242 



CHURCH HISTORY 



West Indies, Japan, China, and Abyssinia, they 

 have won over thousands to their society and 

 church. While Protestant missions have aimed at 

 saving individual souls, they have used every pos- 

 sible means to effect conversions, and have counted 

 their converts in crowds. Their constant policy has 

 been to ingraft Catholic ideas and usages on tra- 

 ditional prejudices and customs. In India they 

 commended themselves to the great as Christian 

 Brahmins and to the poor as apostles of freedom ; 

 in Japan they sidea with the native nobility 

 against the luxurious priestly class ; in China they 

 made their way to favour through geometry and 

 astrology ; in Spanish South America they took 

 the oppressed natives under their protection, con- 

 tended against slavery, and founded in Paraguay a 

 socialistic theocracy of their own. 



Ever since the Reformation the Roman Catholic 

 Church has been growing more and more ultramon- 

 tane, and this tendency has become most marked 

 in the second half of the 19th century, largely 

 through the increasing influence of the Jesuits. 

 That order, suppressed in Portugal (1759), in 

 France (1764), in Spain and Naples (1767), in 

 Parma (1768), and by the bull ' Dominus ac Re- 

 demptor Noster ' of Clement XIV. in 1773, was 

 restored by Phis VII. in 1814. The golden days of 

 the Jesuits were under Pius IX. (1846-78), who 

 gradually passed entirely under their influence. 

 The Jesuit generals, Father Roothaan (1829-53) 

 and Father Beckx (1853-84), called the 'black 

 popes,' reigned in Rome side by side with the 

 ' white pope,' Pius IX. The dogma of the Imma- 

 culate Conception, which the Jesuits maintained 

 against the Dominicans, was promulgated by the 

 pope in 1854, and ten years later the Encyclica and 

 Syllabus proclaimed to the world that the politi- 

 cal and ecclesiastical theories of Jesuitism were 

 accepted by the holy see. The Jesuits acquired 

 considerable influence in France under Napoleon 

 III., but were expelled in 1880. In Italy, since 

 the downfall of the pope's temporal power ( 1871 ), 

 they are restricted to Rome, and they were excluded 

 from Spain and Mexico ( 1868 ), from Germany ( 1872 ). 



The famous canon expressed by Vincent of Leri- 

 num in 434 : ' Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab 

 omnibus creditum est,' has been the formal principle 

 of Catholicism throughout its history. At first it 

 fell to the bishops in the synods to decide whether 

 any particular doctrine bore these three marks of 

 Catholicity. Sometimes one synod set aside the 

 resolutions of another, and even at the oecumenical 

 councils the whole Church was never represented in 

 the same proportions. The supreme authority of the 

 pope was the only means to secure absolute unity, 

 and neither the defenders of the ' episcopal sys- 

 tem ' at the medieval councils nor the Gallicanism 

 of the French clergy ( set forth in their declaration 

 of 1682) were able to interpose an effective resist- 

 ance. To secure the Papacy from all such opposi- 

 tion in future, the Jesuits persuaded Pope Pius IX. 

 to have it decreed by the Vatican council that only 

 the pope is the infallible head of the Church. 

 Leo XIII. has set his seal upon the work of Pius IX. 

 by restoring, in 1886, to the order of the Jesuits all 

 the privileges it enjoyed before its dissolution. 

 The ancient conflict between emperor and pope, 

 recently revived in the ' Kulturkampf,' ended 

 ( 1883-86) in a victory for the Papacy, by the with- 

 drawal of the ' May Laws ' and the reversal of the 

 German ecclesiastical policy pursued since 1872. 



To-day Roman Catholics are reckoned at from 

 150 to 200 millions ; Greek Catholics at from 75 to 

 85 millions; Protestants at from 100 to 120 millions; 

 while non-Christians number about 1450 millions. 



