Beginning his career in the days of Paul, it was not till the thirteenth century that the “Man of Sin” reached his maturity, and stood before the world full grown. During all these ages, he kept stretching himself higher and higher, piling assumption upon assumption, and prerogative upon prerogative, till at last, he raised himself to a height from which he looked down not only upon all churches, but upon all kings and kingdoms. He claimed to be the world’s one bishop and world’s one monarch. In the first century he is seen as the humble pastor, whose only care is to feed his flock, and who looks for no crown save that which the chief shepherd may be pleased to give him at his appearing. In the thirteenth he is beheld as a mighty potentate, who stands with his foot planted on every throne and realm of Christendom. He writes himself a “King of Kings,” and he claims by divine right to administer all the affairs of earth. If we except Christianity, there is no similar example in history of what was at first so small, becoming in the end so great. Three hundred Popes and more are seen, one after the other, steadily prosecuting this idea, without once relaxing in their efforts or turning aside from the pursuit. Each in succession takes up the plan at the point where his predecessor had left it, and carries it a stage nearer its consummation. For thirteen hundred years on end, we see the enterprise pushed forward with an undeviating constancy, and an unflinching courage, with a perseverance and a subtlety, –in short, a combination of powers never before seen working together for the realization of any other project. There is more than man here. The spirit who conceived this plan, who inspired the actors and kept them working century after century, on the same lines, till at last the goal was reached, was more than human. Paul tells us that its author was Satan.
A great apostasy was to precede the rise of the Antichrist. In truth, the "Man of Sin" was to grow out of that apostasy. Be not "troubled" or alarmed says the apostle writing to the Thessalonians, as if time were to be wound up, and Christ were to return (Thess. 2:2, 3): –"That day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed." Not a falling away, but, the falling away, as it is in the original Greek –some great and notable apostacy: the Church must pass through a dark and terrible shadow before Christ shall return. The prophets had spoken not obscurely of that evil time. It was the burden of Daniel's prophecy; it was repeated in the symbolic picturings of John. Paul in his other writings had referred to it, portraying with brief but vivid touches the essential characteristics of the power which at that era was to cast his dark shadow on the world.
Hardly had the early persecutions ceased till that falling away set in. Jerome lifts the veil in the fourth century, and disclosed a truly melancholy picture. In vain we look for the humility, the simplicity, and the purity of the early Church. The gold refined in the furnace of ten persecutions is waxing dim. The vine which Paul planted at Rome is being transformed into the vine of Sodom. The pastors of the church are becoming inflamed with the love of riches, and are striving with one another for pre-eminence. Rome daily sees her bishop ride forth in a gilded chariot, drawn by prancing steeds. Her clergy show themselves attired in robes of silk. The members of their flock crowd alternately the church and the theatre, and rush with indecent haste from superstitious rites performed at the tombs of the martyrs to the games and sports of the circus. The "apostasy" has fairly set in. The corruption grows with the current of the centuries. It shapes itself into system, it builds error upon error, and buttresses itself all round with assumptions and falsehoods. The organization in which it enshrines itself necessarily and naturally finds for itself a chief or head. Now comes the Pope and his hierarchy. The "Man of Sin" has appeared.
He is seen to rise out of the earth of a paganised Christianity. Like the soil from which he is sprung, he is pagan in essence though Christian in appearance. Several notable events helped him to attain his full stature. We must indicate, a few –not all of these, for it is impossible to write the history of thirteen centuries in one short chapter.
The first event which contributed, and contributed essentially to the development of the Papacy was the removal of the Emperor from Rome. Had Caesar continued to reside in his old capital, he would, as the phrase is, have "sat" upon the Pope, and this aspiring ecclesiastic could not have shot up into the powerful potentate which prophecy had foretold. But Constantine (A.D. 334) removed to the new Rome on the Bosphorus, leaving the old capital of the world to the Bishop of Rome, who was henceforth the first and most influential personage in that city. It was then, probably, that the idea of founding an ecclesiastical monarchy suggested itself to him. He had fallen heir, by what must have seemed a lucky accident, to the old capital of the world; he was, moreover, possessor of the chair of Peter, or believed himself to be so, and out of these two –the old town of the Caesars and the old chair of the apostle, it might even be possible –so, doubtless, he reasoned, to fabricate an empire that would one day rival and even overtop that of the emperors. These, it might have been thought beforehand, were but slender materials to bear the weight of so great an enterprise; yet with their help, and aided, doubtless, by deeper that mere human counsel, he projected a sovereignty which has not had its like on earth, which survived the fall of the Roman Empire, which lived through all the convulsions and overturnings of the Middle Ages, and which has come down to our day, and has the art, when men believe it to be about to expire, of rallying its powers, and coming back upon the world.
