these acted as substitutes for those bishops who were too lazy, or too much employed in secular affairs, to do duty themselves. This corruption had arisen to a most enormous height before the Council of Trent. the same time. Baronius says, that this was a new and great evil, which began to stain the church of God, and by which it has been wonderfully afflicted.1 A person is said to hold a church in commendam, when he is empowered to have the care and the profits of it till the appointment of another incumbent. This practice was of great antiquity, in order to prevent churches receiving any detriment during a va The consequence of titular ordination was non-residence, and where curates were employed the principal I could follow his other business. Accordingly the bishops in France, and even the parish priests, substituting some poor priests in their room, passed cancy. But on this pretence livings much of their time at court. And if a bishop could hold one living without residing upon it, it was plain that he might hold two or more, and get them supplied in the same manner. were afterwards granted for a certain time, which was made longer and longer, or till an event which it was known could not take place, and at length for life. This was done by the Titular ordinations, however, which plenary power of the Pope. In this first introduced non-residence, were not manner Clement VII. brought pluthe only cause of pluralities, which are ralities to perfection, by making his said to have had their origin about the nephew, the Cardinal de Medicis, comsixth century. Among benefices be- mendatory universal; granting him stowed upon the churches, some, as all the vacant benefices in the world, prebends, &c., had no cure of souls whether secular or regular, dignities, annexed to them. These were judged parsonages, simple, or with cure of capable of being held by priests who souls, for six months, and appointhad other livings with cure of souls. ing him usufructuary from the first Also parishes which were not able to day of his possession. In England, maintain a minister were allowed to in which every abuse and imposition be served by another minister in the in ecclesiastical matters were carried neighbourhood, but a dispensation from to their greatest extent, the richest the Pope was necessary for this purpose. By this means, however, the greatest scandal in pluralities was practised. This abuse gave very great offence, but dispensations of this kind were so necessary to support the dignity of cardinals, that they were made perpetual in the court of Rome. The cardinal of Lorrain, who held some of the best benefices in France, and some in Scotland too, was particularly vehement in his declamation against pluralities in general, at the Council of Trent, without imagining that his own were liable to any objection. The first account of any flagrant abuse of pluralities occurs in the year 936, when Manasseh, bishop of Arles, obtained of his relation, Hugh, king of Italy, several other bishoprics, so that in all he had four or five at and best benefices were engrossed by the Pope, and given in commendam to Italians, who never visited the country, but employed questors to collect their revenues. Other methods of making pluralities, and disposing of church revenues, were contrived by the court of Rome, such as provisions and exemptions, which are hardly worth describing, and selling the reversions of livings, called expectatives, as well as livings actually vacant. The first attempt that we meet with to check these evils, of pluralities and non-residence, was made by Charlemagne, who made several regulations for that purpose; but they were soon neglected. Several popes also, as John XXII. and Clement V., pretended to reform the same abuses, but without 1 Sueur, A. D. 936. (P.) 1 any real effect; and by the evasion It is to be lamented that these abuses of them even illiterate persons and were not corrected at the reformation children, who were never intended to of the Church of England. On the take orders, might enjoy benefices. contrary, it is apprehended that many The Council of Trent pretended to of them are increased since that period, remedy the evil of pluralities, but they so as to exceed what is generally to be made it worse by admitting of pensions, found of that nature in some Roman as an equivalent for the change of Catholic countries. In consequence of benefices and other purposes. For this, though the funds for the mainthese came to be granted by the court tenance of the clergy are sufficiently of Rome without any consideration, ample, the inequality in the distribuand even to children. They were also tion of them is shameful, and they more convenient, and made church pre- bear no proportion to the services or ferment a more easy traffic in many merit of those who receive them. This respects. For instance, resignations is an evil that calls loudly for redress, were not deemed valid, unless the per- and strikes many persons who give no son who resigned lived twenty days attention to articles of faith, or of disafterwards; whereas a pension might cipline in other respects. Probably, be transferred at the point of death. however, this evil will be tolerated, till Besides it might be turned into ready the whole system be reformed, or demoney, whereas a benefice could not stroyed. But without the serious rewithout simony.2 1 Pennington on Pluralities, p. 58. (P.) Ed. 3, pp. 223, 224. (P.) formation of this and other crying abuses, the utter destruction of the present hierarchy must, in the natural course of things, be expected. To consider the system (if it may be on the wicked. In proof of this called a system) of Christianity à he wrought many miracles, and after a priori, one would think it very little public execution he rose again from the liable to corruption, or abuse. The great dead. He also directed that proselytes outline of it is, that the Universal to his religion should be admitted by