Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

There are three parts, so to say, of adoption which are further distinctly contained in the Divine Sacrifice. The first of these is the derivation of spiritual life from the Person of Christ; for here especially is fulfilled what He said of Himself, “The Bread of God is that which cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world.” In the act of sacrifice He becomes also the food of His brethren: here He was from the beginning daily; here He is to the end. This is the inmost junction of life with belief, so that the faithful people by its presence attesting belief in the Divine Unity and Trinity, in the Incarnation of the Son of God, in His redemption of the race, in the adoption of man by God, at the same time become partakers of the life which these doctrines declare. The perfection of the divine institution consists in this absolute blending of belief, worship, and practice. The unbelieving Jews strove among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?” Our Lord answered by establishing a rite on which His Church lives through all the ages, in which He bestows Himself on each believer individually, being as much his as if He was for him alone. Space and time disappear before the Author of life in the act of communicating Himself, and He is the sole Teacher of His Church, in that He alone feeds it with the Divine Food, which is Himself.

But this food is the source of sanctification: as that by which man fell away from God was sin, so that which unites him to God is holiness. It is from the Incarnate Son in the act of sacrifice that this holiness emanates to His people; and the gift of His flesh, the banquet at the sacrifice, dispenses it. No teaching of words could so identify the Person of our Lord with the source of holiness as the bodily act of receiving His flesh. It is the command, “Be ye holy, for I am holy,” expressed in action. This is the perennial fountain of holiness which wells forth in the midst of His Church; and beside it, as subordinate and preparatory, is the perpetual tribunal of penance: one and the other given to meet and efface the perpetual frailties of daily life, first to restore the fallen, and then to join them afresh with the source of holiness.

There is yet another gift consequent upon adoption, which completes as it were the two we have just mentioned. It is that the flesh of our Lord given in the Blessed Sacrament is the pledge and earnest of eternal life. This He has Himself said in the words, “He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” And St. Thomas, in the beautiful conclusion to the grandest of hymns, has summed up numberless comments of the Fathers on these divine words, where he sings —

“Bone Pastor, panis vere,
Jesu nostri miserere,
Tu nos pasce, nos tuere;
Tu nos bona fac videre
In terra viventium:
Tu qui cuncta scis et vales,
Qui nos pascis hic mortales,
Tuos ibi commensales
Cohæredes et sodales
Fac sanctorum civium.”

The Fathers[106 - Franzelin, De SS. Eucharistiæ Sacramento, p. 111.] with great zeal insist that the physical Body of Christ in the Eucharist, being one in all the receivers, is a principle of unity of Christ’s mystical Body. St. Augustine especially dwells upon this effect in Christ’s mystical Body, but the effect presupposes the cause, which is that physical Body of Christ received by each.

Take an instance of the first statement, that is, the presence of Christ’s physical Body, in St. Chrysostom. Commenting on the words, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?” he says, “Let us learn what is the marvel of the mysteries, what they are, why they were given, and what is their use. We become, He says, one body, members of His flesh and of His blood. Let those who are initiated follow my words. That we may be so, then, not only by charity but in actual fact, let us be fused with that Flesh. For it is done by that Food which He bestowed on us in the desire to show us the longing which He had for us. He mingled Himself with us, and made His Body one mass with us, that we may be one thing, as a body united with its head. This is what Christ did for us, to draw us to closer friendship and to show His own longing for us; He granted those who desired Him, not only to see Him but to touch Him, and to eat Him, and to fix their teeth in His Flesh, to be joined in His embrace, and to satisfy all their longing. Parents often give their children to be nourished by others; I not so, but I nourish you with My own Flesh; I set Myself before you. I wished to become your Brother, I have partaken of flesh and blood for you; again, I give to you that Flesh and Blood whereby I became your kinsman.”[107 - S. Chrys. Hom. in Joan, 46, c. 3, tom. viii. 272.]

Of the effect proceeding from this cause St. Augustine says, “The whole redeemed city, the assembly and society of the saints, is offered as an universal sacrifice to God by the Great Priest, who also offered Himself in His Passion for us, according to the form of a servant, that we might be the Body of so great a Head. For this form He offered, in this He was offered, because according to this He is Mediator, in this Priest, in this Sacrifice. When, therefore, the Apostle exhorted us to present our bodies a living sacrifice: ‘For as in one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same office, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another:’ this is the sacrifice of Christians, many one body in Christ. Which also the Church constantly performs in the sacrifice of the altar, as the faithful know, where it is shown to her that she is offered herself in that which she offers.” As he says a little further on, “Of which thing (that is, Christ being, in the form of a servant, both Priest and Victim) He willed the daily sacrifice of the Church to be the Sacrament; for she being the Body, as He the Head, she learns to offer herself by Him. To this supreme and true sacrifice all false sacrifices have given way.”[108 - St. Aug. De Civitate Dei, lib. 10, c. 6 and 20.]

