not a single one is reproached with rejecting the Pope's authority in matters of faith, while Aërius, e.g., is reproached with denying the episcopate as a grade of the hierarchy. Had the mot d'ordre been given for centuries to observe a dead silence on this, in the Ultramontane view, articulus stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ ?

All this is intelligible enough, if we look at the patristic interpretation of the words of Christ to St. Peter. Of all the Fathers who interpret these passages in the Gospels (Matt. xvi. 18, John xxi. 17), not a single one applies them to the Roman bishops as Peter's successors. How many Fathers have busied themselves with these texts, yet not one of them whose commentaries we possess-Origen, Chrysostom, Hilary, Augustine, Cyril, Theodoret, and those whose interpretations are collected in catenas,-has dropped the faintest hint that the primacy of Rome is the consequence of the commission and promise to Peter! Not one of them has explained the rock or foundation on which Christ would build His Church of the office given to Peter to be transmitted to his successors, but they understood by it either Christ Himself, or Peter's confession of faith in Christ; often both together. Or else they thought Peter was the foundation equally with all the other

Apostles, the Twelve being together the foundation-stones of the Church (Apoc. xxi. 14). The Fathers could the less recognise in the power of the keys, and the power of binding and loosing, any special prerogative or lordship of the Roman bishop, inasmuch as-what is obvious to any one at first sight-they did not regard a power first given to Peter, and afterwards conferred in precisely the same words on all the Apostles, as anything peculiar to him, or hereditary in the line of Roman bishops, and they held the symbol of the keys as meaning just the same as the figurative expression of binding and loosing.1

1

"2

Every one knows the one classical passage of Scripture on which the edifice of Papal Infallibility has been reared: "I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, confirm thy brethren." But these words manifestly refer only to Peter personally, to his denial of Christ and his conversion; he is told that he, whose failure of faith would be only of

1 Döllinger might therefore have spared himself the trouble of trying to show that the power of the keys differs from the power of binding and loosing, so that the former extended over the whole Church, and passed to Peter's successors (First Age of the Church, pp. 29, 30, 2d ed.) This contradicts all the patristic interpretations, and the exegetical tradition of the Church.

2 Luke xxii. 32.

short duration, is to strengthen the other Apostles, whose faith would likewise waver. It is directly against the sense of the passage, which speaks simply of faith, first wavering, and then to be confirmed in the Messianic dignity of Christ, to find in it a promise of future infallibility to a succession of Popes, just because they hold the office Peter first held in the Roman Church. No single writer to the end of the seventh century dreamt of such an interpretation; all without exception—and there are eighteen of them-explain it simply as a prayer of Christ that his Apostle might not wholly succumb, and lose his faith entirely in his approaching trial. The first to find in it a promise of privileges to the Church of Rome was Pope Agatho in 680, when trying to avert the threatened condemnation of his predecessor, Honorius, through whom the Roman Church had lost its boasted privilege of doctrinal purity.

Now, the Tridentine profession of faith, imposed on the clergy since Pius IV., contains a vow never to interpret Holy Scripture otherwise than in accord with the unanimous consent of the Fathers-that is, the great Church doctors of the first six centuries, for Gregory the Great, who died in 604, was the last of the Fathers; every bishop and theologian therefore breaks his oath

when he interprets the passage in question of a gift of infallibility promised by Christ to the Popes.

§ VII.-Forgeries.

At the beginning of the ninth century no change had taken place in the constitution of the Church as we have described it, and especially none as to the authority for deciding matters of faith. When the Frankish bishops came to Leo III., he assured them that, far from setting himself above the Fathers of the Council in 381, who made the additions to the Nicene Creed, he did not venture to put himself on a par with them, and therefore refused to sanction the interpolation of Filioque into the Creed.1

But in the middle of that century-about 845-arose the huge fabrication of the Isidorian decretals, which had results far beyond what its author contemplated, and gradually, but surely, changed the whole constitution and government of the Church. It would be difficult to find in all history a second instance of so successful, and yet so clumsy a forgery. For three centuries past it has been exposed, yet the principles it introduced and brought into practice have taken such 1 Concil. Gall. (ed. Sirmondi) ii. 256.

deep root in the soil of the Church, and have so grown into her life, that the exposure of the fraud has produced no result in shaking the dominant system.

About a hundred pretended decrees of the earliest Popes, together with certain spurious writings of other Church dignitaries and acts of Synods, were then fabricated in the west of Gaul, and eagerly seized upon by Pope Nicolas I. at Rome, to be used as genuine documents in support of the new claims put forward by himself and his successors. The immediate object of the compiler of this forgery was to protect bishops against their metropolitans and other authorities, so as to secure absolute impunity, and the exclusion of all influence of the secular power. This end was to be gained through such an immense extension of the Papal power, that, as these principles gradually penetrated the Church, and were followed out into their consequences, she necessarily assumed the form of an absolute monarchy subjected to the arbitrary power of a single individual, and the foundation of the edifice of Papal Infallibility was already laid-first, by the principle that the decrees of every Council require Papal confirmation ; secondly, by the assertion that the fulness of power, even in matters of faith, resides in the Pope alone, who