Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/307

 society remained a simple voluntary society with no power of enforcing its own precepts by material sanctions, it should have a common jurisprudence recognised by the conscience of its members and by their general consent. Hence from the days of the apostles there were councils, and canons, and constitutions, and books of discipline; at first the canons, councils, and books of discipline covered all the ground of which I have spoken—doctrine, discipline, and administration, although some councils may be more famous for their decisions on one point than on another. Not perhaps to speak of the Apostolic Constitutions, take the council of Nicea for an example, and remember that we owe to it not only a formulated creed, but directions about consecration of bishops and ordination of priests, and likewise rules for the treatment of the lapsed and apostates, and the prohibition of usury. The legislation of Constantine added a new element which worked itself into all these three; giving a coercive and material force to rules which had been hitherto matters of conscience and consensus; the church was empowered to enforce her doctrinal decisions, her rules of discipline, and her frame of administration; and that so completely that from this date the ecclesiastical administration in Christian countries under the empire became so wedded to the secular administration as to be at times almost indistinguishable from it except on close investigation. From this date then our materials begin to sort themselves: the doctrinal definitions are embodied in the Creeds, and need not be pursued further than the fourth, or, at the outside, the sixth general council: but the canons of discipline and administration are worked into great detail for a long period and in many countries. And here I must take a new point: the coercive authority given to the churches in matters of morals becomes henceforth a branch of jurisdiction, hut there still remain branches of moral discipline which depend on voluntary obedience, in which a powerful offender, or a man who does not choose to confess, may defy law and order. For the latter were invented what may be called manuals of casuistry. the Penitentials; for the jurisdiction proper there remained