greatest vigour, and which was ruled by the most accomplished and energetic prelates: and of these Hincmar of Rheims, for nearly forty years was acknowledged by all his contemporaries as the chief in learning, character, and authority.

“Throughout the whole of the struggle the pope had great advantages upon his side, which neither the justice of the adverse cause, nor the talents and perseverance of those who supported it, could counterbalance. The degree of pre-eminence which was really his due, indefinite as it was in itself, was rendered more so by the varying claims and practice of earlier times. Hence the opposition to his authority, which like all opposition to existing powers seemed at first sight to partake of the nature of rebellion, was thought by some, even among the more learned and patriotic of the French bishops, to be not altogether undeserving of the imputation. Others, from love of peace, were willing rather to yield their just rights, and those of the Catholic Church, than persevere in a contest which seemed to involve a breach of charity, and unwillingness to suffer wrong. The age too, was one profuse in terms of compliment and respect. Men addressed to one another, especially to such as were in any degree their superiors, high sounding appellations of reverence and honour, which, if taken literally, would amount to a recognition of the most unlimited authority on the one hand, and on the other to a confession of the most complete subjection; and it is easy to perceive that what may probably have been meant for nothing more than Christian courtesy, might be represented, and perhaps, understood, as a serious acknowledgment of superiority or sovereignty. Add to this, that the temporal prince was often backward in supporting the claims of the national Church, and sometimes even took part against it: for episcopal censure was no less strict, and oftentimes more offensive, than that which was launched from the apostolic throne. Moreover, France itself was continually divided by different political interest: Lorraine, and sometimes Aquitaine, were under different sovereigns from the rest of the country; and the other Carlovingian princes, whose legitimate rule should have been confined to Italy or Bavaria, seldom lost an opportunity of interposing in the affairs of France, and of creating or encouraging factions in Church as well as in State.

"Hence the consequence was, that from one cause or another, and in most cases from several causes combined, the Gallican Church was prevented from acting in concert, or from bringing her whole weight of influence to bear with efficiency on any question of national importance; and least of all upon the question of independency, or unlimited subjection to the Roman see. Even when these adverse circumstances operated with least effect, there was another advantage possessed and used by Rome which weighed more than all the rest. This was the publication of the early decretals, first made in the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century, although not generally known, and perhaps not systematically arranged, for half a century more. Hincmar lived to see them almost universally accepted as really what they purported to be. He, himself, indeed, not unfrequently quotes them, although he refused any blind obedience to their authority, and probably had some suspicions of their genuineness. The age, as it has been truly

remarked, was uncritical, and Hincmar, although he was probably one of the best read scholars of his day, and although his works show a thorough acquaintance with the whole range of Catholic writers, from S. Cyprian's time to his own, and with the canons of councils, general and provincial, which made up the body of ecclesiastical law, can hardly be supposed to be so far in advance of his contemporaries, as to discover at once, and without doubt, the falsity of documents which were unimpeached, or at all events, not disproved, for many centuries afterwards. Even if he had more strongly suspected the forgery of the decretals, however great his boldness in the cause of truth and resolution in defence of his Church, no prelate of that time would have ventured, for the sake of their common Christianity, and the credit of the station which they both held, to bring so heavy a charge against the first bishop of Christendom. At the present day, with prejudices less enlisted in favour of the papal power than were those of all the European Churches of the ninth century, and with far greater experience in the history of the Roman see, we shrink from supposing that so gigantic a forgery, so unprincipled an attempt to uphold their own supremacy at the expense of truth and justice, could have been suggested and maintained at the instance, or even with the knowledge and consent of, a succession of Christian prelates, some of whom have been held as Saints by the later Church, and many of whom were certainly men zealous for the truth in other points, and unwearied in their endeavours to spread the Gospel through the world. The alternative, with all its difficulties, seems preferable; the hypothesis which would throw all the blame of the publication upon Isidore the merchant, if such were in reality his name, and which would represent the pope as equally deceived with the rest of his Church as to the fictitious character of the documents palmed off upon them by the over-zealous and unscrupulous Spaniard. In either view, their effect was the same; and whether knowingly, or in ignorance, adduced by Nicholas and Adrian, they equally increased the difficulty, to Hincmar and his party, of defending the primitive independence of their Church."

