the seed which had been so silently dropped in their cities, presently turned to persecute this people and their rulers; during ten generations having always persistently discountenanced them, they imprisoned, tormented, or executed a certain portion. They also destroyed the seat and wors.h.i.+p of the people who had rejected this Man as their King, and had chosen the Emperor instead. And now, in rather less than three centuries, the Emperor of Rome, the successor of Tiberius, acknowledged this crucified Man for what He declared Himself to be: acknowledged His kingdom; acknowledged as princes in all lands the missionaries whom He had sent forth; acknowledged as one people, bound together in sacraments, those who had believed in His word, or in the word of others derived from Him; acknowledged, moreover, as a living authority, as judges of what was or was not the true doctrine as so derived from Him, men whose sole claim was the consecration received from that Man on the eve of His public execution, and transmitted by the imposition of hands to their successors; acknowledged the rite of sacrifice which He had created by His word in the offering of His Body as the most august, the most tremendous, the most precious thing existing in the world.

Moreover, in the convocation of the Council, the Emperor acknowledged of his own accord the solidarity of the Christian episcopate. St. Cyprian did not express it more plainly in his famous aphorism, "The episcopate is one of which a part is held by each without division of the whole,"

than the Emperor in supposing that a point of doctrine on the maintenance of which the whole fabric of revelation rested, since it concerned the Person of the Founder, could be resolved by the common consent of its episcopate. For the decision to be come to would bind the whole as one Body; and herein lay another imperial attestation of Christ's kingdom.

The Emperor of Rome looked upon the Church and treated it, not as a beehive of separable cells, but as a Body the force and life of which lay in its oneness; and in causing a single heresy to be thus judged, he was condemning the principle of every heresy which should at any time arise.

All this and much more is comprehended in that act of the Emperor Constantino which sanctioned the convocation of the Nicene Council. It was not a Christianity split up into sects, but the solid unity of the Catholic Church in doctrine, discipline, wors.h.i.+p, and const.i.tution, which the Emperor looked to for a support to the tottering political fabric of the State, and as a new bond to its maintenance.[113]

But yet again. The Senate of Rome had been in the day of Rome's freedom a great power. At first representing the authority of a free people who had in course of time established a vast rule, it was a name of dignity and glory on the earth. Next, as the official bestower or ratifier of imperial authority, as even yet representing the Roman people, as collecting in its bosom those who had borne high offices, ruled provinces, gained victories, were the instruments by which the Pax Romana kept the earth quiet and obedient, the Senate was still an august body.

But now appeared before the world another council, consisting of men each of whom represented in his person a spiritual community while he carried a divine power. These men were not imposers of taxes or rulers of armies, not enactors of laws for human contracts, but men whose rule was over souls, whose word was divine, who announced not to a particular race but to all races of the earth one G.o.d, one Christ, one faith; a rule the centre of which was an act of transcendent wors.h.i.+p, and the scope and object holiness. And this council, while it met in the empire of an absolute sovereign, who raised up and put down whom he pleased, the lives and fortunes of whose subjects were entirely in his hands, alone possessed freedom, the freedom to wors.h.i.+p what they believed, to obey the commands of their conscience as Christians, to acknowledge a power stretching over the whole range of their most secret life, and in nowise derived from the Roman Emperor nor dependent on him. This power Constantine acknowledged in causing the Council to be convoked; and by so doing he pointed out the Council of the Christian Church as that from the imitation of which every future parliament should spring to construct civil liberty under Christian sovereigns. a.s.suredly the Council, as a deliberative body, possessed a dignity far transcending that of the Senate whether of free or of imperial Rome.

This is the meaning of the Nicene Council in the great arbitrament between the Spiritual and the Civil Powers, or, in Catholic language, between the Priesthood and the Empire. And it is a meaning put upon it by the Roman Emperor himself. Viewed on this side, the Council is a summary of the whole preceding history from the Day of Pentecost to its convocation, the records of which are as scant as the facts are precious.

