so terrible an office. For if the amiable and
cultivated Benedict the Fourteenth, the admirer
of Voltaire, lived a long lie, sunk his soul in
falsehood and hypocrisy, yet, the work he did
towards ruining and pulling down the Church
system, which he was appointed to uphold, is to
this day alive and active; and, his dereliction of
all papal duty and character has been, and will
be, of profit immeasurable to countless thousands
in the discouragement and coming fall of the
system he so powerfully helped to destroy. If a
Borgia on the papal throne, under the name of
Alexander the Sixth, seemed to be placed on
that elevation only to show mankind, far and
wide, of how great and fearful degradation
human nature is capable, it may well be doubted
whether that defiled and abased soul had so long
and steep a path of rehabilitation before it, as
the disembodied spirit of such a man as was
Caraffa, Pope Paul the Fourth. And Caraffa
was a model pope: one of those pillars of the
Church whom churchmen admire, honour,
regret, and look back on with humiliation at the
thought of the fainting energies and degenerate
weakness of less faithful ages. For, Paul the
Fourth did the duty of a pope, despite all
obstacles and all opposing considerations. "The
greater glory of God" seemed to him to be his
only object: in other words, the greater glory of
the Church. And this was to be secured by
forcibly compelling external obedience to Church
laws and external compliance with Church forms;
by unscrupulously crushing all opposition, and
repressing by fire and bloodshed every tentative
of the human mind towards direct communication
with its Creator, unimpeded by sacerdotal
intermediation. The greater power and the more
unquestioned supremacy of the caste to which
he belonged was, to the mind and conscience of
Paul the Fourth, "the greater glory of God."
And, in his efforts for the attainment of that end,
no human feeling restrained him, no touch of
mercy ever arrested on his lips the doom of
perdition in this world, and, according to his belief,
in the world of eternity. His insatiable lust of
power, his indomitable pride, his fierce capacity
for hating, his total incapacity for any tender
or truly ennobling human emotion, above all, his
undoubting spiritual blindness, which so
conceived of the divine nature as to imagine that it
could be approached by the exercise of such
qualities,—all this, which made that terrible
old man a model pope, must surely make the
upward struggling of such a spirit long and
difficult.

Truly a tremendous and fearful seat to fill,
that chair of Peter, the conditions of which
are such, that it may seem doubtful to a reflecting
mind whether the occupant of it who most
neglects the duties imposed on him by his office,
or he who most zealously discharges them, is
more involved in soul-destroying error. A
position, the monstrosity of which is the normal
and logical product of the assumption of
infallibility.

The oscillation of the line of Vicegerents of
Heaven on earth, between popes who have
scandalised mankind by their unsacerdotal vices
and popes who have scourged and degraded
them by their sacerdotal virtues, has been
determined, as has been observed, by the external
circumstances of the Church. "Church in
danger!" has always been the alarum which has
aroused Rome from unspiritual to spiritual
abominations. It has always been fear which
has recalled the Church from epicurean
unfaithfulness to the active duties of persecution and
self-assertion. The series of utterly worldly and
irreligious popes who sat in the chair of Peter
during the first part of the sixteenth century,
and of whom several were men who disgraced
human nature itself, came to a close about the
middle of the century. Paul the Third, a scion
of the princely house of Farnese, may be
considered the last of that set of unecclesiastical
popes. His successor, Julius the Third, marked
the turning-point of the oscillation by a short
reign of decent do-nothing respectability. Then
came the truly pious Cervini,—Marcellus the
Second—who, had he lived to occupy the papal
throne for a prolonged reign, would, in all
probability, have brought down the whole of
the fabric in ruin; for he talked of reform, and
meant it. But he died on the twenty-second
day of his papacy. The Reformation, the secular
interests of princes, that led to the calling of the
Council of Trent, which lasted from 1545 to
1563, and the spread of heresy, made another
class of man necessary to the Church as its head.
And another class of man was forthcoming.
The Sacred College of Cardinals put the right
man into the right place by the election of the
Cardinal Giovanni Pietro Caraffa to be pope,
under the memorable name of Paul the Fourth.
This man also—chosen by the Church in the
greatness of its need, to stem the advancing tide
of heterodoxy and schism—talked loudly and
earnestly of reform. But he understood the
phrase in a very different sense from that of his
predecessor and the other enlightened men, who
urged the necessity of bringing the Church
system somewhat more into accordance with the
advanced enlightenment and morality of the
age. Reform with him meant going backward,
instead of going forward; and sword and fagot
were the means by which his reformation was to
be worked out. "Paul the Fourth," says the
historian Ranke, "had already attained the age
of seventy-nine, but his deep-set eyes still
gleamed with all the fire of youth. He was
extremely tall and thin; he walked quickly, and
appeared to be all sinew. His daily life was
subject to no order; he often slept by day, and
passed the night in study; and woe to the
servant who entered his room until he rang his
bell. In everything he followed the impulses
of the moment; but these impulses sprang from
a character formed by a long life and become a
second nature. He seemed conscious of no other
duty, no other business, than the restoration of
the ancient faith in all its primitive might and
authority." One of the Venetian ambassadors to
the Court of Rome, in making a report to the
senate on his return from his embassy in 1560,