Thus, then, the question has been answered how our Lord impressed for ever on the world the double act of His Priesthood, the assumption of human nature to His Divine Person, and the offering of that assumed nature in sacrifice. For whereas He made the bloody sacrifice once for all upon the altar of the cross, He ordered the daily sacrifice of His Church to represent it for ever in the name of His people to God the Father, wherein He immolates Himself without blood. “What then?” says St. Chrysostom; “do we not offer every day? We do offer, but making a commemoration of His death. And this is one sacrifice, and not many. How is it one and not many? Because that was once offered which entered into the Holy of holies. This is the figure of that. For we offer ever the same; not to-day one lamb and another to-morrow, but always the same. So that the sacrifice is one. Otherwise, according to the objection, ‘Since it is offered many times,’ are there many Christs? By no means, but there is one Christ everywhere, complete here and complete there, one Body. As then He, being offered in many places, is one Body and not many bodies, so there is one sacrifice. Our High-Priest is He who offered the sacrifice that cleanses us; that same we offer now which was then offered, which is inconsumable. This is done for a commemoration of that which was then done; for, ‘Do this,’ He says, ‘in commemoration of Me.’ We offer not another sacrifice as the (Jewish) high-priest, but ever the same; or rather we make a commemoration of the sacrifice.”[109 - S. Chrys. 16 Hom. on the Hebrews, tom. xii. p. 168.]

The one perpetual sacrifice thus instituted in His Church, to be offered from His first to His second coming, carrying in it indissolubly the great truths of His religion, the life and the unity of His people, this is the instrument which He used to impress His High-Priesthood on the world; and He set up the one episcopate as the bearer of the one priesthood. The government of His Church is not an external magistracy, but rests on the mass of worship and doctrine intimately blent together, so that the outward regimen and the inward belief form an indissoluble unity in the daily practice.

In this unity we must likewise comprehend the jurisdiction expressed in planting and maintaining belief and worship throughout the world. For our Lord is a King, and came to establish a kingdom; not several kingdoms, nor a confederation of states, but one kingdom, concerning which His people confesses for ever, in the words of the angel who announced His coming, “Of His kingdom there shall be no end.” But without jurisdiction, that is, without the power which says to one man, “Go here,” and to another, “Go there,” the first foundation of a kingdom was as impossible as was its continuance and permanence.

All the records of that ancient Church which fought a victorious battle with the Roman Empire and received a civil enfranchisement from the Emperor Constantine tend to show that the principle of hierarchical order was very strong in it, and was most severely maintained. It could not be well stated in a more absolute form than in the letter of Pope St. Clement above quoted. But the Church which met in representation at the great Nicene Council offers a perfect picture of what that order was, working itself out in absolute independence of the Civil Power through three centuries from the Day of Pentecost.

In the diocese the bishop’s jurisdiction was complete. No priest was independent in the exercise of his functions. Thus jurisdiction in the interior forum entered into the daily dispensing of the sacraments. For a long time the Holy Eucharist was dispensed by the bishop from one altar, and sent from him to the sick. He was the imposer of penance, and when, as churches and priests multiplied, the system of parishes and parish priests arose, they executed all their functions in complete subordination to the bishop, whose title in those early times was taken from the rite on which all his power rested, when he is called pre-eminently Sacerdos, i. e., the sacrificing priest. Within the limits of the diocese there can be no sort of doubt that the idea of jurisdiction was perfectly realised in practice.

But did it stop with the diocese? Was the bishop independent in the exercise of his powers? In the first place, he exercised them all within a certain district. He had no power to encroach upon the district of a neighbouring bishop, nor to execute therein functions which were perfectly lawful and usual in his own. It is plain that had he possessed any such power, the whole system established would not have made one kingdom of Christ, but would have been a congeries of similar governments, not tied together but agitated by perpetual rivalries. Nothing could be more unlike the actual system of government as disclosed by the bearing of the Church of Rome to that of Corinth in the letter of St. Clement, or to that orderly division into provinces which is seen in its full development at the Nicene Council. We may conclude that the tie which held the bishops together was at least as strict and as defined as that which formed the unity of the particular diocese.

We now behold that marvellous spiritual fabric of which St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine, at the head of the Fathers of the fourth century, spoke with such affection, acknowledging that its existence was to them an absolute proof of the Godhead of its Founder. It was not its material extension alone, but its inmost nature and character which moved them thus. It was the evolution of the one indivisible power in its threefold direction of Priesthood, Teaching, and Jurisdiction. It was that the one episcopate tied together in a hierarchy of several thousand bishops was but the outward regimen of an inward polity in which the One Sacrifice is offered, and the one Body of Christ communicated by the work of the one Priesthood, which lives upon and dispenses one doctrine, proclaiming it from age to age to the whole earth.