What know we as to the number of the martyrs and confessors in that interval? What infinitesimal portion of individual lives and sufferings then undergone has been preserved for our love and imitation? Among the Fathers present at the Council there was one, Paphnutius, who had lost an eye in the preceding persecution. We are told the Emperor would kiss the empty socket in token of his veneration. That act symbolised his whole demeanour to the Church for whose faith Paphnutius had suffered. It likewise expressed the witness which the fact of the Council convoked and acknowledged by the Roman Emperor gave to all those sufferings the innumerable incidents of which went to construct that victory of patience over force whereby the Christian kingdom was established in its first field of combat. This was the conflict of the natural society of man, as it existed in the grandest empire of Gentilism, with the supernatural society founded in Christ.

Thus the convocation of the Nicene Council is the definitive declaration by the Roman Empire through the mouth of its chief that it recognised a kingdom of Christ upon earth.

To ill.u.s.trate the spiritual government of this kingdom, as it had grown up in the three centuries which intervene between the Day of Pentecost and the convocation of the Council, let us touch upon five points: the first shall be the ordered gradation of the hierarchy; the second, the holding of provincial councils; the third, the hearing and the judging of causes; the fourth, the election of the Church's ministers; the fifth, the administration of her temporal goods.[114]

1. As to the first, the Sixth Canon of the Council ordered that the ancient custom should continue in force, according to which the great mother Churches of Alexandria and Antioch possessed jurisdiction over the whole civil diocese, the one of Egypt and the other of the East, in like manner as the Church of Rome possessed a similar jurisdiction in the West. The ground upon which the Council rests this canon is much to be observed; it does not inst.i.tute this jurisdiction, but orders it be continued because it was the ancient custom. Now as there had been no other Council prior to that of Nicaea, in which this power of jurisdiction over the Metropolitans in the civil dioceses of Egypt and of the East had been granted to the Bishops of Alexandria and of Antioch, the origin of this ancient custom must be referred to apostolic inst.i.tution, according to St. Augustine's rule, "That which is held by the whole Church, which has not been ordered by councils, but always been kept, we are most right in believing to have been handed down by none other than apostolic authority."[115] Pope Innocent I.,[116] writing to Alexander Bishop of Antioch, about eighty years after the Council, recognises his jurisdiction over not only one province, but over the whole a.s.semblage of provinces which made up the civil jurisdiction of the Prefect of the East, not so much on the ground of the city's civil dignity as because it had been the first See of the chief of the Apostles. St. Gregory the Great[117] repeatedly in his letters speaks of the See of the chief of the Apostles as being the See of one in three places, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.

That which the Sixth Canon of the Council witnesses, therefore, is the original jurisdiction of the two great mother Sees of Alexandria and Antioch over their daughter churches, which it corroborates by referring to the norm, as it were, supplied by the still greater See of Rome.

Though these Sees were not called at the time of the Nicene Council patriarchal, a name which arose in the fifth century; yet the thing itself, and the inst.i.tution which it denoted, existed from the beginning.

The system of mother and daughter churches is shown in the highest degree in these three great Sees, in two of which St. Peter himself sat, while he founded the third by his disciple Mark. It is, in fact, a derivation from St. Peter's Primacy, and the const.i.tuent principle of the hierarchy in its intermediate gradation of ranks. As the inst.i.tution of bishops throughout the world is a derivation of apostolic authority, so likewise is the repart.i.tion of jurisdiction among them. One and the same principle-power coming from above-made the whole hierarchy, whether in the bishop over the simple diocese, or in the metropolitan over a single province, or in the primate over several metropolitans, or in the central See of St. Peter, the Head of all. The three former of these gradations, the Sixth Canon of the Council recognised as of immemorial existence.

With regard to the fourth, when the Roman legate at the Council of Chalcedon cited this canon, he cited it with the heading: "The Roman church always had the Primacy." And although the Greek copies of the Council did not bear this heading, the Greek bishops there did not dispute the fact which it stated. And it must be noted that this heading did not a.s.sert the Primacy of Rome to be given by the Council, but that it had always existed; nor was any fact more constantly repeated by Pope after Pope when addressing the Church in her bishops, than this, that his authority, whatever it was, was the gift of Christ to St. Peter, and not bestowed by any Council: and so of divine, not apostolical, inst.i.tution.

