Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII. THE FINAL COLLAPSE OF THE PAPAL SUCCESSION. It has been sufficiently shown, that down to the pontificate of Gregory the Great it had proved impossible for the Popes to establish even so much as legal prescription in the very West itself for their asserted sovereignty over Christendom; while the whole tenor of Church history, specially as regards the General Councils, proves to demonstration that they could never get their possession of a Divine and imprescriptible charter of privilege acknowledged anywhere by entire Churches, persistently as they pressed it from the time of Leo the Great, and often as they seemed on the point of success. But the Papacy which Gregory bequeathed to his successors was a far more powerful factor in Christendom than that which he inherited had been. From the seventh till the fifteenth century Rome was as truly the centre of European policy in the civil, as well as in the religious, sphere as it had been when still the seat of the empire of the Cassars; and the newer theory of its right to govern the nations of the world, or at the least to be looked up to by them as the most august and authoritative spot upon the earth, bade fair to be as influential as that memory of universal rule which went for so much in generating the original sovereign claim of the Pope, less as the alleged successor of St. Peter than as the chief personage in the city acknowledged as conqueror and capital of the world. It is unnecessary to follow the course of the fortunes ot the Roman See henceforth in the almost unbroken fashion required for the earlier stages of this inquiry. It will suffice to state broadly that the authority of the Popes grew steadily greater as it became more concentrated in the West, and as...