Thus the words of our Lord, spoken immediately after He had instituted the priesthood according to the order of Melchisedec, committing to it the sacrifice of His Body and Blood, were marvellously accomplished. “I am the true Vine, and My Father is the husbandman. – Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the Vine, you the branches: he that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.” The human nature which He had taken had sent forth, in virtue of the Person who took it, the triple power bestowed upon it: His priesthood, His teaching, and His rule had occupied the earth. All the nations composing the Roman Empire had brought in their first-fruits to form clusters of the mystical Vine. They had made the triple offering of the Eastern kings from the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Royal Infant; to the King they had given their gold, for His sake and after His likeness becoming poor; to the God their frankincense, worshipping Him at the altar of His love; to the Victim their myrrh, presenting to Him their bodies as a sacrifice, in repetition of His martyrdom. It was the very scoff of the heathen philosopher and magistrate that any one could think to reduce to one worship the various rites of the Empire, a conglomeration of European, Asiatic, and African superstitions. Out of that seemingly hopeless diversity, that endless antagonism, He had constructed a divine unity, a table at which the children of Scipio knelt side by side with the vilest slave, at which many an Aspasia became a penitent, and a Boniface sent back as holy relics to his mistress, Aglae, the body in which he had sinned with her. The vine of the synagogue, planted of old with the choicest care, and protected from the inroads of wild beasts in the security of a single nation of brethren, had brought forth but wild grapes, and therefore it had been plucked up; its hedge had been broken down and its tower ruined. Instead of it, the Vine of His Body had grown abundantly, and from its single root, to use Tertullian’s application of the parable, suckers had been carried everywhere, and the harvest of its vintage rendered the earth fruitful; the hills and the valleys of many vast regions were covered with its grapes. But this itself was but the beginning of a vaster growth in the future, the first realisation of an ever-expanding kingdom. Only it was a complete specimen of all that should be. This generation of the Christian people from the person of Christ was the one miracle which St. Chrysostom thought no heathen could deny.

The Eucharistic Sacrifice is the centre and instrument of all this work; the other Sacraments lead up to it or attend upon it. That which is most intimate in man, the forming his soul after a divine type, and the sanctifying it with all its affections; that which is most intellectual, the doctrine of God made man, surpassing all knowledge in its development as in its conception; that government which is necessary to the well-being of every kingdom; that worship which is most exalting, the worship of the Infinite One, the source, example, and giver of personality, which is the last and highest gift of the Creator to the rational creature, – all these were here joined together by the simple act of God when He perpetuated in a visible rite the double power of His High-priesthood, the assumption of our nature, and the dying for our sins, and brought out of it the generation of His people, wherein the resurrection of one Man to bodily life became the resurrection of a countless host to spiritual brotherhood, and created the Family of the Incarnate God.

I have been exhibiting the institution of the most blessed Eucharist, and the planting of it throughout the Church in the three centuries which ended with the Nicene Council. Throughout these it was the life of the Church; all the marvels of faith, endurance, zeal, and charity spring from it; the works of the Saviour were hidden in it. But since then fifteen centuries and a half have elapsed, and the Church which filled the Roman Empire has dilated itself over the whole earth. In all the countries which it has thus occupied, in all the races of which it has converted the first-fruits, the same blessed Eucharist – that divine banquet of the Flesh and Blood of the Word made man – has continued to be the life of the Church. Upon it the race of martyrs, saints, doctors, and virgins have been nurtured, and the power which in each one of them was supernatural has to be also estimated in its aggregate. Among all the proofs of the Godhead of the Son of Man, that Divine Food which He foretold to the multitude satisfied with the miraculous multiplication of the natural food on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and which He first gave to His Apostles in the upper chamber on the eve of His Passion, is in its results the most transcendent. It is enough by itself to quench all the doubts of unbelief, to kindle all the fires of an endless charity. It is the Church’s unparalleled possession, of which no false religion possesses even a shadow; her testimony, which grows not old; her youth, which never fails. Unnumbered myriads of people of all times and countries have been supported by it through the desert of this world, and been led in its strength to the Paradise in which the Son of God in the glory of His humanity communicates Himself face to face to those whom He has redeemed, and imparts to them the vision of God in His Unity and His Trinity.

But if this Church, possessing this Divine Sacrifice and Sacrament, was a wonder to minds such as St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine in their day of the fifth century, what ought it to be to us at the end of the nineteenth? The Roman Empire broke up, and the tribes of the North dashed into fragments its unrivalled organisation, and destroyed that peace under which the fairest regions of the earth, washed by the inland sea, dwelt for centuries, rich in all the arts of commerce, in all the security of civilisation. The Blessed Eucharist survived this convulsion; far more, it restored this ruin. By founding religious houses through the whole extent of the countries occupied by the German tribes, whose indwellers, in virtue of it, lived the common life under the safeguard of the three great vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it produced a Christian France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and Poland out of the torn and bleeding members of the Empire. This was its work in the Western half of the Roman broken statue.