Parent of mankind commissioned Jesus baptism, and that his disciples should Christ to invite men to the prac- eat bread and drink wine in comtice of virtue, by the assurance of his memoration of his death. mercy to the penitent, and of his pose to raise to immortal life and happiness all the virtuous and the good, but to inflict an adequate punishment pur Here is nothing that any person could imagine would lead to much subtle speculation, at least such as could excite much animosity. The doctrine itself is so plain, that one would think before his incarnation. On this printhe learned and the unlearned were ciple went the Gnostics, deriving their upon a level with respect to it. And doctrine from the received oriental phia person unacquainted with the state lophy. Afterwards the philosophizing of things at the time of its promulga- Christians went upon another principle, tion would look in vain for any pro- porsonifying the wisdom or λóyos of God bable source of the monstrous corrup- the Father. But this was mere Plations and abuses which crept into the tonism, and therefore cannot be said to system afterwards. Our Lord, how- have been unnatural in their circumever, and his apostles, foretold, that stances, though at length they came, there would be a great departure from in the natural progress of things, to the truth, and that something would believe that Christ was, in power and arise in the church altogether unlike glory, equal to God the Father himself. the doctrine which they taught, and even subversive of it. From the same opinion of the soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them, with a long train of other absurd opinions and superstitious practices. In reality, however, the causes of the succeeding corruptions did then exist; and accordingly, without anything more than their natural operation, all the The abuses of the positive instituabuses rose to their full height; and tions of Christianity, monstrous as what is more wonderful still, by the they were, naturally arose from the operation of natural causes also, with- opinion of the purifying and sanctify. out any miraculous interposition of ing virtue of rites and ceremonies, which Providence, we see the abuses gradually was the very basis of all the worship of corrected, and Christianity recovering the Heathens: and they were also similar its primitive beauty and glory. to the abuses of the Jewish religion. The causes of the corruptions were We likewise see the rudiments of all almost wholly contained in the esta- the monkish austerities in the opinions blished opinions of the heathen world, and practices of the Heathens, who and especially the philosophical part of thought to purify and exalt the soul it; so that when those Heathens em- by macerating and mortifying the braced Christianity, they mixed their body. former tenets and prejudices with it. As to the abuses in the government Also, both Jews and Heathens were so of the church, they are as easily acmuch scandalized at the idea of being counted for as abuses in civil gothe disciples of a man who had been vernment; worldly-minded men being crucified as a common malefactor, that always ready to lay hold of every Christians in general were sufficiently opportunity of increasing their power; disposed to adopt any opinion that and in the dark ages too many circumwould most effectually wipe away this stances concurred to give the Christian reproach. clergy peculiar advantages over the laity in this respect. The opinion of the mental faculties of man belonging to a substance dis- Upon the whole, I flatter myself that, tinct from his body, or brain, and of to an attentive reader of this work, it this invisible spiritual part, or soul, will appear, that the corruption of being capable of subsisting before and Christianity, in every article of faith or after its union to the body, which had practice, was the natural consequence taken the deepest root in all the schools of the circumstances in which it was of philosophy, was wonderfully calcu- promulgated; and also that its recovery lated to answer this purpose. For by from these corruptions is the natural this means Christians were enabled to consequence of different circumstances. give to the soul of Christ what rank Let unbelievers, if they can, account as they pleased in the heavenly regions well for the first rise and establishment of Christianity itself. This is a pro- Moses; that the whole nation should blem which historians and philosophers then have adopted without objection, (bound to believe that no effect is pro- what they were afterwards so prone to duced without an adequate cause) will abandon for the rites of any of their find to be of more difficult solution the neighbours; or, that when, by severe more closely it is attended to. discipline, they had acquired the atThe circumstances that Mr. Gibbon tachment to it which they are afterenumerates as the immediate causes of wards known to have done, and which the spread of Christianity were them- continues to this day, it be probable selves effects, and necessarily required they would have invented or have such causes as, I imagine, he would adopted another, which they conceived be unwilling to allow. The revolution to be so different from, and subversive produced by Christianity in the opinions of their own. If they had been so and conduct of men, as he himself de- fertile of invention, it might have been scribes it, was truly astonishing; and expected that they would have struck this, he cannot deny, was produced out some other since the time of Christ, without the concurrence, nay, notwith- a period of near two thousand years. standing the opposition, of all the civil On this subject Mr. Gibbon says, powers of the world; and what is per- that "in contradiction to every known haps more, it was opposed by all the principle of the human mind, that learning, genius, and wit of the age too. singular people seems to have yielded For Christianity was assailed