voured to persuade the Merovingian Theodebert to abandon his throne and become an ecclesiastic, the whole assembly burst out into scornful laughter. "Was it ever heard that a Merovingian king had degraded himself into a priest?" The saint had replied, "He who disdains to become an ecclesiastic will become so against his will." The times had rapidly changed. From all parts of Western Christendom kings were coming, lowly penitents, to Rome, to lay aside the vain pomp of royalty, to assume the coarse attire, the total seclusion, and, as they hoped, the undisturbed and heaven-winning peace of the cloister. Ceolwulf is said to have been the eighth Anglo-Saxon prince who became a monk. Now, within a few years, from the thrones of France and of Lombardy, the kings descended of their own accord, and laid their temporal government down before the head of Christendom, and entreated permission to devote the rest of their lives to the spiritual state.

Carloman, the elder son of Charles Martel, had commenced his reign with vigour, ability, and success. On a sudden he cast off at once the duties and the dignity of his station, and surrendered to Pepin, his brother, the power and all the ambitious hopes of his family. Carloman left his country, appeared in Italy, humbly requested to be admitted into the monastic state, built a monastery on Mount Soracte, but finding that too near to Rome, retired to the more profound seclusion of Monte Casino. In that solitude the heir of Charles Martel hoped to pass the rest of his earthly days.

'But Pope Zacharias beheld even a greater triumph of the faith. A Lombard king suddenly paused on the full tide of ambition and success, and from a deadly and formidable enemy of the Pope and of the Roman interest, became a peaceful monk.'-Vol. ii. pp. 231, 232.

V. The next period carries us from the time of Charlemagne through two centuries and a-half (from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1044), the early part of which was marked by great Popes--Leo IV., Nicolas I., and Hadrian II.-and by great events, while the latter part exhibits the darkest period of that Church's history, when the Papacy had sunk into the lowest state of degradation. The history of the state of the Church under Charlemagne, and his legislation, occupy a prominent place. Indeed, during all this period it is the French portion of the Church that exhibits the most life and vigour. The schools of Charlemagne awakened the minds of men. Hence it was with the French Church, most particularly under Hincmar, that the Popes had to contend. They had, indeed, other contests. The Saracens invaded Italy, and occupied the suburbs of Rome itself. The great struggle with Photius, about the See of Constantinople, followed. Nicolas and Hadrian conducted the contests both with Constantinople and France. The severance of Rome from Constantinople, and its uncontested preeminence, was the result of the one: the forged Decretals-which permanently fixed on the Church all the power which the Popes then claimed, with the authority of the apostolic age and the first three centuries-were brought into prominence in the second. Dean Milman's character of Nicolas, and his statements on this subject, are characterised y great fairness:

'During all his conflicts in the West with the royal and with the episcopal power, the moral and religious sympathies of mankind could not but be on his side. If his language was occasionally more violent, even contemptuous, than became the moderation which, up to this time, had mitigated the papal decrees, he might plead lofty and righteous indignation: if he interfered with domestic relations, it was in defence of the innocent and defenceless, and in vindication of the sanctity of marriage: if he treated kings with scorn, it was because they had become contemptible for their weakness or their vices: if he interfered with episcopal or metropolitan jurisdiction, the inferior clergy, even bishops, would be pleased to have a remote and possibly disinterested tribunal, to which they might appeal from prelates, chosen only from aristocratic connexions, barbarians in occupation and in ferocity: if he was inexorable to transgressors, it was to those of the highest order, prelates who had lent themselves to injustice and iniquity, and had defied his power: if he annulled councils, those councils had already been condemned for their injustice, had deserved the reproachful appellation with which they were branded by the Pope, with all who had any innate or unperverted sentiment of justice and purity. Hence the presumptuous usurpation even of divine power, so long as it was thus beneficently used, awed, confounded all, and offended few; men took no alarm at the arrogance which befriended them against the oppressor and the tyrant.

'The impression left by Nicolas I. on his times may be estimated by the words of a later writer. "Since the days of Gregory I. to our time sat no high-priest on the throne of St. Peter to be compared to Nicolas. He tamed kings and tyrants, and ruled the world like a sovereign: to holy bishops and clergy he was mild and gentle; to the wicked and unconverted a terror; so that we might truly say a new Elias arose in him."

'But this vast moral advancement of the popedom was not all which the Roman See owes to Nicolas I.; she owes the questionable boon of the recognition of the False Decretals as the law of the Church.

'Nicolas I. not only saw during his pontificate the famous False Decretals take their place in the jurisprudence of Latin Christendom; if he did not promulgate, he assumed them as authentic documents; he gave them the weight of the papal sanction; and with their aid prostrated at his feet the one great Transalpine prelate who could still maintain the independence of the Teutonic Church, Hincmar Archbishop of Rheims.

