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It may have occurred to him that, in the peculiar position of the Church, the concoction of a series of letters, written in the name of an apostolic Father, and vigorously asserting the claims of the bishops, would help much to strengthen the hands of the hierarchy.
"He had no great liking, he said, for arranging the poets in a hierarchy. He found so much that surpassed him in different ways in all the great ones; but he thought that Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe, these seven, were the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800.
The first churches, like those of Corinth and Ephesus and Rome, were democracies: no such thing as a priestly line to carry on a hierarchy, an ecclesiastical dynasty, was dreamed of. It may be gathered from the gospels that such an idea was so far from the mind of Christ that his mission was to set at naught just such another hierarchy, which then existed in Israel.
In an age and a country which had not yet thoroughly learned the lesson taught by hundreds of thousands of murders committed by an orthodox church, he was one of those who considered the substitution of a new dogma and a new hierarchy, a new orthodoxy and a new church, in place of the old ones, a satisfactory result for fifty, years of perpetual bloodshed.
Average Keltic priests fully bear out the description furnished by a loyal priest of Donegal, who, on alluding to their social status and Maynooth course, said: "They are merely shaved labourers, stall-fed for three years." As to their exceptional claims. The attitude of omniscience and omnipotence has often been crudely stated by the Catholic hierarchy.
They were plans for the settlement of a wholly invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public hope. For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes's speech, is a hierarchy of symbols.
Next in point of consequence as well as of numbers and initiative is the personnel of the control, the ruling class, the administration, the official community, the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom, under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the populace.
But in 553 the last embers of resistance were quenched in blood. Italy, devastated and depopulated, was reorganised as an imperial province with an elaborate hierarchy of civil and military officials. The change was welcome to the orthodox clergy, the more so because Justinian gave large powers in local administration to their bishops.
But, between this arrangement and the artificial hierarchy of the Comedy, it is impossible to find a bridge to pass over. One of the real links betwixt the novels is the reappearance of the same people in many of them, which thing is not in itself displeasing.
The reader will be able to understand, from the facts of this chapter, to what extent the individual was sacrificed to the family, as a religious body. From servant to master up through all degrees of the household hierarchy the law of duty was the same: obedience absolute to custom and tradition.