patriarchal equality, and seem to form a step in recession from the ground of Leo. But when we take his operations in general into view, and remember the rigid consistency of the papacy, which never forgets, we are almost justified in thinking that this protest was directed not so much against the title itself as against the bearer of it, and proceeded more from jealousy of a rival at Constantinople than from sincere humility. From the same motive the Roman bishops avoided the title of patriarch, as placing them on a level with the eastern patriarchs, and preferred the title of pope, from a sense of the specific dignity of the chair of Peter. Gregory is said to have been the first to use the humble-proud title, "Servant of the servants of God," (servus servorum Dei,) which ill agrees with the claims of the vicar of Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and the representative of God almighty on earth! His successors, notwithstanding his remarkable protest, called themselves freely the "universal bishops of Christendom." What he had condemned in his oriental colleagues as antichristian arrogance, the latter popes considered but the appropriate expression of their official position in the Church universal. It is not our object to pursue the development of the papacy any further through its varying fortunes, misfortunes, conflicts, and triumphs during the middle ages; its split, decline, and terrible ordeal during the Reformation; its subsequent revival during the Indian summer of Jesuitical restoration; its present crisis and prospects. We will only offer, in conclusion, a few general reflections from a purely historical point of observation. The papacy is undeniably the result of a long process of * Bellarmine disposes of this apparent testimony of one of the great and best popes against the system of popery which has frequently been urged since Calvin by Protestant controversialists, by assuming that the term episcopus universalis is used in two very different senses. "Respondeo," he says in his great controver sial work, De Controversiis Christiana Fidei, etc., de Romano Pontifice, lib. ii, cap. 31,) duobus modis posse intelligi nomen universalis episcopi. Uno modo, ut ille, qui dicitur universalis, intelligatur esse solus episcopus omnium urbium Christianarum, ita ut cæteri non sint episcopi, sed vicarii tantum illius, qui dicitur episcopus universalis, et hoc modo nomen hoc est vere profanum, sacrilegum et antichristiaAltero modo dici potest episcopus universalis, qui habet curam totius ecclesiæ, sed generalem, ita ut non excludat particulares episcopos. Et hoc modo nomen hoc posse tribui Romano pontifici ex mente Gregorii probatur." num. ... history. Centuries were employed in building it, and centuries have already been engaged upon its partial destruction. Lust of honor and of power, and even open fraud,* have contributed to its development; for human nature lies hidden under episcopal robes, with its steadfast inclination to abuse the power intrusted to it; and the greater the power, the stronger is the temptation and the worse the abuse. But behind and above these human impulses lay the needs of the Church and the plans of Providence, and these are the proper basis for explaining the rise, as well as the subsequent decay, of the papal dominion over the countries and nations of Europe. That Providence which moves the helm of the history of the world and Church, according to an eternal plan, not only prepares in silence and a secrecy unknown even to themselves the suitable persons for a given work, but also lays in the depths of the past the foundations of mighty institutions, that they may appear thoroughly furnished as soon as the time may demand them. Thus the origin and gradual growth of the Latin patriarchate at Rome looked forward to the middle age, and formed part of the necessary external outfit of the Church for her disciplinary mission among the heathen barbarians. The vigorous hordes who destroyed the West-Roman empire were to be themselves built upon the ruins of the old civilization, and trained by an awe-inspiring ecclesiastical authority and a firm hierarchical organization to Christianity and freedom, till, having come of age, they should need the legal schoolmaster no longer, and should cast away his cords from them. The Catholic hierarchy, with its pyramid-like culmination in the papacy, served among the Romanic and Germanic peoples, until the time of the Reformation, a purpose similar to that of the Jewish theocracy and the old Roman empire respectively in the inward and outward preparation for Christianity. The full exhibition of this pedagogic purpose belongs to the history of the middle age; but the foundation for it we *Recall the interpolations of papistic passages in the works of Cyprian; the Roman enlargement of the sixth canon of Nice; the citation of the Sardican canon under the name and authority of the Nicene council; and the latter notorious pseudo-Isidorian decretals. The popes, to be sure, were not the original authors of these falsifications, but they used them freely and repeatedly for their purposes. find already being laid in the Nicene and post-Nicene age, especially in the reign of that most remarkable man who is the prominent figure in this article. But the very reason we have assigned for the historical or temporal (not divine or eternal) right and necessity of the papacy is the best reason for its downfall, and instead of weakening the cause of Protestantism, gives it a powerful weapon in its controversy with Rome. Admitting that Romanism and popery were a wholesome school of discipline for the nations of the dark ages, we connect it inseparably with a lower stage of Christianity and civilization, and place its main power and significance in the past. To say that it has had its