Up to this period the Decretals, the letters or edicts of the Bishops of Rome, according to the authorised or common collection of Dionysius, commenced with Pope Siricius, towards the close of the fourth century. To the collection of Dionysius was added that of the authentic councils, which bore the name of Isidore of Seville. On a sudden was promulgated, unannounced, without preparation, not absolutely unquestioned, but apparently overawing at once all doubt, a new Code, which to the former authentic documents added fifty-nine letters and decrees of the twenty oldest popes from Clement to Melchiades, and the donation of Constantine; and in the third part, among the decrees of the Popes and of the councils from Silvester to Gregory II., thirty-nine false decrees, and the acts of several unauthentic councils. In this vast manual of sacerdotal Christianity the Popes appear from the first the parents, guardians, legislators of the faith throughout the world. The False Decretals do not merely assert the supremacy of the Popes-the dignity and privileges of the Bishop of Rome-they comprehend the whole dogmatic system and discipline of the Church, the whole hierarchy from the highest to the lowest degree, their sanctity, and immunities, their persecutions, their disputes, their right of appeal to Rome. They are full and minute on

Church property, on its usurpation and spoliation; on ordinations; on the sacraments, on baptism, confirmation, marriage, the Eucharist; on fasts and festivals; the discovery of the cross, the discovery of the relics of the Apostles; on the chrism, holy water, consecration of churches, blessing of the fruits of the field; on the sacred vessels and habiliments. Personal incidents are not wanting to give life and reality to the fiction. The whole is composed with an air of profound piety and reverence; a specious purity, and occasionally beauty, in the moral and religious tone. There are many axioms of seemingly sincere and vital religion. But for the too manifest design, the aggrandisement of the See of Rome and the aggrandisement of the whole clergy in subordination to the See of Rome; but for the monstrous ignorance of history, which betrays itself in glaring anachronisms, and in the utter confusion of the order of events and the lives of distinguished men the former awakening keen and jealous suspicion, the latter making the detection of the spuriousness of the whole easy, clear, irrefragable-the False Decretals might still have maintained their place in ecclesiastical history. They are now given up by all; not a voice is raised in their favour; the utmost that is done by those who cannot suppress all regret at their explosion, is to palliate the guilt of the forger, to call in question or to weaken the influence which they had in their own day, and throughout the later history of Christianity.

The author or authors of this most audacious and elaborate of pious frauds is unknown; the date and place of its compilation are driven into such narrow limits that they may be determined within a few years, and within a very circumscribed region. The False Decretals came not from Rome; the time of their arrival at Rome, after they were known beyond the Alps, appears almost certain.'-Vol. ii. pp. 372-375.

We must pass over some portion of the narrative:

'It might occur to the most religious, that for the sake of religion; it might occur to those to whom the dignity and interest of the sacerdotal order were their religion, that some effort must be made to reinvest the clergy in their imperilled sanctity. There must be some appeal against this secular, this ecclesiastical tyranny: and whither should appeal be? It could not be to the Scriptures, to the Gospel; it must be to ancient and venerable tradition, to the unrepealed, irrepealable law of the Church; to remote and awful Rome. Rome must be proclaimed in an unusual, more emphatic manner, the eternal, immemorial court of appeal; the tradition must not rest on the comparatively recent names of Leo the Great, of Innocent the Great, of Siricius, or the right of appeal depend on the decree of the Council of Sardica; it must come down from the successors of St. Peter himself in unbroken succession; the whole clergy must have a perpetual, indefeasible sanctity of the same antiquity.

'So may the idea of this, to us it seems, monstrous fiction have dawned upon its author; himself may have implicitly believed that he asserted no prerogative for Rome which Rome herself had not claimed, which he did not think to be her right. It is even now asserted, perhaps can hardly be disproved, that the False Decretals advanced no pretensions in favour of the See of Rome which had not been heard before in some vague and indefinite, but not therefore less significant, language. The boldness of the act was in the new authority in which it arrayed these pretensions. The author may have thought that in renewing the power, while he by no means lost sight of the holiness of the clergy, he was embarked in a hallowed cause. In some respects he shows skill at least as consummate as might be expected in that age. There was no great fear of detection in a fiction so advantageous to those who could alone expose it, the clergy, in