It would appear that the Apostles,[118] in carrying out the divine instructions of their Master for the establishment of His kingdom, followed His own example. Inasmuch as He had given them a head, they would appoint inferior heads in the Church who should hold an order among themselves in its administration, and all refer to the Superior. In doing this they had regard to the civil disposition of the empire, using it as a model upon which they formed the exterior polity of the Church. For just as in the civil and temporal government of each province there was a mother city, the prefect of which administered the whole province, ruling under the Prince over the subordinate governors, to whom matters of more grave importance were referred, so the Apostles and their disciples after them inst.i.tuted in the chief cities bishops to whom they gave all the powers of metropolitans before the name came into use, in order that ecclesiastical regulations of the greatest moment might be treated before them in union with the bishops of their respective provinces.[119] Thus St. Paul, finding Ephesus the metropolis of Proconsular Asia, placed Timotheus to be bishop there, giving him at the same time jurisdiction over the bishops of that province, who should be drawn as it were out of the womb of the parent See; and in his first letter we find instructions as to the quality of the bishops whom he should select. In the 19th chapter of the Acts, we are told that St. Paul had drawn a great number of disciples to him, not only at Ephesus, but in nearly every part of Asia, that is, the proconsular province of that name. In the 17th chapter, at a later date, he summoned at Miletus the bishops of Ephesus and its province to meet him, calling them "all you among whom I have pa.s.sed preaching the kingdom of G.o.d," which words denote that he was speaking, not to the priests of one city, but to the bishops of a province, in which "the Holy Ghost had set them as bishops to rule over the church of G.o.d." St. Irenaeus also notes that they were bishops and elders from Ephesus and the adjoining cities. St. John recognises these bishops in the seven letters which he is ordered to communicate to the angels of the churches in the Apocalypse. At the head of these is the Angel of the church of Ephesus as metropolis. So, again, the Apostle Paul set t.i.tus as metropolitan over the whole of Crete, expressly ordering him to establish bishops in every city, and describing what their character should be. His letters to Corinth and to Thessalonica, as well as to Ephesus, are letters to cities each of which was a metropolis. Thus the 34th of the Canons, called apostolical, runs: "It behoves the bishops of each nation to recognise him, who is the first among them, and to esteem him as their head, and to do nothing of importance without his sentence; but let each of them do only what concerns his own diocese and the places belonging to it, and not that without the agreement of all."[120] Here is seen the discipline of the ancient church, beyond a doubt derived from the Apostles, as to the Metropolitan's superintendence over the bishops of every province.

Thus the distribution[121] of episcopal jurisdiction began with the beginning, and was the outflow of one principle as stable as it was simple. The structure of the diocese, that of the province, that of the patriarchate, that of the whole Church, was identical throughout. It was a series of concentric circles, at the centre of which was our Lord Himself. In the simple diocese He was seen as walking and teaching with His Apostles on earth; in the province the metropolitan, with his suffragans, repeated the same image; in the patriarchate, the Primate and his metropolitans; while in the See of Peter, our Lord stood by the lake of Galilee delivering with the thrice enjoined question, "Lovest thou Me more than these?" the divine pastoral power over His whole flock.

This was the example of the Master Himself, which the Apostles faithfully followed.

From the beginning as to this exterior polity of His Church nothing was undefined, nothing was casual; it was the Body of Christ in its natural action gradually filling the world, by which the Head was gradually drawing man to Himself. It was the perfection of order, and yet the perfection of a divine liberty, which took hold of earthly things, such as the civil disposition of a temporal empire, to exalt it into the structure of a supernatural kingdom.

