044. AN INCESTUOUS ALLIANCE

AN INCESTUOUS ALLIANCE And who was the head of the hierarchy in this same 1492? None other than Roderigo Borgia, otherwise known as Pope Alexander VI. He sold for money the highest offices of the church; by assassination he made offices vacant that he might have offices to sell. Books of inconceivable obscenity received his sanction; books with a tinge of evangelical truth he condemned. For impiety, worse than a Nero, for impurity, worse than a beast, he yet claimed to be the vicar of Jesus Christ. Not too harshly did Dbllinger speak of him as among those popes "whom hell has swallowed up." The world in 1492 had reached a practical demonstration that the alliance of Church and State is an incestuous one. Whether the Church dominate the State, or the State dominate the Church, the result is equally disastrous. When the Church assumes temporal powers, it ceases to be a church. In 1484 John Laillier, Doctor of the Sorbonne, cried out: "Since the days of Pope Sylvester, Rome is no Church of Christ, but a mere instrument of the State for the purpose of extorting money." And we shall never understand such a monstrosity as Alexander VI., unless we see in him a mere temporal prince, who for purposes of ambition pretends to be Christ’s vicegerent, and hypocritically assumes to administer spiritual affairs. The very conception of a spiritual kingdom had well-nigh died out from the minds of men, or such a phenomenon would not have been possible.

While the Church had become the mere tool and slave of secular ambition, what shall we say of the State in 1492? Was civil government more free than ecclesiastical government? The short and simple answer is, that it was "the age of the despots." The characteristics of the time were Caesarism, absolutism, centralization. Every king of Europe at that time could say: "L’Etat, cest mot,"—"I am the State," just as the pope could say: "L’Eglise, cest mot,"—"I am the Church." But in order to appreciate how much this means, and from what hideous civil conditions our fathers were brought out, it will be necessary to take a backward glance at the history of the State, as we have just reviewed the history of the Church.

Mr. John Fiske, in his "Beginnings of New England," furnishes us with a generalization which greatly helps our inquiry. The characteristic of the Oriental State, he tells us, was conquest without incorporation. Hence the unassimilated provinces of the Eastern empires fell apart just so soon as the external force that aggregated them was withdrawn. The characteristic of the Roman State, on the contrary, was conquest with incorporation, but without representation. Here was a great advance on the Oriental method; wherever Rome carried her victorious banners she made the conquered peoples Romans, giving them not only Roman protection but Roman citizenship. The Roman Empire was an organic whole; its organization and law enabled it for centuries to resist attack. Still it lacked the one element which alone could have given it perpetuity—the element of representation.