In the Eastern the savage power of the Mahometan Califate arose, denying at once the redemption of Christ, and the sacrifice in which He had enshrined that redemption, and the divine banquet which ensued upon it. Thousands of Christian Sees fell not before its persuasive power, but its ruthless sword of conquest. The Mahometan Califate has for hundreds of years trampled on the fairest regions of the earth, and turned the Roman peace into a desolation. At length it trembles for its existence; the divine Eucharist remains unimpaired in strength, and is ready to enter into the desolated territory and repeat its work of restoration, to turn the foulness of the Mahometan harem into the sanctity of the Christian home.

Again, when iniquity abounded and the love of many had waxed cold, there arose a defection in the West as terrible as that of the East 900 years before, and it was marked by special enmity to the Blessed Eucharist. It cast down and trampled under the feet of those who approached the desecrated churches the very altars at which for a thousand years the generations of a Christian people had worshipped. It denied the great mystery which was the heart of the doctrine; it enrolled the denial in the coronation oath of its sovereigns; it abolished the belief which had soothed all sorrows as it had made all saints. But that defection has broken into innumerable wavelets against the Rock of the Christian Church, upon which rises, as of old, the impregnable citadel of the faith – the faith which dispenses, as in the first ages, to the children of all the races of the earth that sacred Body and Blood, in virtue of which now, as in the upper chamber, the Word of God declares, “I am the Vine; ye are the branches: he that abideth in Me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”

Can there be any proof of the Godhead of the Word made flesh to compare with that which has been the life of the living and the hope of the dying to sixty generations of men for eighteen centuries and a half? “For this is the chalice in My Blood of the new and everlasting testament, the mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins.”

CHAPTER VI

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE

The Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her Organic Growth

The foundation-stone of the Church of God is the Person of our Lord, a truth embodied with marvellous force and terseness of expression in that famous symbol of the Catacombs, the Sacred Fish, denoting by its initial letters the name of our Lord as Man, His office as Messiah, the two natures in the one Divine Person, the salvation which is their result, Jesus, the Christ, Son of God, Saviour.[110 - Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς, Θεοῦ Υιὸς, Σωτήρ = Ἰχθύς.] As in that Divine Person the Godhead and Manhood are joined in that special union which constitutes personality, as He who governs and He who teaches, He who offers sacrifice and He who is sacrificed, is one and the same Saviour throughout, so He continues to be in the life of His Body the Church. And this is very manifest during the first stadium of the Church’s course, stretching from the Day of Pentecost to the decree of Constantino, which granted to it civil recognition as a lawful religion; for government and doctrine, like warp and woof, form the robe woven from the top throughout in which our Lord as High Priest appears to the world. According to the prophecy, “He builds a temple to the Lord, and bears the glory, and is a Priest upon His throne.”[111 - Zach. vi. 13.] His kingdom resides in this unity. It is one flock, and the pastures in which His people feed upon the truth make the domain of the government by which the kingdom is ruled, and to feed the flock is to rule it. It is the one temple in which the sacrifice offered is the Lord Himself, while in the sacrifice the people is fed and grows, and is reciprocally offered to the Lord.

In all this the Church continues the mystery of her Lord’s life, the Divine Incarnation, the suffering of the Nature assumed, the resurrection which follows. We have, then, to deal with one particular but complex fact, the outcome of this whole period in the government, teaching, and worship of the Church inseparably blent together, as borne into and upon the world by its hierarchy, as enacted in its liturgy, as contained in its sacramental life, as exhibited in the living Christian people, the invincible race,[112 - τό ἄμαχον γένος, St. Chrys., above quoted.] which grew up in those centuries without interference by the State. It is a period during which the State’s legal position of undeviating hostility served as the guardian of the new spiritual kingdom’s independence.

That independence resided in a threefold sanctuary, which is one and the same, being the House, the Temple, the Tribunal which the Blessed Trinity, the source and model of the Church, had constructed for Himself in the hearts of His people. First there is the sanctuary of worship, in which Christ is Priest, the starting-point of the whole economy; secondly, the sanctuary of teaching, from which as Prophet He dispenses all that doctrine wherewith He is charged; thirdly, there is the sanctuary of government, whereof jurisdiction is a necessary and inalienable part, and in this He rules as King the distribution of all powers belonging to His kingdom.

We have to consider how, in the first three centuries, all this was actually carried out; and we shall best do so by placing ourselves at the remarkable point of history, the convocation of the Nicene Council in the year 325, and by summing up the result of the long conflict which preceded that event, as regards these three particulars.

