Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/118

128 became the great seminary where they should learn to become a sacerdotal people, a people to the honor of God. She became the mother, who fosteringly clasped all people to her bosom. She had a right to do so, because the treasures of the highest life were in her possession; she must do it, even with authority and severity, because the age was half-savage, and the people and the princes violent and given to war. But, during the struggle to overcome and reduce the world to order, she availed herself of worldly weapons and, becoming herself worldly, forgot her ideal and the significance of the word,—the church. Christ never spoke of the church, but as the kingdom of God on the earth, and made it clear, both by word and deed, what that kingdom is.

The representatives of Christ on earth, popes and bishops, forgot by degrees that the kingdom of God was something different to the structure of ecclesiastical forms, which was merely raised with the intention of preparing or sheltering it. And, as the emperors, seated on the world's throne, became dizzy from their elevation, and fancied themselves to be gods, so, by degrees, the popes, grown dizzy under their cowls, believed themselves to be our Lord's true and only instruments, directly inspired by the Holy Ghost. They even set themselves in God's place on earth, and the Catholic Church, from having been a nursing and wise, though sometimes a severe mother, became a wicked step-mother, who persecuted, banished, and burned without mercy, the children who would not in all things, conform to her bidding, or who ventured to think that she had forgotten the divine, eternal