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The twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent decreed as follows: "The holy synod commands all bishops, and others sustaining the duty and care of teaching, that they should diligently instruct the faithful concerning the legitimate use of images according to the custom of the catholic and apostolic church received from the commencement of christianity, and the consent of the holy fathers, and decrees of the sacred councils, teaching them ... that the images of Christ; of the Virgin mother of God, and other saints, are to be had and retained especially in churches, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them: not that any divinity or virtue is believed to exist in them for which they are to be worshipped, or that any thing is to be asked from them, or that confidence is to be placed in images, as was formerly done by the Gentiles, who used to place their hope in idol; but because the honour which is given to them is referred to the prototypes which they represent; so that by the images which we kiss, and before which we uncover our heads and bow our bodies, we adore Christ, and venerate the Saints, whose likeness they bear: this has been decreed against the opposers of images by the decrees of councils, especially of the second synod of Nice.
So Laveuve had died yonder, stretched on his litter of rags, his hands clenched in his obstinate desire to cling to his life of torture, whilst he, Pierre, again glowing with the flame of charity, consumed by apostolic zeal, was scouring Paris to find him for the evening a clean bed on which he might be saved. Ah! the atrocious irony of it all!
There was reason afterwards to believe, that it would have been better for Mr. Temple to remain in Turkey, in the exercise of his eminently apostolic influence upon his brother missionaries and the native Protestant community, Greek and Armenian. Yet his own opinion was in favor of the course he pursued.
In order that criminals so atrocious might no longer pollute the earth, he appointed inquisitors in every country, armed with the apostolic power to convict and punish. It was now that the Witch Mania, properly so called, may be said to have fairly commenced. Immediately a class of men sprang up in Europe, who made it the sole business of their lives to discover and burn the witches.
Cut off by their own faith, as well by excommunication, from the Orthodox Church, the supply of consecrated priests soon gave out; they had lost their apostolic succession and could not renew it, for the one Bishop Paul of Kalomna who had joined them, had died in prison, without appointing a successor.
There were, no doubt, many obscure passages in the Scripture, but men's minds were finite; a catholic acceptance was imperative, and the evils of the present day a sufficiently sweeping statement were wholly due to deplorable lapses from such acceptance. The Apostolic teaching must be preserved, since it transcended all modern wanderings after truth.
They insisted that the coveted islands were included in their portion of the great Borgian grant. As there had hardly yet been time to make a trigonometrical survey of an unknown world, so generously divided by the pope, there was no way of settling disputed boundary questions save by apostolic blows.
The clergy were divided into two classes: the one destined for the bishoprics and abbeys, and their rich revenues; the other for the apostolic function and its poverty. The third estate, ground down by the court, humiliated by the nobility, was itself divided into corporations, which, in their turn, exercised upon each other the evil and the contempt they received from the higher classes.
But we may read through the entire book of Acts and all the apostolic epistles: they tell us very minutely how the Church was planted in many lands, how it grew and spread, but there is not even a faint hint that Peter was regarded as the primate, or Pope, in his day.
His flowing white hair, and the calmness and purity of his aspect, gave him quite an apostolic look; and once while visiting at the house of a friend, a certain small boy the same for whom John Brown afterwards wrote his autobiography of a boy asked his mother if that man was one of Christ's disciples. Such was the father of "Little Women."
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