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5- STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF PAPAL SYSTEM. 101
ideals of religion as a counterpoise to the pettiness and
misery of present life. Through the doctrine of the Com
munion of Saints, it brought the great examples both of
the present and the past into close relation to the lives of
Christians dispersed throughout the world, and made life
nobler by this sense of fellowship.
On the other hand, it had grave inherent defects. Its
postulates were unsound and its interpretations of Scrip
ture often crude and erroneous. It neglected the interests
and stinted the growth of the individual soul, and it
ignored the rights and duties of the Christian people. It
separated the clergy into something like a caste, and made
ambition on their part almost a duty. It treated laymen
chiefly as useful instruments or passive recipients of in
struction. It overlooked the design of God that every
member of the Church should be a fully developed fellow-
worker in the body. Further, it was largely a paper sys
tem, which broke down when applied to mankind on a
large scale, and it needed men of herculean proportions
and abilities to administer it even tolerably well. In the
hands of ambitious, avaricious and sensual men, such as
often filled the high places of the Church in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, the system rather spread corrup
tion than promoted discipline.
Nevertheless, with all these defects on the spiritual side,
the papacy might have continued to dominate Europe if
it had merely maintained and developed its spiritual
claims. Its fall was caused by its secular ambition. To
put it quite simply, the possession of temporal sovereignty
ruined its character. Yet the development of this temporal
power was not an unnatural result of the spiritual system,
and no doubt seemed all but inevitable to those who had
been brought to think of the visible Church as the kingdom
of God, and of Rome as the centre of the world. Let
me point out how the secularity of the papacy arose.
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