The Nicene Council was convoked to terminate the question which Arius had raised as to the Godhead of our Lord. It was the remedy of the Emperor Constantine for the malady which had broken out in the Church. He had just become, by the death of Licinius, sole ruler of the Roman world. Though not yet a Christian by the reception of baptism, he had conceived the highest veneration for the Christian Church. There can be no doubt that he trusted, by means of its spiritual unity, to weld together on a firmer basis the shaken fabric of imperial Rome. Thus he looked with much sorrow and no little perplexity upon the rise of a heresy in the important Church of Alexandria; and when its bishop, in spite of his great authority, as the head of the second Church in the world, which by a most powerful organisation governed the three secular provinces of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis, was unable to expel the mischief, he urged the convocation of a General Council. He convoked it, so far as a secular prince could do so, by giving all the assistance which the public authority could render in a State politically absolute; for he not only invited the bishops to attend, but ordered that they should travel free of cost at the public expense. Pope Sylvester, on his side, assented; he sent his legates to the Council, where they alone represented the whole West, and so by his assent and by the mission of his legates gave the Council its œcumenical character.

By this act the Emperor, who, it should be borne in mind, was still the Pontifex Maximus of heathen worship, and the official head of the old State religion, recognised the Church of Christ as a spiritual kingdom, possessing a doctrine of which it was the sole judge and bearer; recognised in its bishops the representatives of the various powers placed by Christ, its Founder, therein, as those who bore throughout his empire a priesthood, and exercised a spiritual rule and jurisdiction, and preached a doctrine all bound together in one whole; who, moreover, in virtue of this triple character, which came upon them from above, by the institution of Christ and through the medium of consecration, which is to say, by the force of a divine unction, and not by any human authority, represented a people which likewise was spread everywhere, while it was one likewise in virtue of a divine consecration, baptism in the threefold name of God.

Such a recognition is an enormous fact, which reason and imagination flag in their effort to realise. Two hundred and ninety-six years before, a Man had died upon a cross the death of a Roman slave, and the evening before His death He had ordered His disciples to commemorate that death for ever in a certain rite which should constitute the central worship of His people. This Man died by the edict of a Roman procurator, which had been extorted from him by the threats of the people and their rulers over whom he maintained Rome’s supremacy. This Man also died with the record over His head that the cause for which He died was, the assumption of kingship over a people who refused Him for their King, and chose in preference the Roman Emperor. His death was reported to the Emperor of that day; but we know not whether he took any note of the death of one recorded as a pretender to a provincial throne, or of a death enacted at the command of a very subordinate officer of his empire, a mere procurator under the Proconsul of Syria. The twelve disciples of this Man, made up of fishermen, a publican, and afterwards a tent-maker, went forth, carrying with them this rite, which they delivered to other men throughout the empire. Upon this rite grew up a whole fabric of doctrine and worship; rulers who propagated the doctrine and celebrated the rite, and a people which sprung out of both. The Roman emperors, at first superciliously disregarding the seed which had been so silently dropped in their cities, presently turned to persecute this people and their rulers; during ten generations having always persistently discountenanced them, they imprisoned, tormented, or executed a certain portion. They also destroyed the seat and worship of the people who had rejected this Man as their King, and had chosen the Emperor instead. And now, in rather less than three centuries, the Emperor of Rome, the successor of Tiberius, acknowledged this crucified Man for what He declared Himself to be: acknowledged His kingdom; acknowledged as princes in all lands the missionaries whom He had sent forth; acknowledged as one people, bound together in sacraments, those who had believed in His word, or in the word of others derived from Him; acknowledged, moreover, as a living authority, as judges of what was or was not the true doctrine as so derived from Him, men whose sole claim was the consecration received from that Man on the eve of His public execution, and transmitted by the imposition of hands to their successors; acknowledged the rite of sacrifice which He had created by His word in the offering of His Body as the most august, the most tremendous, the most precious thing existing in the world.

Moreover, in the convocation of the Council, the Emperor acknowledged of his own accord the solidarity of the Christian episcopate. St. Cyprian did not express it more plainly in his famous aphorism, “The episcopate is one of which a part is held by each without division of the whole,” than the Emperor in supposing that a point of doctrine on the maintenance of which the whole fabric of revelation rested, since it concerned the Person of the Founder, could be resolved by the common consent of its episcopate. For the decision to be come to would bind the whole as one Body; and herein lay another imperial attestation of Christ’s kingdom. The Emperor of Rome looked upon the Church and treated it, not as a beehive of separable cells, but as a Body the force and life of which lay in its oneness; and in causing a single heresy to be thus judged, he was condemning the principle of every heresy which should at any time arise.