The first of the occasions on which Hincmar becomes conspicuous, as resisting an undue assertion of authority on the part of the Roman pontiff, related to the case of Rothad, bishop of Soissons. This prelate was much older than Hincmar; he seems to have lived an irregular luxurious life himself, and to have managed the affairs of his diocese with great laxity. This, and other causes, seem to have occasioned a good deal of ill feeling between him and his metropolitan, and probably made the latter not at all indisposed to treat him with severity when an occasion arrived. He was deposed in a council at Soissons, held in 861: his own account of the reasons states that he had refused to reinstate, at Hincmar's command, a priest whom he had deprived, and who had appealed to the metropolitan. Both Hincmar, and the council of Soissons, however, assign his irregular and uncanonical acts and laxity of life and rule as the real cause of his punishment. At a synod held at Pistres, in 862, he appealed against Hincmar's sentence,

which its author at the same time asked to have confirmed; and Rothad then appealed to the holy See. This was allowed, with much reluctance, by Hincmar: he took advantage, however, of a letter which Rothad wrote shortly after to one of the prelates then at the council, in which he defended his own conduct to him and his colleagues, and, representing that this was in fact pleading his cause before them, and so a revocation of the appeal to Rome, he prevailed on the king and the bishops to put a stop to his journey. A council was soon afterwards assembled at Soissons, which Rothad refused to attend, and in which leave was refused him to go to Rome, and the decision arrived at that he should be deposed from the episcopate. The refusal to allow the appeal was confirmed more than a year afterwards by a council of several provinces, held at Senlis, on the ground that it was contrary to the laws of the empire; the acts of this council were sent to pope Nicholas, who had already written to reprimand Hincmar for his conduct, and who was not at all pacified by the arguments and excuses alleged by the council for their conduct. They were threatened with the same punishment as that to which Rothad had been sentenced, unless they retracted: and the king was urged to allow him to proceed to Rome. This he was obliged to do: and the bishop of Soissons started, accompanied by some other bishops, who were sent by Hincmar to represent himself, but their journey was stopped by the emperor Louis, on the borders of Italy, and Rothad alone was able to reach Rome, where he arrived in the spring of 864, and waited several months for some representatives of the other party. The ground taken by Hincmar in the letter which his legates forwarded to Pope Nicholas, is interesting, and we give Mr. Prichard's abstract of it.

"Hincmar maintained that the legates whom he had empowered to represent him at Rome, and who were the bearers of the letter, appeared, not as complainants or accusers, according to the notion of Rothad, and of Nicholas himself, but as accused, to answer the charges brought against him by the late bishop of Soissons. It was true, he said, that Rothad had appealed to Rome, alleging the canons of Sardica as the ground of his conduct: but having, in the meantime, substituted for this the choice of another tribunal, and having selected the judges by whom he desired to be tried, he had brought himself under the Carthaginian and African canons, which were of equal authority in the Church with those of Sardica, and which positively forbad any appeal to Rome under these circumstances. The decree of S. Gregory was to the same purport. And, again, it would be unseemly and irreverent towards Rome, to trouble that supreme court with all the quarrels and discussions which took place among the lower, as well as the higher clergy, in different parts of the Church, and which were ordered by the Nicene and other synods to be settled by their own metropolitans or in provincial councils. He lays down the matters in which appeals may be