About this time, moreover, the equality which had reigned among the pastors of the church in the primitive age was broken. The bishops claimed superiority above the presbyters. Nor was there equality even among the bishops themselves. They took precedence, not according to their learning, or their talents, or their piety, but according to the rank of the city in which their see was placed. Finally, a new and loftier order arose overtopping the episcopate. Christendom was partitioned into five great patriarchates –Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. These were the five great cities of the empire, and their bishops were constituted the five great princes of the church.
Now came the momentous question, for a while so qeenly agitated. Which of the five shall be the first? Constantinople claimed this honour for her patriarch, on the ground that it was the residence of the Emperor. Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem each put in its claim, but to no effect. Constantinople found, however, a powerful rival in the old city on the banks of the Tiber. Rome had been the head of the world, the throne of the Caesars; around it was still the halo of a thousand victories, and that gave it a mysterious influence over the imaginations of men, who began to see in its bishop the first ecclesiastic of the Christian world. The popular suffrage had pronounced in favour of the Roman bishop before his rank had received imperial ratification. He was installed as the first of the five patriarchs in A.D. 606. The Emperor Phocas, displeased with the bishop of Constantinople, who had condemned the murder of Maurice, by which Phocas opened his way to the imperial dignity, made Boniface III, universal bishop. The imperial edict, however, gave to the Roman bishop only the precedence among the five patriarchs; it gave him no power or jurisdiction over them.
Mere rank the bishops of Rome held to be but an empty honour. What they coveted was substantial power. Their policy was now shaped with the view of reducing the whole clergy of the church into obedience to the Roman chair, and exalting the popes to supreme and absolute sovereignty. Centuries passed away, in the course of which, by the help of many an artifice, and under cover of many a pretext, the Roman bishops slowly extended their power over the West. The darkness which accompanied the descent of the Gothic nations favoured their project in a high degree. "Bad wares," says Puffendorf, in his Introduction to the History of Europe, "are best vended in the dark, or at least in a dim light."
Some of the "wares" vended in these "dark" times were sufficiently remarkable. Out of many we give but two examples. The Emperor Constantine, by his last will and testament, was made to bequeath to Silvester, Bishop of Rome, the whole Western Empire, including palace, regalia, and all the belongings of the master of the world. A goodly dowry, verily, for the poor fisherman. Then came another "windfall" to the papacy, in the shape of the decretals of Isidore. This last showed the church, to her equal surprise and delight, that her Popes from Peter downwards had held the same state, lived in the same magnificence, and promulgated their pontifical will in briefs, edicts, and bulls in the same authoritative and lordly style, as the grand Popes of the Middle Ages. Both documents, it is unnecessary to say, were sheer forgeries. They are acknowledged by Romanists to be so. They could not have stood a moment's scrutiny in an enlightened age. But they were accepted as genuine in the darkness of the times that gave them birth, and vast conclusions were founded upon them. The fabrications of Isidore were made the substructions of canon law, and that stupendous fabric of legislation is still maintained to be of divine authority, despite that it is now acknowledged to be founded on a forgery.
The northern nations arrived in southern Europe in the fifth and succeeding centuries ignorant of Christianity. This was another cause that favored the advancement of the "Man of Sin." These nations, on their arrival in Italy, beheld a great spiritual potentate seated in the chair of Caesar. He told them that he was the successor of Peter the Apostle, whom Christ had constituted his Vicar on earth, with power to transmit all his prerogatives, spiritual and temporal, to his successors in his office. This was the only Gospel the Pope ever preached to the barbarian tribes. They had no means of testing the legitimacy of these mighty claims. In the Pope himself they recognised no very distant resemblance to their own arch-druid; the rites of the Roman temples were not unlike the worship they had practiced in their pagan homes; they had easy access to the baptismal fount, their pagan beliefs and manners forming no impediment; nation after nation entered the Roman pale, the Franks leading the way, and earning for themselves the title of the "eldest son of the Church." The Gothic nations had found in the Pope, before whose chair they now bowed down, a common spiritual Father. Thus was accomplished another notable stage in the development of the Papacy.
