By Joseph McCabe
Peter Abélard
St. Augustine and His Age
A Candid History of the Jesuits
Crises in the History of the Papacy
Crises
in the
History of the Papacy
A Study of
Twenty Famous Popes whose Careers andwhose Influence Were Important in theDevelopment of the Church andin the History of the World
By
Joseph McCabe
Author of "Peter Abélard," "Life of Saint Augustine," etc.
G.P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1916
Copyright, 1916
BY
JOSEPH McCABE
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
Probably no religious institution in the world has had so remarkable[Pg iii]a history, and assuredly none has attracted so large and varied aliterature, as the Papacy. The successive dynasties of the priestsof ancient Egypt were, by comparison, parochial in their power andephemeral in their duration. The priests of Buddha, rising to anautocracy in the isolation of Thibet or mingling with the crowd inthe more genial atmosphere of China or cherishing severe mysticismsin Japan, offer no analogy to the Papacy's consistent growth andhomogeneous dominion. The religious leaders of the Jews, scatteredthrough the world, yet hardened in their type by centuries ofpersecution, may surpass it in conservative antiquity, but they donot remotely approach it in power and in historical importance. Itinfluences the history of Europe more conspicuously than emperors haveever done, stretches a more than imperial power over lands beyond themost fevered dreams of Alexander or Cæsar, and may well seem to havemade "Eternal Rome" something more than the idle boast of a patriot.
Yet this conservative endurance has not been favoured by such astability of environment as has sheltered the lamas of Thibet or thesecular priests of the old Chinese religion. The Papacy has livedthrough fifteen centuries of portentous change, though it seemed[Pg iv] ineach phase to have connected itself indissolubly with the dominantinstitutions and ideas of that phase. The Popes have witnessed, andhave survived, three mighty transformations of the face of Europe. Theyhad hardly issued from their early obscurity and lodged themselves inthe fabric of the old Roman civilization when this fell into ruins; butthey held firmly, amidst the ruins, the sceptre they had inherited. Oneby one the stately institutions of the older world—the schools, thelaw-courts, the guilds of craftsmen, the military system, the municipalforms and commercial routes—disappeared in the flood of barbarismwhich poured over Europe, but this institution, which seemed the leastfirmly established, was hardly shaken and was quickly accepted by thestrange new world. A new polity was created, partly under the directionof the Popes, and it was so entirely saturated by their influence thatreligion gave it its most characteristic name. Then Christendom, as itwas called, passed in turn through a critical development, culminatingin the Reformation; and the Papacy begot a Counter-Reformation andsecured millions beyond the seas to replace the millions it