Still, even if we accept the actual Gospels as faithfully recording the words of Christ, a more glaring contrast between the simplicity of Christ’s words and actions and the proud, ambitious Papal Court that is supposed to have grown from them can scarcely be imagined. Every religious teacher, every leader of men, has his favourites or his more active officers; and from the few simple words of Christ, which seem to indicate some such capacity in Peter, the most ardent but most dangerous of his disciples, we are asked to infer the foundation of a vast system that would have aroused the indignation of the Galilean carpenter a thousand times more than the Jewish priestcraft did. One of the most curious aspects of the history of every religion possessed of sacred documents is the marvellous discoveries that are continually being made of hidden senses of the text. Those who reject the Papacy have a still greater difficulty in finding bishops and archbishops in the text of the Gospel; the Presbyterian does violence to the text for his own purposes; even the pure Evangelical is ever finding deeper meanings, and constructing dogmas or systems on one or other text of the Gospel. But Roman theology is a masterpiece of ingenuity in exegetics. From Christ’s simple words, “Whose sins you shall retain they are retained,” the whole hideous system of the Confessional is evolved; from a medicinal remark of James comes the curious dogma of Extreme Unction; from some strong language of the sorely-tempted Paul is pressed Original Sin and Baptismal Regeneration; from the farewell supper of Christ the extraordinary doctrines of the Eucharist and the Mass, with all their complicated ceremonies; and the Immaculate Conception is proved from a stray remark in the Genesis version of an old Babylonian legend. Scripture must not be taken alone, they tell us; tradition embodies revelation with equal authority. But what is tradition? From the heterogeneous contents of the writings of the Fathers what are we to choose as revealed? Well, the Pope is infallible; but it turns out that even he has no inner revelation or positive assistance in the matter; he must be convinced from Scripture and tradition like ourselves, and it is extremely difficult sometimes to see the connection between his dogmatic conclusions and the scriptural data he alleges for them.
If it is hopeless to trace the origin of the hierarchy of the Church of Rome in Scripture, it is certainly not difficult to understand it as a purely human institution. Follow its growth in ecclesiastical history: it is as natural as the growth of any civil government. The extension of the Church and the growing exercise of reason on its tenets developed the already separated caste of priesthood into a powerful administrative and magisterial body. Its history is marked throughout by human passion—ambition, intrigue, usurpation, and even coarser vices. Pope after pope has assumed the tiara from mere ambition, and