an age which, for instance, received the life of St. Denys, written by the Abbot Hilduim of that monastery, and the ecclesiastical counsellor of the emperor, as identified with Dionysius the Areopagite; a legend almost of unparalleled extravagance, but which became at once accredited hagiology. The new code was enshrined, as it were, in a framework of deeply religious thought and language; it was introduced under the venerated name of Isidore of Seville (it was rumoured to have been brought from Spain by Riculf, Archbishop of Mentz); it was thus attached to the authentic work of Isidore, which had long enjoyed undisputed authority. Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, as the most powerful, so, perhaps, the most learned Transalpine ecclesiastic, who might at once have exposed the fiction, which he could hardly but know to be a fiction, co-operated more than any one else to establish its authority. So long as he supposed it to advance or confirm his own power, he suppressed all intrusive doubts; he discovered too late that it was a trap (a mousetrap is his own undignified word) to catch unwary metropolitans. Hincmar was caught, beyond all hope of escape. In the appeal of Rothrad, Bishop of Soissons, against Hincmar, metropolitan of Rheims, Pope Nicolas I. at first alleges no word of the new Decretals in favour of his right of appeal; he seemingly knows no older authority than that of Innocent, Leo, Siricius, and the Council of Sardica. The next year not merely is he fully master of the pseudo-Isidorian documents, but he taunts Hincmar with now calling in question, when it makes against him, authority which he was ready to acknowledge in confirmation of his own power. Hincmar is forced to the humiliation of submission. Rothrad, deposed by Hincmar, deposed by the Council of Senils, is reinstated in his see.

'This immediate, if somewhat cautious, adoption of the fiction, unquestionably not the forgery, by Pope Nicolas, appears to me less capable of charitable palliation than the original invention. It was, in truth, a strong temptation; but in Rome, where such documents had never been heard of, it is difficult to imagine by what arguments a man, not unlearned, could convince himself, or believe that he could convince himself, of their authenticity. Here was a long, continuous, unbroken series of letters, an accumulated mass of decrees of councils, of which the archives of Rome could show no vestige, of which the traditions of Rome were altogether silent: yet is there no holy indignation at fraud, no lofty reproof of those who dared to seat themselves in the pontifical chair and speak in the names of Pope after Pope. There is a deliberate, artful vindication of their authority. Reasons are alleged from which it is impossible to suppose that Nicolas himself believed their validity, on account of their acknowledged absence from the Roman archives. Nor did the successors of Nicolas betray any greater scruple in strengthening themselves by this welcome, and therefore only, unsuspicious aid. It is impossible to deny that, at least by citing without reserve or hesitation, the Roman pontiff's gave their deliberate sanction to this great historic fraud.

'Nor must be overlooked, perhaps the more important result of the acceptance of the pseudo-Isidorian statutes as the universal, immemorial, irrepealable law of Christendom. It established the great principle which Nicolas I. had before announced, of the sole legislative power of the Pope. Every one of these papal epistles was a canon of the Church; every future bull therefore rested on the same irrefragable authority, commanded the same implicit obedience. The Papacy became a legislative as well as an administrative authority. Infallibility was the next inevitable step, if infallibility was not already in the power asserted to have been bestowed by the Lord on St. Peter, by St. Peter handed down in unbroken descent, and in a plenitude which could not be restricted or limited, to the latest of his successors.'-Vol. ii. pp. 377-380.

The advance made in the French Church during this period is very important-it was a great step in the progress of the Church generally, and prepared the way for the changes which followed. Indeed, the life of Hincmar, the controversies which arose in that branch of Christendom, the working of the human mind shown in Gotteschalk and the disputes on predestination, indicate what advance the young and fresh civilization of the lately barbarian Franks was making. The same age saw

the conversion of Bulgaria and the Slave races effected by the Eastern Church, and of the northern tribes of Scandinavia by the Latin.

How wonderful is the vitality exhibited by the Church, when on a general view of the history it appears to be utterly corrupt. The reason, doubtless, is, that while among the evil are the good-to use S. Augustine's metaphor-as the few grains of corn, scattered and lost sight of in the heaps of chaff, those few are living and influential. They show no sign of life when cursorily regarded; but they have that in them which, cast into the ground, swells, shoots up, and bears fruit an hundredfold. Nay more, when one looks at the Church of that period, and beholds it in its manifold corruptions, both in East and West, yet sending out fresh branches, it seems like some aged oak of which the trunk is hollow and decayed, and ready to die, whilst yet it retains in its frame the power of putting forth some new shoots; and to one who lived then and saw no further, it might seem as if this were all-as if these new conversions were the last efforts of expiring life-the flashings of the lamp just going out. An unbeliever in the promises and real hidden life of the Church would have said so then; but, unlike the tree, the Church had within it the power of revival and inward renewal, so that the parts which seemed decayed and ready to perish grew young again.

The history of this revival of religion throughout the Church, to which we refer, is, we think, inadequately drawn out in Dean Milman's history. We mean that vigorous and earnest working of living personal religion, which manifested itself ultimately in the Hildebrandine period and in the age of Bernard. To speak of this as a reformation only would most inadequately express its true nature. A reformation suggests the idea of outward changes-of discipline enforced, and abuses removed. The great feature of the work we speak of is, that the reformation was the result of renewed religion-whilst it was the enforcement of a discipline which persons now would regard as an intolerable burden. That it was the elevation of the ecclesiastical over the secular power is true; but if we look at the real state of Christendom, and the evils produced by the secularizing of the clergy, their subjection to a rude and