Introductory Notice
to
The Decretals.
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The learned editors of the
Edinburgh series have given us only a specimen of these frauds, which, pretending to be a series of “papal edicts” from Clement and his successors during the ante-Nicene ages, are, in fact, the manufactured product of the ninth century,—the most stupendous imposture of the world’s history, the most successful and the most stubborn in its hold upon enlightened nations. Like the mason’s framework of lath and scantlings, on which he turns an arch of massive stone, the Decretals served their purpose, enabling Nicholas I. to found the Papacy by their insignificant aid. That swelling arch of vanity once reared, the framework might be knocked out; but the fabric stood, and has borne up every weight imposed upon it for ages. Its strong abutments have been ignorance and despotism. Nicholas produced his flimsy framework of imposture, and amazed the whole Church by the audacity of the claims he founded upon it. The age, however, was unlearned and uncritical; and, in spite of remonstrances from France under lead of Hincmar, bishop of Rheims, the West patiently submitted to the overthrow of the ancient Canons and the Nicene Constitutions, and bowed to the yoke of a new canon-law, of which these frauds were not only made an integral, but the essential, part. The East never accepted them for a moment: her great patriarchates retain the Nicene System to this day. But, as the established religion of the “Holy Roman Empire,” the national churches of Western Europe, one by one, succumbed to this revolt from historic Catholicity. The Eastern churches were the more numerous. They stood by the Constitutions confirmed by all the Œcumenical Synods; they altered not a word of the Nicene Creed; they stood up for the great Catholic law, “Let the ancient customs prevail;” and they were, and are to this day, the grand historic stem of Christendom. The Papacy created the Western schism, and contrived to call it “the schism of the Greeks.” The Decretals had created the Papacy, and they enabled the first Pope to assume that communion with himself was the test of Catholic communion: hence his excommunication of the Easterns, which, after brief intervals of relaxation, settled into the chronic schism of the Papacy, and produced the awful history of the mediæval Church in Western Europe.
In naming Nicholas I. as the founder of the
Papacy, and the first Pope, I merely reach the logical consequence of
admitted facts and demonstrated truths. I merely apply the
recognised principles of modern thought and scientific law to the
science of history, and dismiss the technology of empiricism in this
science, as our age has abolished similar empiricisms in the exact
sciences. For ages after Copernicus, even those who basked in the
light of the true system of the universe went on in the old ruts, talking as if the Ptolemaic theory were yet a reality: and so the very historians whose lucid pages explode the whole fabric of the Papal communion, still go on, in the language of fable, giving to the early Bishops of Rome the title of “Popes;” counting St. Peter as the first Pope; bewildering the student by many confusions of fact with fable; and conceding to the modern fabric of Romanism the name of “the Catholic Church,” with all the immense advantages that accrue to falsehood by such a surrender of truth, and the consequent endowment of imposture with the raiment and the domain of Apostolic antiquity.
The student of this
series must have noted the following fundamental facts:—
1. That the name papa was common to
all bishops, and signified no pre-eminence in those who bore
it.
2. That the Apostolic Sees were all equally
accounted matrices of unity, and the roots of other
Catholic churches.
3. That, down to the Council of Nicæa, the
whole system of the Church was framed on this principle, and that these
were the “ancient customs” which that council ordained to
be perpetual.