The primary sources of Church History are : ( 1 ) 

 Original documents, such as the records and decrees 

 of church councils ; the official publications of 



bishops and popes (pastoral epistles, bulls, briefs, 

 decretals, and constitutions); laws relating to 

 ecclesiastical affairs, issued by sovereigns, chan- 

 cellors, or parliaments ; liturgies and service-books, 

 rules of religious orders, symbolical books and 

 confessions of faith, sermons and treatises of 

 theologians and ecclesiastical leaders, journals 

 and reports of eye-witnesses, and letters of con- 

 temporaries eminent in church or state. (2)- 

 Monuments, such as ecclesiastical buildings, pic- 

 tures, sculptures, inscriptions, vessels, &c. Among 

 the secondary sources are calendaries, martyrologies, 

 and necrologies ; traditions, annals, and chronicles 

 all requiring to be sifted by criticism, the farther 

 their date from the period to which they refer. 



The earliest church historian whose writing is 

 extant is Eusebius of Caesarea, who made use of 

 the earlier works of Hegesippus (about 150 A.D.)- 

 and Julius Africanus (3d century). The history 

 of Eusebius, extending to 324 A.D., was continued 

 by Socrates to 439, Sozomen to 423, Theodoret 

 to 428, Philostorgius to 425, Theodore to 527, 

 and Evagrius to 594. The chronicle of Eutychius 

 of Alexandria, written in Arabic, comes down to 

 937. Nicephorus Callisti ( 1330) closes the series of 

 the Greek church historians. The Byzantine civil 

 historians from 500 to 1500 contain valuable 

 materials for church history. The earliest Latin 

 historians of the Church were Rufinus, who wrote 

 a translation of Eusebius, and brought it down 

 to 395 ; Sulpicius Severus, ' the Christian Sallust,' 

 extending to 400 ; Orosius to 416 ; Cassiodorus, 

 who combined Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret 

 into a text-book, the famous Historia Ecclesiastica 

 tripartita, which was the standard down to the 

 Reformation ; and Jerome, whose translation of 

 Eusebius, and continuation to 378, was followed 

 by the chroniclers Prosper of Aquitaine, Idacius, 

 and Marcellinus. Of medieval writers of special 

 histories the most notable are Jornandes (550); 

 Gregory of Tours (540-595), who wrote the 

 chronicles of the French Church in the 5th and 

 6th centuries ; Bede, the father of English churck 

 history, which he narrated to the year 731 ; Paul 

 the deacon ( 760 ), author of a history of the Lom- 

 bards ; and Adam of Bremen, the chief authority 

 on the northern churches from 788 to 1072. The 

 Dialogus Miraculorum of Csesarius of Heisterbach 

 throws great light on his own age (first half of 

 13th century). Besides the Liber Pontificalis, a. 

 history of the popes to 885, which was probably 

 the work of various authors, general church history 

 was written by Anastasius of Rome and HayniO' 

 of Halberstadt in the 9th century, by the Norman 

 monk Ordericus Vitalis, and the cardinals Petrus 

 Pisanus, Pandulf, and Boso in the 12th century ;. 

 in the 13th, by Martinus Polonus, whose Chronica- 

 summorum Pontiftcum Imperatorumque was the 

 most popular history-book of the middle ages ; in 

 the 14th, by Ptolemy of Lucca ; and in the 15th, 

 by Antoninus of Florence, whose work comes down, 

 to 1459. Laurentius Valla's attack on the legend 

 of the ' Donation of Constantine ' appeared in 1440. 



The Reformation, at first more productive in 

 exegesis than in history, awoke to the necessity of 

 justifying itself by the Church's development in 

 the past, as well as by the statements of Scrip- 

 ture. After the Peace of Augsburg, a society of 

 Lutheran theologians at Magdeburg, headed by 

 Matthius Flacius ( Illyricus ), compiled a comprehen- 

 sive history, arranged in 13 folio vols., each em- 

 bracing a century. The Magdeburg Centuries wa& 

 answered by the Annals of Csesar Baronius, in 

 12 folio vols., which was followed by the histories 

 of Hottinger, Spanheim, and Samuel and Jaques. 

 Basnage in the Reformed Church, and of Pagi, a 

 Franciscan monk, who also criticised Baronius. 

 The history of the Council of Trent was written 



