Plain Lectures On The Growth Of The Papal Power

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 edition. Excerpt: ...over to the Bishops of Rome, as the chief personages in Italy, the task of guarding that country against the Lombards. The Popes were now masters of some fortresses; K from time to time they repaired the walls of Rome; and the Italians came by degrees to regard the great, powerful, and active bishops as their chiefs, rather than the distant princes who held a nominal sovereignty over them, but were unable to provide for them those benefits of protection and government which subjects expect at the hands of their rulers. In another quarter, the Saracens, by overrunning Syria, had driven out the patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem, who withdrew to reside within the empire; and the Popes endeavoured to take advantage of this by setting up vicars over the Holy Land--a sort of prelude to that establishment of the Latin Church in room of the Greek which took place in those countries during the time of the Crusades. But this system of vicars did not come to much, although it shows that Gregory's successors were animated by a spirit of aggression very unlike the respect which he had shown for the rights and claims of other patriarchs. About the same time with the religion of Mahomet began the Monothelistic controversy, occasioned by the opinion that the Saviour had only a single will; that there was no will belonging to His human nature; whereas the doctrine of the Church, as defined by the Sixth General Council, in 681, is that "in Him there are two natural wills and two natural operations, while yet the human follows the Divine and Almighty will, not resisting or opposing it, but rather being subject to it." This controversy arose in the East; indeed the first occasion of it was given by a letter which a patriarch of Constantinople is...