VIII., nor half so feeble as in the time of Leo X. It is more majestic and venerable than in the time of Luther.  Nor are Protestants so bitter and one-sided as they were fifty years ago.  They begin to judge this great power by broader principles; to view it as it really is,—­not as “Antichrist” and the “scarlet mother,” but as a venerable institution, with great abuses, having at heart the interests of those whom it grinds down and deceives.

But, after all, I do not in this Lecture present the Papacy of the eleventh century or the nineteenth, but the Papacy of the fifth century, as organized by Leo.  True, its fundamental principles as a government are the same as then.  These principles I do not admire, especially for an enlightened era.  I only palliate them in reference to the wants of a dark and miserable age, and as a critic insist upon their notable success in the age that gave them birth.

With these remarks on the regimen, the polity, and the government of the Church of which Leo laid the foundation, and which he adapted to barbarous ages, when the Church was still a struggling power and Christianity itself little better than nominal,—­long before it had much modified the laws or changed the morals of society; long before it had created a new civilization,—­with these remarks, acceptable, it may be, neither to Catholics nor to Protestants, I turn once more to the man himself.  Can you deny his title to the name of Great?  Would you take him out of the galaxy of illustrious men whom we still call Fathers and Saints?  Even Gibbon praises his exalted character.  What would the Church of the Middle Ages have been without such aims and aspirations?  Oh, what a benevolent mission the Papacy performed in its best ages, mitigating the sorrows of the poor, raising the humble from degradation, opposing slavery and war, educating the ignorant, scattering the Word of God, heading off the dreadful tyranny of feudalism, elevating the learned to offices of trust, shielding the pious from the rapacity of barons, recognizing man as man, proclaiming Christian equalities, holding out the hopes of a future life to the penitent believer, and proclaiming the sovereignty of intelligence over the reign of brute forces and the rapacity of ungodly men!  All this did Leo, and his immediate successors.  And when he superadded to the functions of a great religious magistrate the virtues of the humblest Christian,—­parting with his magnificent patrimony to feed the poor, and proclaiming (with an eloquence unusual in his time) the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, and setting himself as an example of the virtues which he preached,—­we concede his claim to be numbered among the great benefactors of mankind.  How much worse Roman Catholicism would have been but for his august example and authority!  How much better to educate the ignorant people, who have souls to save, by the patristic than by heathen literature, with all its poison of false philosophies