struggle for Papal domination. Isidore had made the earliest Popes assert that no speech ever could be held with an excommunicated man, whence Gregory and his allies inferred that this applied also to kings and emperors, and that nobody could, even in matters of business, hold any intercourse with them if excommunicated, so that they were no longer fit to reign, and must be deposed. By this extension of the idea, wholly unknown to the ancient Church, and destructive of the entire original character of the institution, an enormous instrument of power was created, which not only might be abused, but was itself a standing abuse, a confusion of things human and divine, and a perpetual source of civil disturbance and division. Bossuet has admitted that it was a false doctrine which Gregory introduced into the Church, by altering and distorting the notion of excommunication.1 Gregory himself must have known he was the first to make the claim, and that even in the Isidorian decretals there was nothing like it, yet at the Synod of 10782 he grounded it exclusively on the statutes of his predecessors. To make their spiritual arms irresistible, the Gregorians also borrowed from

1 Defens. Declar. pars. 1. 1. 3. c. 7.

Ivo and Gratian, for the misfortune of Europe, received this into their codes (c. 15, qu. 6. 4).

Isidore an alleged rule of Pope Urban I., addressed to all bishops, that even an unjust excommunication by a bishop must be respected, and nobody could receive the condemned man.1

1

If we look at the whole Papal system of universal monarchy, as it has been gradually built up during seven centuries, and is now being energetically pushed on to its final completion, we can clearly distinguish the separate stones the building is composed of. For a long time all that was done was to interpret the canon of Sardica so as to extend the appellant jurisdiction of the Pope to whatever could be brought under the general and elastic term of "greater causes." But from the end of the fifth century the Papal pretensions had advanced to a point beyond this, in consequence of the attitude assumed by Leo and Gelasius, and from that time began a course of systematic fabrications, sometimes manufactured in Rome, sometimes originating elsewhere, but adopted and utilized there.

The conduct of the Popes since Innocent I. and Zosimus, in constantly quoting the Sardican canon on appeals as a canon of Nice, cannot be exactly ascribed to conscious fraud-the arrangement of their collection 1 Thus Anselm and Card. Gregory, and then Gratian, c. 11, qu. 3. 27.

of canons misled them. There was more deliberate purpose in inserting in the Roman manuscript of the sixth Nicene canon, "The Roman Church always had the primacy," of which there is no syllable in the original,— a fraud exposed at the Council of Chalcedon, to the confusion of the Roman legates, by reading the original.1

Towards the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century, the process of forgeries and fictions in the interests of Rome was actively carried on there. Then began the compilation of spurious acts of Roman martyrs, which was continued for some centuries, and which modern criticism, even at Rome, has been obliged to give up, as, for instance, is done by Papebroch, Ruinart, Orsi, and Saccarelli. The fabulous story of the conversion and baptism of Constantine was invented to glorify the Church of Rome, and make Pope Silvester appear a worker of miracles. Then the inviolability of the Pope had to be established, and the principle that he cannot be judged by any human tribunal, but only by himself. For four years before 514 Rome was the scene of a bloody strife about this question; the adherents of Symmachus and his opponent Laurentius murdered one another in the streets, and the Arian Goth, King Theo

1 Mansi, Concil. vii. 444.

doric, was as little acceptable as a judge as the Emperor, who was hated in Rome. So the acts of the Council of Sinuessa and the legend of Pope Marcellinus were invented, and the "Constitution of Silvester," viz., the decision of a Synod of 284 bishops, pretended to have been held by him in 321 at Rome, evidently compiled while the bloody scenes in which clerics were murdered or executed for their crimes were fresh in men's minds. There again the principle was inculcated that no one can judge the first See.1

Some other records were fabricated at Rome in the same barbarous Latin, such as the Gesta Liberii, designed to confirm the legend of Constantine's baptism at Rome, and to represent Pope Liberius as purified from his heresy by repentance, and graced by a divine miracle. Of the same stamp were the Gesta of Pope Xystus III. and the History of Polychronius, where the Pope is accused, but the condemnation of his accuser follows, as also of the accuser of the fabulous Polychronius, Bishop of Jerusalem. These fabrications of the beginning of the sixth century, which all belong to the same class, had a reference also to the attitude of Rome towards the Church of Constantinople. It was the period of the long inter

1 Append. ad Epp. Pont. Rom. (ed. Coustant), pp. 38 seq.

ruption of communion between East and West caused by the Henoticon (484-519), when Felix II. even summoned the Patriarch Acacius to Rome, and Pope Gelasius, about 495, for the first time insulted the Greeks and their twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon, by affirming that every Council must be confirmed and every Church judged by Rome, but she can be judged by none. It was not by canons, as the Council of Chalcedon affirmed, but by the word of Christ, that she received the primacy.1 In this he went beyond all the claims of his predecessors. Thence came the fictions manufactured at Rome after his death,-a letter of the Nicene Council praying Pope Silvester for its confirmation, and the confirmation given by Silvester and a Roman Synod; the declaration in the acts of Xystus III. that the Emperor had convoked the Council by the Pope's authority; the History of Polychronius, exhibiting the Pope, as early as 435, sitting in judgment on an Eastern Patriarch; and lastly, the fabulous history of the Synod held by Silvester, which adopted Gelasius's saying about the divine origin of the Roman primacy, and confirmed the order of precedence of the Churches of Alexandria and Antioch next after Rome, making no mention of Con1 Mansi, viii. 54.