is bishop of the universal Church, while the other bishops are his servants.

Now, if the Pope is really the bishop of the whole Church, so that every other bishop is his servant, he, who is the sole and legitimate mouth of the Church, ought to be infallible. If the decrees of Councils are invalid without Papal confirmation, the divine attestation of a doctrine undeniably rests in the last resort on the word of one man, and the notion of the absolute power of that one man over the whole Church includes that of his infallibility, as the shell contains the kernel. With perfect consistency, therefore, the pseudo-Isidore makes his early Popes say: "The Roman Church remains to the end free from stain of heresy."

Formerly all learned students of ecclesiastical antiquity and canon-law-men like De Marca, Baluze, Coustant, Gibert, Berardi, Zallwein, etc.—were agreed that the change introduced by the pseudo-Isidore was a substantial one, that it displaced the old system of Church government and brought in the new. Modern writers have maintained that the compiler of the forgery only meant to codify the existing state of things, and

1 Ep. Lucii in Hinschius' ed. of Decretals, p. 179. Cf. p. 206. The same statement is put into the mouth of Marcus and Felix L.

give it a formal status, and that the same development would have taken place without his trick. The truth

First, Before his fabrication many very efficacious forgeries had won a gradual recognition at Rome since the beginning of the sixth century; and on them was based the maxim that the Pope, as supreme in the Church, could be judged by no man.

Secondly, The Isidorian doctrine contradicted itself, for it aimed at two things which were mutually incompatible, the complete independence and impunity of bishops on the one hand, and the advancement of Papal power on the other. The first point it sought to effect by such strange and unpractical rules that they never attained any real vitality, while, on the contrary, the principles about the power of the Roman See worked their way, and became dominant under favourable circumstances, but with a result greatly opposed to the views of Isidore, by bringing the bishops into complete subjection to Rome. But that the pseudo-Isidorian principles eventually revolutionized the whole constitution of the Church, and introduced a new system in

1 So Walter, Phillips, Schulte, Pachmann, among canonists, and Döllinger in his Church History (ii. 41-43), on grounds betraying a very imperfect knowledge of the decretals.

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place of the old,-on that point there can be no controversy among candid historians.

At the time when the forged decretals began to be widely known, the See of Rome was occupied by Nicolas I. (858-867), a Pope who exceeded all his predecessors in the audacity of his designs. Favoured and protected by the break-up of the empire of Charles the Great, he met East and West alike with the firm resolution of pressing to the uttermost every claim of any one of his predecessors, and pushing the limits of the Roman supremacy to the point of absolute monarchy. By a bold but non-natural torturing of a single word against the sense of a whole code of law, he managed to give a turn to a canon of a General Council, excluding all appeals to Rome, as though it opened to the whole clergy in East and West a right of appeal to Rome, and made the Pope the supreme judge of all bishops and clergy of the whole world.1 He wrote this to the Eastern Emperor, to the Frankish king, Charles, and to all the Frankish bishops.2 And he referred the Orientals, and so sharp-sighted a

1 Canon 17 of Chalcedon, which speaks of appeals to the "primas dioceseos," i.e., one of the Eastern patriarchs, not a civil ruler, as Baxmann thinks (Politik der Päbste, ii. 13). Nicolas said the singular meant the plural, dioceseon," and that the "primate" meant the Pope,-a notion which would not seem worth a reply in Constantinople.

2 Mansi, Concil. v. 202, 688, 694.

man as Photius, to those fabrications fathered on Popes Silvester and Sixtus, which were thenceforth used for centuries, and gained the Roman Church the oft-repeated reproach from the Greeks, of being the native home of inventions and falsifications of documents. Soon after, receiving the new implements forged in the Isidorian workshop (about 863 or 864), Nicolas met the doubts of the Frankish bishops with the assurance that the Roman Church had long preserved all those documents with honour in her archives, and that every writing of a Pope, even if not part of the Dionysian collection of canons, was binding on the whole Church.1 In a Synod at Rome in 863 he had accordingly anathematized all who should refuse to receive the teaching or ordinances of a Pope.2 If, indeed, all Papal utterances were a rule for the whole Church, and all decrees of Councils dependent on the Pope's good pleasure,―as Nicolas asserted on the strength of the Isidorian forgery,—then there would be but one step further to the promulgation of Papal Infallibility, though it has been long delayed. It was thought enough to repeat from time to time that the Roman Church keeps the faith pure, and is free from every stain.

1 Mansi, Concil. xv. 695.

2 Harduin, Concil. v. 574.

Nearly three centuries passed before the seed sown produced its full harvest. For almost two hundred years, from the death of Nicolas I. to the time of Leo IX., the Roman See was in a condition which did not allow of any systematic acquisition and enforcement of new or extended rights. For above sixty years (883-955) the Roman Church was enslaved and degraded, while the Apostolic See became the prey and the plaything of rival factions of the nobles, and for a long time of ambitious and profligate women. It was only renovated for a brief interval (997-1003) in the persons of Gregory v. and Silvester II., by the influence of the Saxon emperor. Then the Papacy sank back into utter confusion and moral impotence; the Tuscan Counts made it hereditary in their family; again and again dissolute boys, like John XII. and Benedict IX., occupied and disgraced the Apostolic throne, which was now bought and sold like a piece of merchandise, and at last three Popes fought for the tiara, until the Emperor Henry III. put an end to the scandal by elevating a German bishop to the See of Rome.

With Leo IX. (1048-1054) was inaugurated a new era of the Papacy, which may be called the Hildebrandine. Within sixty years, through the contest with kings,