All this and much more is comprehended in that act of the Emperor Constantino which sanctioned the convocation of the Nicene Council. It was not a Christianity split up into sects, but the solid unity of the Catholic Church in doctrine, discipline, worship, and constitution, which the Emperor looked to for a support to the tottering political fabric of the State, and as a new bond to its maintenance.[113 - See Hagemann, Die römische Kirche, p. 558.]

But yet again. The Senate of Rome had been in the day of Rome’s freedom a great power. At first representing the authority of a free people who had in course of time established a vast rule, it was a name of dignity and glory on the earth. Next, as the official bestower or ratifier of imperial authority, as even yet representing the Roman people, as collecting in its bosom those who had borne high offices, ruled provinces, gained victories, were the instruments by which the Pax Romana kept the earth quiet and obedient, the Senate was still an august body. But now appeared before the world another council, consisting of men each of whom represented in his person a spiritual community while he carried a divine power. These men were not imposers of taxes or rulers of armies, not enactors of laws for human contracts, but men whose rule was over souls, whose word was divine, who announced not to a particular race but to all races of the earth one God, one Christ, one faith; a rule the centre of which was an act of transcendent worship, and the scope and object holiness. And this council, while it met in the empire of an absolute sovereign, who raised up and put down whom he pleased, the lives and fortunes of whose subjects were entirely in his hands, alone possessed freedom, the freedom to worship what they believed, to obey the commands of their conscience as Christians, to acknowledge a power stretching over the whole range of their most secret life, and in nowise derived from the Roman Emperor nor dependent on him. This power Constantine acknowledged in causing the Council to be convoked; and by so doing he pointed out the Council of the Christian Church as that from the imitation of which every future parliament should spring to construct civil liberty under Christian sovereigns. Assuredly the Council, as a deliberative body, possessed a dignity far transcending that of the Senate whether of free or of imperial Rome.

This is the meaning of the Nicene Council in the great arbitrament between the Spiritual and the Civil Powers, or, in Catholic language, between the Priesthood and the Empire. And it is a meaning put upon it by the Roman Emperor himself. Viewed on this side, the Council is a summary of the whole preceding history from the Day of Pentecost to its convocation, the records of which are as scant as the facts are precious. What know we as to the number of the martyrs and confessors in that interval? What infinitesimal portion of individual lives and sufferings then undergone has been preserved for our love and imitation? Among the Fathers present at the Council there was one, Paphnutius, who had lost an eye in the preceding persecution. We are told the Emperor would kiss the empty socket in token of his veneration. That act symbolised his whole demeanour to the Church for whose faith Paphnutius had suffered. It likewise expressed the witness which the fact of the Council convoked and acknowledged by the Roman Emperor gave to all those sufferings the innumerable incidents of which went to construct that victory of patience over force whereby the Christian kingdom was established in its first field of combat. This was the conflict of the natural society of man, as it existed in the grandest empire of Gentilism, with the supernatural society founded in Christ.

Thus the convocation of the Nicene Council is the definitive declaration by the Roman Empire through the mouth of its chief that it recognised a kingdom of Christ upon earth.

To illustrate the spiritual government of this kingdom, as it had grown up in the three centuries which intervene between the Day of Pentecost and the convocation of the Council, let us touch upon five points: the first shall be the ordered gradation of the hierarchy; the second, the holding of provincial councils; the third, the hearing and the judging of causes; the fourth, the election of the Church’s ministers; the fifth, the administration of her temporal goods.[114 - Bianchi, vol. iii. pp. 120, 121.]

1. As to the first, the Sixth Canon of the Council ordered that the ancient custom should continue in force, according to which the great mother Churches of Alexandria and Antioch possessed jurisdiction over the whole civil diocese, the one of Egypt and the other of the East, in like manner as the Church of Rome possessed a similar jurisdiction in the West. The ground upon which the Council rests this canon is much to be observed; it does not institute this jurisdiction, but orders it be continued because it was the ancient custom. Now as there had been no other Council prior to that of Nicæa, in which this power of jurisdiction over the Metropolitans in the civil dioceses of Egypt and of the East had been granted to the Bishops of Alexandria and of Antioch, the origin of this ancient custom must be referred to apostolic institution, according to St. Augustine’s rule, “That which is held by the whole Church, which has not been ordered by councils, but always been kept, we are most right in believing to have been handed down by none other than apostolic authority.”[115 - Aug. l. iv. De Bapt. c. Donat. cap. ult. (B. 120 note).] Pope Innocent I.,[116 - Innocent. Ep. 18, c. 1.] writing to Alexander Bishop of Antioch, about eighty years after the Council, recognises his jurisdiction over not only one province, but over the whole assemblage of provinces which made up the civil jurisdiction of the Prefect of the East, not so much on the ground of the city’s civil dignity as because it had been the first See of the chief of the Apostles. St. Gregory the Great[117 - S. Greg. I., 1. 6, Ep. 39; 8, Ep. 35.] repeatedly in his letters speaks of the See of the chief of the Apostles as being the See of one in three places, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.