His dignity enhanced by this vast accession of new subjects, the Pope set himself to strengthen his power within the Church by completing the subjection and vassalage of the clergy. He let slip no opportunity that offered to compass this end. Since the fifth century the bishops who lived on this side the Alps used to go to Rome to visit the sepulchres of the Apostles Peter and Paul. This journey was a voluntary one, being undertaken to gratify the devout or superstitious feelings of the pious excursionist. In no long time it was made obligatory, and those who failed to present themselves at the apostolic threshold were subjected to rebuke, as lukewarm in their devotion to the Holy Chair. It was next interpreted in the sense that the itinerant bishop had sought confirmation at Rome, and that all bishops ought to go thither for that end. Thus there came another accession of prerogative and dignity to the papal chair.
Further, it was a usual practice of churches and bishops to ask the advice of the Roman Church in matters of consequence and difficulty, or crave the right interpretation of particular cannons. When they at Rome perceived that their advice was taken as a decision, they began to send their decrees before they were demanded, on pretence that Rome being the first See of the Christian world, her bishop ought to take care that the canons and ecclesiastical laws were duly kept. Hence another encroachment upon the liberties of churches and pastors, and another accession to papal dignity and jurisdiction.
And further, when differences or quarrels arose betwixt bishop and bishop, or between church and church, nothing was more natural that for the parties at variance to solicit the mediation of the Bishop of Rome. The Pope willingly undertook the task of composing their contentions, but the price he exacted was a still further surrender of the liberties of the Church. He thence took occasion to assume the office of a judge, and to represent his chair as a tribunal to which he had a right to summon parties. At times he came in between the Metropolitan and his diocesan, and on one pretext or other, deposed the latter, to the wakening of the jurisdiction of the former, Moreover, it sometimes happened that parties who had been condemned before provincial tribunals were encouraged to appeal to Rome, where the cause was reheard and the provincial sentence, it might be, revoked. By these stealthy and persistent steps, the Pope contrived to keep on the ascending grade.
There followed other most ingenious devices, all for the same end. Among these was the pall of consecration. The pall was sent to all bishops from the Pope, at first as a gift. It was next represented as indispensable, and that without it no bishops could discharge the functions of his office. Thus a new hold was obtained over the clergy, and a new method invented of replenishing the papal coffers; for a high price was put on this mystic article of dress, which was woven of the wool of the lambs of St Agnes.
To the same end were annals imposed. This was the sum paid by bishops when they changed from one see to another, a practice allowed by the Pope for the gain it brought him. The multiplication of monks and friars tended to the same end. The Pope summoned into existence the corps of the regular clergy to play them off against the army of the seculars. He acted on the maxim, "divide, and conquer." The monks were a check upon the bishops; they watched their proceedings and carried their report to Rome. They had acquired a vast reputation for holiness, and the direction of consciences through the confessional was mainly in their hands. They had discovered the secret of amassing riches by the arts of mendicancy. They swarmed over Europe, and were thoroughly devoted to the interests of the papal see; and if any bishop set himself in opposition to the Pope, they raised such a clamour against him as speedily convinced him that he had no alternative but submission.
Especially did the English monk Winfrid, who changed his name to Boniface, enlarge the papal dominion. This man is commonly but erroneously credited with the first Christianization of Germany. Invested with the authority of the pope's legate, he traversed the countries on the east of the Rhone, rooting out the schools and churches of the Evangelical faith which had been numerously planted in that region of Europe by the Culdee missionaries of the Irish and Scottish nations, substituting in their room Roman monasteries and cathedrals. This was the work of Boniface; a work well pleasing to Rome, inasmuch as it greatly widened the bounds of the pontifical sway.
Among the events of these disastrous ages, contributing to the growth of the papal power, not the least influential were the Crusades. They evoked a mighty outburst of enthusiasm around the papal chair. They place powerful kings, vast treasures, and countless soldiers at the service of the pope. He took into his own management the estates of those who went to fight for the recovery of the Holy Land; exempting their owners from the jurisdiction of the civil power in both civil and criminal causes. When the fury of the Crusades had spent itself, it was found that the spirit of princes was broken, their resources dried up, their realms impoverished by the loss of their subjects, and the only institution that had profited by the frenzy was the Papacy, which now, every other interest abased, rose aloft in greater grandeur than ever. Nor was this the end of the matter. The fanatical fury which had found its first fearful discharge on the plains of Syria, was diverted back to the land whence it had come, and there it vented without exhausting itself in those bloody persecutions and wars against heretics, which rage for centuries in Christendom.