The great builders of the Middle Ages, in these stupendous cathedrals which the piety of generations raised in honour of the Mother of G.o.d, represented the Body of our Lord in that form of the cross on which He purchased our redemption. Every wall, every b.u.t.tress, every chapel therein converged towards the centre, and lent its several portion of support to the whole. Therein the Church in her unity and solidarity was visibly portrayed, the Head with His members, the Mother of fair love, bearing the Divine Child, with His saints and confessors around Him.

Therein the mystery of our salvation, the mystical altar of sacrifice, was ever set forth, in which the Divine Presence, the greater Schechinah of the new law, abode without ceasing. Such an intellectual and moral structure is presented to us in the hierarchy of the Church, graduated according to the system just described, from the first Apostolic Council at Jerusalem to the first General Council at Nicaea. No bishop stood apart from his fellows; no important matter of doctrine or discipline, of government or wors.h.i.+p, was terminated by him without common council of his brethren. Every province was ranged round the central shrine, and made part of the one edifice. It was the Body of Christ sculptured, not on stone, but on human hearts, joined together by the wisdom of His saints, and cemented with the blood of His martyrs.

2. The second point[122] to be considered is the development of synodical inst.i.tutions which kept even pace with the metropolitical hierarchy. As the council of his priests stood beside the bishop, so the provincial synod, the earliest form of councils, stood beside the metropolitan. From the second half of the second century these came into action for the subjugation of doctrinal errors and divisions, such as the Montanist heresy, and the contest as to the proper day for the celebration of Easter. The unity and solidarity of the churches and their bishops found more and more expression in these synods; here the heretical attack was stayed, and the common action of the bishops met the common a.s.sault of opponents. In the third century these episcopal meetings took place generally once, and in some countries twice a year. In them the bishops only had a decisive voice; priests and deacons could take part in them, the latter usually standing, while bishops and priests sat; the laity also were not absolutely excluded. The decrees of councils were usually sent by encyclical letters to other bishops. Bishops who could not appear in person had to be represented either by other bishops, as in A.D. 286 at Carthage, or by clerics of their church, as in 314 at Arles. The bishops of higher rank, who presided over the synod, generally metropolitans, were accustomed to subscribe the decrees alone.

Accusations against bishops, and wrong acts on their part, were likewise examined at synods, and decided there. We no longer possess acts of the most ancient councils, except those of some African synods under Cyprian, and of that of Antioch in 269; we have 28 disciplinary decrees of the Council of Amyra in 314, and 14 of that of Neocaesarea held at about the same time.

3. Nothing sheds clearer light upon the const.i.tution of the Church, as a perfect society, than her action in the hearing and deciding of causes.[123] The coercive power of the Church descends to her direct from G.o.d, and not from man, and was comprised from the beginning in the twofold jurisdiction of the external and the internal forum, the one criminal and the other penitential. The Son of G.o.d, who gave this power to the prelates of His Church, appointed them to be judges of men, granting to them full power to absolve and to condemn, and pledging His divine word that their sentences should be confirmed in heaven. The grant is recorded in the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew, as promised to St.

Peter in his quality as head of the Church, and in the eighteenth chapter as promised to the Apostles collectively, and in their persons to the bishops who descend from them. By this divine disposition they are the sole and ordinary judges of the Church who belong essentially to the ecclesiastical polity; and therefore St. Cyprian wrote: that "heresies have arisen and schisms sprung up from no other reason than the not yielding obedience to G.o.d's priest; and from not reflecting that there is at a time but one priest in the Church, and one judge at a time in Christ's place: to whom, if according to the divine commands the whole brotherhood yielded obedience, no one would venture to do anything against the College of Priests;"[124] that is the episcopate.