* * *

necessary, as the following :-when the dispute involves some question connected with episcopal conduct, in which the canons of the Church have never passed any decision, and on which assemblies of one or more provinces have been unable to come to any satisfactory conclusion: or again, whenever in causes of greater importance, the bishop appeals from a provincial synod, without having compromised this appeal by choosing other judges for himself. In either of these cases, the Sardican canons allow the appeal, and permit the pope to require that a new inquiry should be made, to be conducted, however, not at Rome, but in the same place in which the cause of dispute had arisen, or the former trial taken place. A third case is, when a charge is brought against a metropolitan, who has had his rank recognised by receiving the pallium from Rome, who had the privilege of demanding, in the first place, that the decision of the pope should be taken upon the matter of complaint. But as Rothad's case could fall under neither of these classes, he had no canonical right to make the appeal. * While the letters sent from Nicholas, by the bishop of Beauvais, had required that legates should be sent with Rothad to Rome, others, which he had sent to king Charles by the hands of Luido, the king's ambassador, ordered Hincmar and the council of Soissons to restore him to that bishopric. This Hincmar declined to do, using, in making his excuse for the refusal, terms of such excessive reverence and affection,* that, customary as this mode of speaking is in the writings of the day, it is difficult to avoid attributing to them an ironical meaning. The reasons for not restoring him were, first, that the bishops who had ordered his deposition could not be re-assembled, as they were kept in their dicceses by dread of a Norman invasion: secondly, because Rothad already commenced his journey to Rome; and thirdly, because all the bishops to whom Hincmar communicated the order of the pope, declined having any share in restoring a man who had been so negligent in preserving discipline, so disobedient to canonical rules, and so rebellious, on all occasions, to the will of his king and metropolitan. In proof that the reputation thus universally given to Rothad was not unmerited, he recounted some of his misdemeanours. If, however, he continues, the the pope persists, for some reason which has been overlooked by the bishops of France, in which they had no opportunity of knowing, in demanding Rothad's restoration, no obstacle will be opposed, inasmuch as every one acknowledges that the Churches of France are in the primacy of S. Peter, and subject to the Roman pontiff. He expostulates with the pope on the numerous threats of excommunication which he had lavished upon him in his letters, but professes to regard them as a just punishment for his many sins. For the future, he says, it will be his great business to conduct himself so as to avoid a repetition of them, that he may run no risk of dying out of communion with the Church of Rome. However, he reminds the pope that he himself gives the name of brethren, to metropolitan bishops, and that while the metropolitan has no right to oppress one of his suffragans, a certain respect and obe

* He says, "Sciat reverentissima et amantissimè colenda dulcissima vestra paternitas, hoc me agere nequivisse pro his quæ continentur in subditis," &c.

dience is, at the same time, due from the latter to the former. In the letter previously sent by the council of Soissons, the pope had been requested to pay a just regard to the privileges of the French Churches, and had expressed, in return, his determination to preserve those of the Church of Rome. Hincmar now says, as if in answer to this resolution, that the privileges of Rome are best kept up by preserving those of the provincial Churches, such as Rheims, and that he himself, in labouring to uphold the latter, had been striving, in fact, to maintain the rights of the apostolic see.'

Rothad, after waiting many months in Rome, presented a petition to the pope, complaining bitterly of the treatment he had received from Hincmar; and on Christmas Eve, the pope adverted to the matter in his discourse in S. Mary Major, and dwelt upon the illegality of the deposition which had taken place, after appeal had been made to Rome. And on the festival of S. Agnes, in January, 865, Rothad was publicly restored to his former dignity, furnished with letters attesting his restitution, and Arsenius, who was then being sent as legate into France, was charged to see that the orders of the pope were fulfilled. One of the letters was to Hincmar; it contained the arguments by which the pope justified his own view of the case, and the complaints to which Hincmar's apparent want of straightforwardness gave occasion and it threatened him with deposition from his archiepiscopal office, without hope of restoration, unless he either reinstated Rothad at once, or returned with him to Rome to plead the cause before the tribunal of the pontiff. These threats seem to have induced Hincmar to submit, without further delay, to orders which he still must have thought grounded merely upon an usurped right, and unrecognised by the principles of the Church polity which had been recognised in the best ages. Nicholas was not a man who was at all likely to shrink from executing his threat: he had but recently deposed the two archbishops of Treves and Cologne, without any effectual resistance, although they might have depended for support on their sovereign, and their brother prelates, with far greater certainty than Hincmar could on Charles the Bald and the French bishops. The chances of a struggle, therefore, were all decidedly against him; and we may also well suppose, that he would in any case have preferred that submission, to which his letter had already almost pledged him, to the scandal of a resistance to so highly venerated an authority as that of the papal chair, and the danger of a schism, should he be supported in his resistance by other bishops of his own province and country. He had done all in his power to assert what he clearly conceived to be the legitimate rights of metropolitan bishops, and national Churches: and that he allowed himself to make the most of the mistakes of his adversaries, such as Rothad's letter to the council of Soissons, which certainly was not meant by its author to be a revocation of his appeal to