Middle Ages, except among the Brahmans and Buddhists of
India. This religious fervor the popes were to make use of, to extend
their empire.

And that nothing might be wanted to cement their power which had been
thus assured, the Emperor Valentinian III.--a monarch controlled by
Leo--passed in the year 445 this celebrated decree:--

"The primacy of the Apostolic See having been established by the merit
of Saint Peter, its founder, the sacred Council of Nice, and the dignity
of the city of Rome, we thus declare our irrevocable edict, that all
bishops, whether in Gaul or elsewhere, shall make no innovation without
the sanction of the Bishop of Rome; and, that the Apostolic See may
remain inviolable, all bishops who shall refuse to appear before the
tribunal of the Bishop of Rome, when cited, shall be constrained to
appear by the governor of the province."

Thus firmly was the Papacy rooted in the middle of the fifth century,
not only by the encroachments of bishops, but by the authority of
emperors. The papal dominion begins, as an institution, with Leo the
Great. As a religion it began when Paul and Peter preached at Rome. Its
institution was peculiar and unique; a great spiritual government
usurping the attributes of other governments, as predicted by Daniel,
and, at first benignant, ripening into a gloomy tyranny,--a tyranny so
unscrupulous and grasping as to become finally, in the eyes of Luther,
an evil power. As a religion, as I have said, it did not widely depart
from the primitive creeds until it added to the doctrines generally
accepted by the Church, and even still by Protestants, those other
dogmas which were means to an end,--that end the possession of power and
its perpetuation among ignorant people. Yet these dogmas, false as they
are, never succeeded in obscuring wholly the truths which are taught in
the gospel, or in extinguishing faith in the world. In all the
encroachments of the Papacy, in all the triumphs of an unauthorized
Church polity, the flame of true Christian piety has been dimmed, but
not extinguished. And when this fatal and ambitious polity shall have
passed away before the advance of reason and civilization, as other
governments have been overturned, the lamp of piety will yet burn, as in
other churches, since it will be fed by the Bible and the Providence of
God. Governments and institutions pass away, but not religions;
certainly not the truths originally declared among the mountains of