right, its necessity, its glory, is to say that it has it no more. The law of Moses was a schoolmaster to lead the Jewish nation to Christ, and looked to the Gospel as its fulfillment. The types and shadows of the Old Testament passed away when the substance appeared: the Jewish Sabbath was lost in the Christian Sunday, circumcision in baptism for the remission of sins, the passover in the holy communion, the daily sacrifice in the one eternal sacrifice of the cross. The whole Jewish religion was a religion of hope and of the future, constantly pointing beyond itself and finding its inmost sense and meaning in the Christian dispensation. Then, again, every system of discipline looks toward manly self-government and independence. The mother cares and provides for her children, not to keep them in a helpless minority, but with a view to train them up to youth and independent manhood and womanhood. So the whole medieval Catholicism was a training school for evangelical freedom in Christ. Hence it is as impossible to turn Protestantism back into the swaddling clothes of medieval Romanism, as to change a grown man into an infant, or to turn the stream back to its fountain. But here lies also the great difference between the Greek Catholic and the Evangelical Protestant opposition to the universal monarchy of the papacy. They are allies against Rome, but only in a negative point of view. They equally resist the claims of popery, but from altogether different positions and in a different spirit. The Greek, and Russian Church protests against the papacy from the basis of the Nicene age and the patriarchal oligarchy of the fourth and fifth centuries. Protestantism protests against it from the modern stand-point of religious freedom and popular self-government. The Greek Church rejects and abhors the papacy as a later innovation, which is, in fact, only a further development of its own hierarchical principle; Protestantism rejects and disowns the papacy as a superseded institution of the past, which has substantially answered its providential purposes and fulfilled its mission, at least as far as the great northern and western nations of Europe and America are concerned, who are the main bearers of the present and future history of the race, and represent the Christian religion in its irresistible motion and progress to the ends of the earth. ART. IV.-WHEDON ON THE WILL. The Freedom of the Will as a Basis of Human Responsibility and of Divine Government. By D. D. WHEDON, D.D. 12mo., pp. 438. New York: Carlton & Porter. 1864. THE nature, possibility, and explanation of the Freedom of the Will has been hitherto confessedly the questio vexata alike of the theologian and the metaphysician. Dr. Chalmers, in his chapters on Philosophic Necessity, avows his conviction that the controversy on this subject is interminable. To his eye there seemed no promise of a pacific adjustment, and it bore every appearance of remaining a disputed question to the end of time. So far as the suffrages of learned men are concerned there is a powerful array of great names on both sides. We find Leibnitz, Hobbes, Hume, Lord Kames, Jonathan Edwards on the side of philosophic necessity. "And these are countervailed in authority, and greatly more than countervailed in number, by Clarke, Butler, Locke, Reid, and Stewart," (and we may now add Kant, M. de Biran, Cousin, Hamilton, and Mansel,) on the side of freedom. So that a survey of the entire field presented to the mind of Chalmers such organic and radical difference, both as to matters of fact and first principles, that there seemed no prospect of adjustment by any process of dialectics. There was as "little hope of the disputants coming to one and the same mind, as that two men shall ever come to one and the same place, who have set out on their respective journeys with their backs toward each other."* We cannot, however, be prevailed upon to regard this as an insoluble problem. Under a reign of causational necessity there can be no moral government, and no just retribution. It is, at best, a mere physical or natural government; for moral government is of beings who are free and self-determined, and not of mere machines. To blame a necessitated thing or being is irrational, to punish it is a cruelty and an injustice. The necessitarian himself is unable to conceal his conscious embarrassment in presence of these difficulties, and to save his theory he becomes reckless in assertions. He affirms that "the whole system of morality-its duties and responsibilities, the whole scheme of moral government with its rewards and punishments, remain, on his theory, as entire and stable as ever."+ This affirmation runs athwart all the dictates of common sense, and collides with the universal convictions of humanity. He is the only consistent necessitarian who rejects the Christian doctrine of sin, of accountability and retribution, and reduces the government of God to the mere physical impulsation and management of a universal mechanism. The necessitarian dogma cannot be made to quadrate with our primitive convictions; it is out of harmony with all our instinctive beliefs. The idea of right, the sense of duty and accountability, the consciousness of sin, our faith in the justice of God, our religious hope and fears, all impel us onward to find a rational and "valid basis for human responsibility and Moral Government in the Freedom of the Will." The manly honesty of Chalmers constrains him to admit that the doctrine of necessity, as taught by Edwards, is identical with that of Hobbes and Hume. All he claims for Edwards is, "that he has succeeded in moralizing and evangelizing the whole argument." He has plundered the arsenal of infidelity, and sanctified the theft by consecrating the stolen arms * Institutes of Theology, pp. 290, 291. Eng. ed. |