as much a stronger and more ready assent to by ridicule and reproach as it was by the traditions of their remote ancesopen persecution; and, be the spread of it what Mr. Gibbon pleases, he can not deny that it kept uniformly gaining ground, taking in all descriptions of men without distinction, before it had any foreign aid; and what then remained of the old religions was not sufficient to occasion any sensible obstruction to the full establishment of it. The Jewish religion alone was an exception; and this circumstance, together with the rise of Christianity among the Jews, are facts that deserve Mr. Gibbon's particular attention. Of all mankind, the Jews were the most unlikely to set up any religion, so different from their own; and as unlikely was it that other nations, and especially the polite and learned among them, should receive a religion from Jews, and those some of the most ignorant of that despised nation. Let Mr. Gibbon recollect his own idea of the Jews, which seems to be much the same with that of Voltaire, and think whether it be at all probable, that they should have originally in vented a religion so essentially different from any other in the world, as that which is described in the books of tors, than to the evidence of their own senses." A singular people, indeed, if this was the case; for then they must not have been men, but beings in the shape of men only, though internally constituted in some very different manner. But what facts in history may not be represented as probable or improbable, on such loose suppositions as these? Such liberties as these I shall neither take nor grant. Jews are men, and men are beings, whose affections and actions are subject to as strict rules as those of the animate or inanimate parts of nature. Their conduct, therefore, must be accounted for on such principles as always have influenced the conduct of men, and such as we observe still to influence men. I wish Mr. Gibbon would consider whether he does not, in the passage above quoted, use the word tradition in an improper manner. By tradition we generally mean something for which we have not the evidence of histories written at the time of the events. We never talk of the tra 1 History, Ch. xv. I. p. 539. (P.) dition of the wars of Julius Cæsar, or as Mr. Gibbon says,' is the very reverse of his death in the senate house, nor even of the tradition of the conquests of Alexander the Great; because there were histories of those events written at the time, or so near to the time, as to be fully within the memory of those who were witnesses of them. Now Moses, and the other writers of the Old Testament, were as much present at the time of the transactions they relate, as the historians of Julius Cæsar or Alexander. An incautious reader (and there are too many such) would be apt to imagine from Mr. Gibbon's manner of expressing himself, that the Jews did not even pretend to have written histories of the same age with the origin of their religion, but that it was in the same predicament with what he calls "the elegant mythology of Greece and Rome;" whereas the fact is, that every tittle of it was committed to writing at the time. It is generally in such an indirect manner as this, and not by a fair and candid representation of facts, that unbelievers endeavour to discredit the system of revelation. of the truth. He could not himself imagine circumstances in which the principal facts on which Christianity is founded should be subject to a more rigid scrutiny. These things, as Paul said to king Agrippa, were not done in a corner. Acts xxvi. 26. It appears to me that, admitting all the miraculous events which the evangelical history asserts, it was not probable that Christianity should have been received with less difficulty than it was; but without that assistance, absolutely impossible for it to have been received at all. Mr. Gibbon represents the discredit into which the old religions were fallen, as having made way for the new one. So urgent," says he, on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition." 2 But are not the vulgar, men, as well as the learned, their understandings being naturally as good and as various, and certainly subject to the same laws; Let Mr. Gibbon, as an historian, and necessity of believing or proneness compare the rise and progress of Ma- to belief, is not greater in the one than hometanism with that of Judaism or in the other; but the expression is of Christianity, and attend to the dif- loose and inaccurate, and calculated to ference. Besides the influence of the impose on superficial readers. Besides, sword, which Christianity certainly if any set of men had this property of had not, Mahometanism stood on the proneness to believe, they must, to be basis of the Jewish and Christian all of a piece, have a proportionable revelations. If these had not been unwillingness to quit their belief, at firmly believed in the time of Ma- least without very sufficient evidence; homet, what credit would his religion and yet those vulgar of all nations are have gained? In these circumstances, supposed by Mr. Gibbon to have abanhe must have invented some other doned the belief of their own mythosystem, which would have required logy, some time before Christianity visible miracles of its own, which he came, to supply the vacancy. Such might have found some difficulty in vulgar as those I should think entitled passing upon his followers; though to the more respectable appellation of they were in circumstances far more free-thinkers, which with many is easy to be imposed upon than the Jews synonymous to philosophers. And, in or the Heathens, in the time of our fact, it was not with the vulgar, but Saviour. This was an age of light with the philosophers, that the reliand of suspicion; the other, if any, of gions of Greece and Rome were fallen darkness and credulity. That ChristiHistory, Ch. xv. I. p. 535. (P anity grew up in silence and obscurity, 2 Ibid. p. 602. (P.) |