This power of the keys gave a true and proper jurisdiction as well in the criminal as the penitential forum. But the difference between the two is marked. The punishment inflicted by the Church on those who were accused and convicted in judgment was different from that which was laid upon such as of their own accord, either in public or in secret, confessed their sins. The punishment inflicted on delinquents after accusation and proof of their misconduct was called a sentence, a condemnation, a sacerdotal censure, to use St. Cyprian's term; the other, which was laid upon any one who of his own accord confessed his faults, was properly a penitence, and never called a condemnation, but, on the contrary, carried with it a sacerdotal absolution from the soul's stains. The former belonged to the exterior forum, judicial and contentious; the latter to the interior forum, that of conscience. There was, indeed, a great difference between the two; for the censure laid its stroke upon those who resisted and were contumacious, who refused to confess their crime, if they were once judicially convicted; but penitence was only given to those who, by confession, voluntarily disclosed their fault, and they only who were the guilty parties formed the accusers and the witnesses against themselves.[125]

During the whole period of the first three centuries the Church exercised through her bishops this true and proper jurisdiction, both of the exterior and the interior forum. Instances of the former are the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira by St. Peter; of Elymas the sorcerer and the incestuous person at Corinth by St. Paul. But, further, the latter Apostle in his first Epistle to the Corinthians directed that causes of all kinds among Christians should be settled, not before the secular Gentile magistrates, but before the divine magistracy of the Church. And according to this rule the bishops in the first ages took cognisance of all causes and temporal differences, as well of clergy as of laity, and terminated them by their judgment; and this custom lasted even into the fourth century, after the peace of the Church, so that the most troublesome occupation which the bishops of those ages had was to exercise this judicial power over secular matters, as St. Augustine confesses in his own case, where he says, "They demand of us that we should occupy ourselves with their vicious and troublesome covetousness, and give them up our time; at least they press the weak, and force them to bring their causes to us; and we do not venture to say to them, 'Man, who made me a judge or a divider among you?' For the Apostle inst.i.tuted ecclesiastical judges in such causes by prohibiting Christians from pleading before secular tribunals."[126]

Jurisdiction is defined to be "cognition of causes belonging to the magistrate by right of his office."[127] Such a cognition was exercised by the bishops over every sort of cause among Christians in the first centuries. Aristotle says, "Those are most properly to be called magistrates whose function it is to deliberate, to judge, and to command, but especially the latter, as being more characteristic of them." And when St. Paul writes, "Obey those that are set over you, and be subject to them; for they watch as those who will give account of your souls," he says the same, since by the force of relative terms there cannot be the duty of obedience on one side without the right to command on the other.

This episcopal magistracy was executed in four degrees, corresponding to the hierarchy and the councils as they have been just described. First, in his diocese the bishop was the proper judge, as Origen in his answer to Celsus draws a parallel between the bishop with his presbytery in each particular city and the chief magistrate of that city with the council.

Secondly, the metropolitan with his council of bishops, so that the apostolical canons enjoin that if a bishop be accused by persons of the faith, worthy of credit, he should be brought and judged before that tribunal.[128] Thirdly, if a metropolitan were accused, the higher tribunal of the Primate and his Episcopal Council would intervene.

Fourthly, if a Primate, or one of those afterwards termed Patriarchs, were in fault, as Paul of Samosata, holding the See of Antioch in the third century, a council of still greater rank would meet to judge him; and in this case even the secular sovereign, the Emperor Aurelius, recognised that the episcopal house ought to belong to the person indicated by the bishops of Italy, that is, the Pope.

4. The fourth point which I will endeavour to sum up is the practice of the Church in the period preceding the Nicene Council as to the election of bishops and the other ministers of inferior rank to the bishop from the priest downwards, together with the principle on which this practice was founded.

It has been shown above how the first bishops were planted by St. Peter, St. Paul, and the other Apostles, who chose by direction of the Holy Spirit, in the cities wherein they preached, those whom they would invest with the plenitude of the priesthood, to be sources of future spiritual rule and centres of Christian life. But when successors to those had in the course of time to be appointed, what rule was followed?

The form of the sacred elections in those first ages was this: when a bishop died, the bishops of the province, together with the metropolitan, a.s.sembled in the city of the defunct prelate. They here took information from the clergy and the people respecting the persons who were considered worthy of episcopal rank. The bishops deliberated by themselves on the matter, and then proposed in public the person whom they considered worthy of the bishop's seat. They heard thereupon the opinion and the wish of the clergy and the faithful people. Having heard these, they issued their judgment, in which the sentence of the metropolitan had the larger share; and the new bishop being elected, they at once consecrated him. As to the election of the priests and the other inferior clergy, the same order was pursued in consulting clergy and people, and the whole judgment was ultimately reserved to the bishop.

