ment of appeals to the Roman See.* Then, A.D. 861, Hincmar, one of the ablest of Gallican archbishops, deposes his suffragan, Rothad of Soissons, and the deposed bishop makes Rome his refuge. Again the canons of Sardica are appeal * It is interesting, but not very important, that the bishops of the English Church accepted at the Council of Hertford (A.D. 673) a collection of canons which must probably have contained those of Sardica. It was a volume presented by Theodore of Tarsus, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and it is pretty sure to have been the collection of Dionysius Exiguus, made about A.D. 500, and representing for long after the popular idea of what was generally binding law in the Western Church. But two things are worthy of notice in connection with this: (1) None of these canons were binding upon the English Church as an independent province, unless by the acceptance of the authorities of that province, and what was made law by the authorities of that independent province, the authorities of that independent province had a right at any later time to abrogate. (2) There is no example of the application of the Sardican scheme to England. Thus in A.D. 678, when Wilfrid of York appealed against Archbishop Theodore to Agatho of Rome, Agatho did not call upon the bishops of any neighboring province, Scotland, Ireland, or Gaul, to hold a trial, but heard the case himself with a council of fifty Italian bishops. He followed the scheme of Valentinian rather than that of Sardica, which never was put in practice anywhere at all. It is pleasant to add that the English Church of that day resented his interference very sharply and very properly, and did not submit to it for a moment, which is all the more noticeable, because on the merits of the original question Wilfrid was quite right, and Theodore quite wrong. ed to as if they were of living authority, and the light of scholarship is found to have died down so low that there is no resistance to their claim. But presently the pope takes a higher tone. It is Nicholas I. who now sits in the Roman bishop's chair, and the forged decretals have just been put into his too willing hands. Hincmar had been prepared to submit to the Sardican scheme, but he had contended (rightly) that it merely allowed the bishop of Rome to order a new trial by neighboring bishops, with assessors sent by himself, and certainly not to call either party, either bishop or metropolitan, to Rome, nor to sit as judge in the cause himself. The answer is startling. Nicholas would have called this case before him, even if Rothad had not appealed. Sardica is now brushed aside. The poor old ghost is of no use any more. A far more terrifying, and alas! an even more unhistorical apparition is now on the scene. The Forged Decretals are accepted as history. The light of critical scholarship is gone out. The Church's traditions of liberty have been forgotten. The papacy has begun. Above the appeal to Rome, carefully limited to cases of deposition from the episcopate, towers up the new claim of the Roman See to interfere in any matter whatsoever merely upon the universal pope's own motion. There remains but one thing to say, which is this: In all these eight hundred years which we have been reviewing, neither the summons to Rome nor even the most guarded appeal to Rome has been found to receive the sanction of the Catholic Church. |