Obrazy na stronie
PDF
ePub

edition of the Councils by Labbé and Cossart, Paris, 1671-2.

There are annexed to this Introduction, an anathema extracted from the Bull in Coena Domini, which is repeated at Rome on Maunday Thursday, every year; the oath taken by the Roman Bishops at their consecration; and the authorized form of reconciling a convert; that every person may be convinced that the decrees here set forth are not dead letters, as some would fain have us believe, but form in part the obligation of the priesthood, and the term of communion in the Roman Church. Indeed, as long as the Bishops of the Roman communion will persist in ascribing to the deuteroNicene Council, and those subsequent to it, the character and authority of General Councils, (in which, according to their theory, it is the Holy Spirit that infallibly guides the decisions,) so long it is impossible that they can release themselves from the snare in which they are taken. They, and the churches under them, must needs receive the decrees of those Councils, however novel, monstrous, and self-contradictory, with the same feelings of implicit reverence with which the rest of the Catholic Church are taught to receive the deep things contained in the Books of the sacred Scriptures. When by God's grace their eyes shall be opened, and they shall be convinced that those cannot be considered as General Councils, the decrees of which both have not been generally received, and are repugnant to those

which have been generally received, nor have a claim to implicit respect as the channels of the communication of the mind of the Holy Ghost, then, and not till then, can we hope that some approach may be made to a restoration of Catholic communion, and to binding up the deadly wound in the Christian Church which has given the enemies of the faith so great occasion to blaspheme. Without entering into the question as to the proper degree of deference to be paid to a General Council, even when acknowledged to be such, it may be of use to bear in mind that our opponents, even according to their own theory, are not tied to the decrees of any council which cannot certainly be proved to deserve the character of a general one; and that if they shall see reason to doubt of this as respects any of the councils which they have commonly supposed to be of that kind, they will then be as much bound to reject them, as they conceive themselves now to be bound to receive them.

They will themselves, for the most part, acknowledge that that which rests on the authority of the Pope alone, ought not to be required of any man as necessary to salvation; yet on what but the authority of the Pope alone does the claim of the synod at Trent rest, to the character of a General Council? Neither the number of Bishops there assembled, nor of the countries which they represented, nor of the countries which received the decrees there passed, could furnish a pretext for such a claim: and the

7

same remark may be made of all the pseudo-General Synods up to the deutero-Nicene inclusive. They have not the essential marks of General Councils, and therefore, even according to the Roman theory, their decrees are not of necessity binding upon any Christian Bishop. But they serve as instruments in the hands of the Bishop of Rome to enslave the previously free churches of Spain, Lombardy, France, and Germany, and other countries, to debase the Apostolic character of the Bishops of those churches, and to promote his sole aggrandisement, at the cost of violating the communion of Catholic Christendom, and impeding the fulfilment of the wish of the Saviour of mankind. This is a slavery from which we must hope that God, in His good time, will deliver the churches of those countries as He has already delivered those of Great Britain and Ireland.

If the grounds for rejecting the authority of the deutero-Nicene Council, and those subsequent to it, be more particularly enquired after, the Reader will find below that in respect of the deutero-Nicene Council of so little authority was it esteemed, that the churches of Lombardy, Germany, Gaul, and Britain, did not hesitate to reject and condemn its decrees, nor did any interruption of communion thereupon ensue between the churches which rejected these decrees, and the Church of Rome which received them. Nor did Pope Adrian, who befriended the Council, venture, in his controversy

[ocr errors]

with Charlemagne respecting it, to urge its authority as a bar to gainsaying. It was not counted by Pope Nicholas, nearly one hundred years afterwards among the General Councils, nor was it inserted at first in the Liber Diurnus: and so late as the sixteenth century so little did the members of the Church of Rome consider themselves bound to respect it, that Jacobus Merlin who published a collection of the General Councils at Paris in 1523, at Cologne 1530, and again at Paris, 1535, excludes it from his list. As regards what they call the eighth General Council, namely, that of Constantinople, 869, it was never received in the East, there being another Council at the same place, 879, to which they ascribed that title: nay, some reserved it for the Council of Florence, where a temporary re-union was patched up between Rome and Constantinople. It was likewise excluded from Jacobus Merlin's collection. At the four Lateran Councils it is not pretended that the Greek Church was represented; they were never received in the East: only one was mentioned at Constance and Basle, but which of the four is not specified; and they were all excluded from the collection of Jacobus Merlin. Of the fourth of these, which is the most important of them, it is further to be observed that, according to Platina, Nauclerus, and Matthew Paris, there were no canons passed at it. It appears that some were read to the Council by Pope Innocent, but not passed. Those which go under the name of the fourth Lateran were

first given to the world with that designation in 1538, by Johannes Cochlæus. To the two Councils of Lyons and that at Vienne the same objection holds, that there were no representatives of the Eastern churches there, except a few compulsory delegates of the Greek Emperor at the second of Lyons: nor were their decrees received in the East, except those of the second of Lyons compulsorily and uncanonically for the short space of eight years; small store is set upon them by the Romans themselves, and they were all excluded from the collection of Jacobus Merlin. To the Councils of Constance and Basle the same objection applies, that the Eastern churches had no voice in those assemblies, nor ever received their decrees, to which the higher objection (in a Roman's estimation) must be added, that they were hardly recognized by the Bishops of Rome, and almost all their decrees rejected by them. At the Council of Florence there were indeed some Grecian representatives, and an agreement was patched up for the moment. But the agreement was obtained by fraud and bribery, and indignantly and contemptuously rejected by the Great Synod at Constantinople. The little conclave of one hundred and fourteen, called the fifth Lateran, is not received by large portions of the Roman communion. And as for the cabal at Trent, which, from the paucity of its numbers, and the narrow limits from which they came, did not venture to speak of itself as representing the Catholic Church, enough has been already said.

[ocr errors]
« PoprzedniaDalej »