Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/593

Rh within it as head of the great ecclesiastical empire. The clergy and monks had hitherto been regarded more or less as foreigners—that is, as subjects of the Pope's ecclesiastical empire. Where there was a revolt from Rome the allegiance of these persons to the Pope was annulled, and the civil power claimed as full a sovereignty over them as it had over its lay subjects. Matters relating to marriage and wills still for the most part remained under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but then, as the ecclesiastical courts themselves became national courts and ceased to be Roman or papal, all these matters came under the control of the civil power."

In a spiritual or religious point of view, this severance by the Northern nations of the bonds that formerly united them to the ecclesiastical empire of Rome, meant a transfer of their allegiance from the Church to the Bible. The decrees of Popes and the decisions of Councils were no longer to be regarded as having divine and binding force; the Scriptures alone were to be held as possessing divine and infallible authority, and, theoretically, this rule and standard of faith and practice each one was to interpret for himself.

Thus one-half of Western Christendom was lost to the Roman Church. Yet notwithstanding this loss, notwithstanding the earlier loss of the Eastern part of Christendom (see p. 417), and notwithstanding the fact that its temporal power has been entirely taken from it, the Papacy still remains, as Macaulay says, " not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor." The Pope is to-day the supreme and infallible Plead of a Church that, in the words of the brilliant writer just quoted, " was great and respected before Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."