That which the Sixth Canon of the Council witnesses, therefore, is the original jurisdiction of the two great mother Sees of Alexandria and Antioch over their daughter churches, which it corroborates by referring to the norm, as it were, supplied by the still greater See of Rome. Though these Sees were not called at the time of the Nicene Council patriarchal, a name which arose in the fifth century; yet the thing itself, and the institution which it denoted, existed from the beginning. The system of mother and daughter churches is shown in the highest degree in these three great Sees, in two of which St. Peter himself sat, while he founded the third by his disciple Mark. It is, in fact, a derivation from St. Peter’s Primacy, and the constituent principle of the hierarchy in its intermediate gradation of ranks. As the institution of bishops throughout the world is a derivation of apostolic authority, so likewise is the repartition of jurisdiction among them. One and the same principle – power coming from above – made the whole hierarchy, whether in the bishop over the simple diocese, or in the metropolitan over a single province, or in the primate over several metropolitans, or in the central See of St. Peter, the Head of all. The three former of these gradations, the Sixth Canon of the Council recognised as of immemorial existence. With regard to the fourth, when the Roman legate at the Council of Chalcedon cited this canon, he cited it with the heading: “The Roman church always had the Primacy.” And although the Greek copies of the Council did not bear this heading, the Greek bishops there did not dispute the fact which it stated. And it must be noted that this heading did not assert the Primacy of Rome to be given by the Council, but that it had always existed; nor was any fact more constantly repeated by Pope after Pope when addressing the Church in her bishops, than this, that his authority, whatever it was, was the gift of Christ to St. Peter, and not bestowed by any Council: and so of divine, not apostolical, institution.

It would appear that the Apostles,[118 - Bianchi, 3, 137.] in carrying out the divine instructions of their Master for the establishment of His kingdom, followed His own example. Inasmuch as He had given them a head, they would appoint inferior heads in the Church who should hold an order among themselves in its administration, and all refer to the Superior. In doing this they had regard to the civil disposition of the empire, using it as a model upon which they formed the exterior polity of the Church. For just as in the civil and temporal government of each province there was a mother city, the prefect of which administered the whole province, ruling under the Prince over the subordinate governors, to whom matters of more grave importance were referred, so the Apostles and their disciples after them instituted in the chief cities bishops to whom they gave all the powers of metropolitans before the name came into use, in order that ecclesiastical regulations of the greatest moment might be treated before them in union with the bishops of their respective provinces.[119 - Bianchi, 3, 136.] Thus St. Paul, finding Ephesus the metropolis of Proconsular Asia, placed Timotheus to be bishop there, giving him at the same time jurisdiction over the bishops of that province, who should be drawn as it were out of the womb of the parent See; and in his first letter we find instructions as to the quality of the bishops whom he should select. In the 19th chapter of the Acts, we are told that St. Paul had drawn a great number of disciples to him, not only at Ephesus, but in nearly every part of Asia, that is, the proconsular province of that name. In the 17th chapter, at a later date, he summoned at Miletus the bishops of Ephesus and its province to meet him, calling them “all you among whom I have passed preaching the kingdom of God,” which words denote that he was speaking, not to the priests of one city, but to the bishops of a province, in which “the Holy Ghost had set them as bishops to rule over the church of God.” St. Irenæus also notes that they were bishops and elders from Ephesus and the adjoining cities. St. John recognises these bishops in the seven letters which he is ordered to communicate to the angels of the churches in the Apocalypse. At the head of these is the Angel of the church of Ephesus as metropolis. So, again, the Apostle Paul set Titus as metropolitan over the whole of Crete, expressly ordering him to establish bishops in every city, and describing what their character should be. His letters to Corinth and to Thessalonica, as well as to Ephesus, are letters to cities each of which was a metropolis. Thus the 34th of the Canons, called apostolical, runs: “It behoves the bishops of each nation to recognise him, who is the first among them, and to esteem him as their head, and to do nothing of importance without his sentence; but let each of them do only what concerns his own diocese and the places belonging to it, and not that without the agreement of all.”[120 - The Council of Antioch, in the year 341, almost repeats this canon, and lays it down as of universal application.] Here is seen the discipline of the ancient church, beyond a doubt derived from the Apostles, as to the Metropolitan’s superintendence over the bishops of every province.

Thus the distribution[121 - Bianchi, 3, 132.] of episcopal jurisdiction began with the beginning, and was the outflow of one principle as stable as it was simple. The structure of the diocese, that of the province, that of the patriarchate, that of the whole Church, was identical throughout. It was a series of concentric circles, at the centre of which was our Lord Himself. In the simple diocese He was seen as walking and teaching with His Apostles on earth; in the province the metropolitan, with his suffragans, repeated the same image; in the patriarchate, the Primate and his metropolitans; while in the See of Peter, our Lord stood by the lake of Galilee delivering with the thrice enjoined question, “Lovest thou Me more than these?” the divine pastoral power over His whole flock. This was the example of the Master Himself, which the Apostles faithfully followed.

