Comparatively few in our peaceful times have any idea of the real nature and the comprehensive grasp of popery. During the long period of the middle ages it was fully developed; but its nature remains unchanged until the present hour. Times and circumstances have changed, not popery. The clergy, including the monks and friars, were a distinct class, and stood entirely apart from the rest of mankind. A broad, deep, impassable line separated the two communities—the clergy and the laity. The lives, the laws, the property, the rights, and the social duties of the one were not only different from those of the other, but often antagonistic.
Education, such as it was, had become the exclusive privilege of the clergy. Whoever had any desire for knowledge, could neither obtain nor employ it but in connection with the churchman or the monastery. The younger sons of the nobility, and even of royalty, as the church became wealthy and powerful, joined the clerical community. By this means the most famous names in the land were found among the clergy, and the Church and State were thus welded together. The universities, the schools, the whole domains of the human intellect, were in their possession. The other great division of mankind—the laity—were kept in utter darkness and ignorance. And woe betide the man who would venture to point out some new road to intelligence, freedom, and power. The faintest glimmer of light was instantly extinguished, and the discovery denounced as magical and forbidden.
The priests alone could read, write, draw up State papers, or treaties, and frame laws. From the sacredness of their character, and their intellectual superiority, they were admitted to the courts and the councils of kings; they were the negotiators and the ambassadors of sovereigns. But royal secrets and compacts were not all they knew; the confessional laid open the whole heart of every one, from the highest to the lowest, before the eye of the priesthood. No act was beyond their cognizance, hardly any thought or intention was secret. There might be smothered murmurs at the avarice, pride, and licentiousness of the priest, still he was a priest, a bishop, a pope; his sacraments lost not their efficacy, his verdict of condemnation or absolution was equally valid. Those who openly doubted the power of the clergy in such matters were heretics, outcasts, proscribed, only fit fuel for the flames both now and evermore.
The pope, as was universally believed, combined in his own person all the attributes of supreme power in matters of religion and of government. The power of emperors and kings was derived, his was original. He was armed with divine authority to depose monarchs, to absolve subjects from their allegiance and from every other obligation; and, if needful, to dissolve all the bonds of society. But above all, he was empowered to maintain the integrity of the faith as transmitted to him from his predecessors or defined by himself as head of the church; to repress dissent in every shape; to persecute to extermination all who ventured to dispute this supreme prerogative, as rebels and traitors to God and His church; and at any time to call upon the secular government, without compensation, to lavish life and money, labor and feeling, to enable him to maintain the integrity of the spiritual empire.