Page:History of Freedom.djvu/365

 DÖLLINGER ON THE TEMPORAL POWER 321

to argue that there is no earthly office divinely appointed for the government of the Church, and that nobody has received the mission to conduct ecclesiastical affairs, and to preserve the divine order in religion. The several local churches may have an earthly ruler, but for the whole Church of Christ there is no such protection. Christ, therefore, is the only head they acknowledge, and they must necessarily declare separation, isolation, and discord to be a principle and the normal condition of His Church. The rejection of the primacy of St. Peter has driven men on to a slippery course, where all the steps are downwards. The Greeks first proclaimed that they recognised no Pope, that each patriarch ruled over a portion of the Church. The Anglicans rejected both Pope and patriarch, and admitted no ecclesiastical order higher than the Episcopate. Foreign Protestanism refused to tolerate even bishops, or any authority but the parish clergy under the supremacy of the ruler of the land. Then the sects abolished the local jurisdiction of the parish clergy, and retained only preachers. At length the ministry was rejected as an office altogether, and the Quakers made each individual his own prophet, priest, and doctor. The Papacy, that unique institution, the Crown of the Catholic system, exhibits in its history the constant working of that law which is at the foundation of the life of the Church, the law of continuous organic development It shared the vicissitudes of the Church, and had its part in everything which influences the course and mode of her existence. I n early times it gre\v in silence and obscurity, its features were rarely and imperfectly dis- tinguishable; but even then the Popes exerted their authority in all directions, and while the wisdom with which it was exercised was often questioned, the right itself \vas undisputed. So long as the Roman Empire upheld in its strong framework and kept together the Church, \vhich \vas confined mostly within its bounds, and checked \vith the stern discipline of a uniform la\v the manifestations of national and local divergence, the y