From the beginning as to this exterior polity of His Church nothing was undefined, nothing was casual; it was the Body of Christ in its natural action gradually filling the world, by which the Head was gradually drawing man to Himself. It was the perfection of order, and yet the perfection of a divine liberty, which took hold of earthly things, such as the civil disposition of a temporal empire, to exalt it into the structure of a supernatural kingdom.

The great builders of the Middle Ages, in these stupendous cathedrals which the piety of generations raised in honour of the Mother of God, represented the Body of our Lord in that form of the cross on which He purchased our redemption. Every wall, every buttress, every chapel therein converged towards the centre, and lent its several portion of support to the whole. Therein the Church in her unity and solidarity was visibly portrayed, the Head with His members, the Mother of fair love, bearing the Divine Child, with His saints and confessors around Him. Therein the mystery of our salvation, the mystical altar of sacrifice, was ever set forth, in which the Divine Presence, the greater Schechinah of the new law, abode without ceasing. Such an intellectual and moral structure is presented to us in the hierarchy of the Church, graduated according to the system just described, from the first Apostolic Council at Jerusalem to the first General Council at Nicæa. No bishop stood apart from his fellows; no important matter of doctrine or discipline, of government or worship, was terminated by him without common council of his brethren. Every province was ranged round the central shrine, and made part of the one edifice. It was the Body of Christ sculptured, not on stone, but on human hearts, joined together by the wisdom of His saints, and cemented with the blood of His martyrs.

2. The second point[122 - The following paragraph is a translation from Cardinal Hergenröther’s History, vol. i. pp. 196, 197, sec. 228.] to be considered is the development of synodical institutions which kept even pace with the metropolitical hierarchy. As the council of his priests stood beside the bishop, so the provincial synod, the earliest form of councils, stood beside the metropolitan. From the second half of the second century these came into action for the subjugation of doctrinal errors and divisions, such as the Montanist heresy, and the contest as to the proper day for the celebration of Easter. The unity and solidarity of the churches and their bishops found more and more expression in these synods; here the heretical attack was stayed, and the common action of the bishops met the common assault of opponents. In the third century these episcopal meetings took place generally once, and in some countries twice a year. In them the bishops only had a decisive voice; priests and deacons could take part in them, the latter usually standing, while bishops and priests sat; the laity also were not absolutely excluded. The decrees of councils were usually sent by encyclical letters to other bishops. Bishops who could not appear in person had to be represented either by other bishops, as in A.D. 286 at Carthage, or by clerics of their church, as in 314 at Arles. The bishops of higher rank, who presided over the synod, generally metropolitans, were accustomed to subscribe the decrees alone. Accusations against bishops, and wrong acts on their part, were likewise examined at synods, and decided there. We no longer possess acts of the most ancient councils, except those of some African synods under Cyprian, and of that of Antioch in 269; we have 28 disciplinary decrees of the Council of Amyra in 314, and 14 of that of Neocæsarea held at about the same time.

3. Nothing sheds clearer light upon the constitution of the Church, as a perfect society, than her action in the hearing and deciding of causes.[123 - Bianchi, 3, 468; quoting the constitution of Pope John XXII.] The coercive power of the Church descends to her direct from God, and not from man, and was comprised from the beginning in the twofold jurisdiction of the external and the internal forum, the one criminal and the other penitential. The Son of God, who gave this power to the prelates of His Church, appointed them to be judges of men, granting to them full power to absolve and to condemn, and pledging His divine word that their sentences should be confirmed in heaven. The grant is recorded in the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew, as promised to St. Peter in his quality as head of the Church, and in the eighteenth chapter as promised to the Apostles collectively, and in their persons to the bishops who descend from them. By this divine disposition they are the sole and ordinary judges of the Church who belong essentially to the ecclesiastical polity; and therefore St. Cyprian wrote: that “heresies have arisen and schisms sprung up from no other reason than the not yielding obedience to God’s priest; and from not reflecting that there is at a time but one priest in the Church, and one judge at a time in Christ’s place: to whom, if according to the divine commands the whole brotherhood yielded obedience, no one would venture to do anything against the College of Priests;”[124 - Bianchi, 3, 440. The word Sacerdos is here used as the proper appellation of the bishop in his diocese by Cyprian, Ep. 57, according to the usage in the third century, as the word Ecclesia indicates the diocese; the argument being that if complete obedience were rendered to the bishop in the diocese, there would be complete peace in the whole Church ruled by the Collegium of Bishops.] that is the episcopate.