Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/194

204 “Whence came this enigmatical power into a weak and mortal human being,—this power which never before made its appearance in history, neither will ever again?

“There exists in humanity a deep and primeval, I might say, an elementary longing after unity. When we look attentively into history, we may hear this longing incessantly poured forth, may hear its harmonious and discordant music. This ideal unity of the human race is represented in the Roman Pope; it was the magic key of his power. He has appropriated to himself the organism of humanity, or of the community of the world, as the body and its members appropriate to themselves, the one actuating soul. And further still. The harmony of the general life which he condensed and ruled in the church, he has extended to the whole universe. He has bound up earth with heaven, so that this unity is continued in an immeasurable circle into eternity. He made himself the image of God on earth.”

I add; that this was his sin. It has been and continues to be punished according to the plan of the world's history. The artificial, social erection, the centre of which was the Pope, is now—a ruin;—he himself—a schoolmaster with a great number of disobedient scholars. But that which was eternally true in the dogmas he taught, in the unity he believed in, and by virtue of which the nations bowed before him, that still remains and will explain itself in a higher unity, a higher harmony in a gospel freedom and light.

And if another Gregory the Great should one day