St. Cyprian has left us in his 68th letter a most lucid testimony to this being the custom in his day, not only in the Churches of Africa, but in all other provinces. "We must," he says, "diligently observe and maintain the custom which has come down to us by divine tradition and apostolical observance, which is kept among ourselves and in almost every province.

In order that ordination be rightly celebrated, the nearest bishops of the province must a.s.semble among that people for whom a superior is to be appointed. The bishop must be chosen in the presence of the people, which has the fullest knowledge of the life of every one, and is thoroughly acquainted with his conduct by his acts." He supports the custom by the example of Eleazar, who, though chosen to be high priest by Moses alone, in obedience to a divine command, was yet set before the people, to show that sacerdotal ordinations should be made in the presence of those who by intimate knowledge can testify the merits of those chosen; and, again, by the example of the Apostles, who, in the election as well of St. Matthias as of the seven deacons, called together the people and heard their testimony, "that no unworthy person might find means to be advanced to a higher rank or the sacerdotal dignity."

The outcome of these three centuries is, that the election of the bishop lay in the hands of the metropolitan, a.s.sisted by the bishops of his province, and that the election of the metropolitan lay in the synod of his bishops, but confirmed by the bishops of the first Sees, to whom belonged the consecration of metropolitans.[129] This was the discipline in the East, while in the West the Roman Pontiff, through the dignity of his throne as head of the whole Church and of all particular Churches, did not personally intervene in the election of bishops to vacant Sees, but the successor was chosen by the neighbouring bishops according to the desires of the clergy and people, and the decree of the election was transmitted him, leaving to his choice its confirmation, or provision for the vacant See in some other manner, as might seem to him most expedient.

The election of all ministers below the bishop belonged to the bishop alone.

It is evident that the great number of bishops who in the course of two centuries were sent out by the Roman Pontiffs[130] to convert the nations to the faith were not elected by the faithful people which they themselves founded; nor could the testimony or the consent of the people be asked. But if the election of ministers had belonged by divine inst.i.tution to the faithful laity and the Christian people, neither the Apostles, nor their disciples, nor the successors of St. Peter could have altered a divine disposition, nor elected pastors without the consent of the people.

But the principle on which the Church acted from the beginning is as clear as her practice; for the priesthood and the whole order of pastors in the Church having been established by the Son of G.o.d, and the perpetuity of this same priesthood in this same Church being also necessary by this divine disposition, it follows that the election of sacred ministers to maintain the succession and the disposition given by Christ to the Church, must belong by divine order to some one. As it cannot belong to laymen, it must belong to the clergy alone. In fact, St.

Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, declares that G.o.d Himself prescribed the form of this election in the priesthood of Aaron, and that this form was observed by our Lord. "No one," he says, "takes this honour to himself but he that is called by G.o.d, as was Aaron. So, too, Christ glorified not Himself to be called High Priest, but He that said to Him, 'Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee;' as also in another place He says, 'Thou art a Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec.'"

Exactly, then, as Aaron was elected solely by Moses at G.o.d's command, without waiting for any consent or any council of the people, so in the Church bishops did not need the consent or counsel of the people to be elected to their ministry, but they required the suffrage and the inst.i.tution of their own order. And our Lord, on the day of His Resurrection, when He met His a.s.sembled Apostles, gave the whole rule, order, and descent of election and inst.i.tution in His Church in the words, "As My Father sent Me, so I also send you." As He elected His apostles and disciples, excluding all consent of the mult.i.tude, so He made them electors and inst.i.tutors of the ministers who should succeed them, independent of popular election. In His Church power is from above, not from below; from within, not from without; nor is any truth attested with a more complete and unbroken witness in the history of three hundred years than this.

5. The fifth point to be considered is the administration of the Church's temporal goods.