NOTES.
Opinions of representative Protestant historians who cannot be charged with partisan bias
or Romanizing tendency: —
"Whatever judgment," says Leopold von Ranke, who was a good Lutheran (Die römischen
Päpste, I. 29), "we may form of the Popes of former times, they had always great interests in view:
the care of an oppressed religion, the conflict with heathenism, the propagation of Christianity
among the Northern nations, the founding of an independent hierarchical power. It belongs to the
dignity of human existence to will and to execute something great. These tendencies the Popes kept
in higher motion."
In the last volume of his great work, published after his death (Weltgeschichte, Siebenter
Theil, Leipzig, 1886, pp. 311–313), Ranke gives his estimate of the typical Pope Gregory VII., of
which this is a condensed translation: —
"The hierarchical system of Gregory rests on the attempt to make the clerical power the
basis of the entire human existence. This explains the two principles which characterize the
system,—the command of (clerical] celibacy, and the prohibition of investiture by the hands of a
layman. By the first, the lower clergy were to be made a corporation free from all personal relations
to human society; by the second, the higher clergy were to be secured against all influence of the
secular power. The great hierarch had well considered his standpoint: he thereby met a want of the
times, which regarded the clergy, so to say, as higher beings. All his words had dignity, consistency
and power. He had a native talent for worldly affairs. Peter Damiani probably had this in view when
he called him, once, the holy Satan .... Gregory’s deliverances contain no profound doctrines; nearly
all were known before. But they are summed up by him in a system, the sincerity of which no one
could call in question. His dying words: ’I die in exile, because I loved justice,’ express his inmost
conviction. But we must not forget that it was only the hierarchical justice which he defended to
his last breath."—In the thirteenth chapter, entitled "Canossa," Ranke presents his views on the
conflict between Gregory VII. and Henry IV., or between the hierarchical and the secular power.
Adolf Harnack, a prominent historian of the present generation, in his commemorative address on
Martin Luther (Giessen, 1883, p. 7), calls "the idea of the papacy the greatest and most humane
idea (die grösste und humanste Idee) which the middle age produced."
It was In a review of Ranke’s History of the Popes, that Lord Macaulay, a Protestant of
Scotch ancestry, penned his brilliant eulogy on the Roman Church as the oldest and most venerable
power in Christendom, which is likely to outlast all other governments and churches. "She was
great and respected," he concludes, "before the Saxon set his foot on Britain, before the Frank had
passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshiped
in the Temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveler from
New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge
to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s."^297
But we must not overlook a later testimony, in which the eloquent historian supplemented
and qualified this eulogy: —
"From the time," says Macaulay in the first chapter of his History of England, "when the
barbarians overran the Western Empire, to the time of the revival of letters, the influence of the
(^297) First published In the Edinburgh Review, October, 1840. The passage is often quoted by Roman Catholics, e.g., by Archbishop
Spalding, in his History of the Prot. Ref., p. 217 sqq.; but they find it convenient to ignore the other passage from his History of England.