A TRIBUTE TO ST. GREGORY VII.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 509, 12 January 1883, Page 5

A TRIBUTE TO ST. GREGORY VII.

A WBITBE in the Contemporary Review, W. S. Lilly, discnssing the* subject, " The Turning Point of the Middle Ages," pays this tribute to St. Gregory VII. It is eight centuries ago that Gregory passed away. But his work has not passed away. The world has been made better by that man's life and doing, better for us in this Nineteenth Century. He laboured, and we— the heirs of all the ages— have entered into his labours. Let me, in conclusion, set down what it is that we immediately owe him. The debt of the modern world to Gregory is mainly this ; that by his heroic courage and faith unfailing, the triumph of monarchical absolutism throughout Europe was retarded for two centuries— centuries during which the new nationalities rallied closely around the apostolic throne, were informed with the conception of a higher law than any resting merely on material power, of a more sacred fealty than any due to secular rulers. His earliest biographer describes him as wrestling against and overcoming kings, tyrants, duke*, princes and all the jailors of human souls. And this is an exact description of the battle which he fought and won. For the victory was truly his, although it was not until the pontificate of Callixtus 11., fifty years after his death, that the last and greatest of the issues debated by him — the question of the investiture —was settled, substantially in favour of the Church. His successors were animated by his spirit ; they did but unswervingly adhere to his principles ; in their lofty words we seem to catch the accents of him, though dead, yet speaking. To him it is primarily and especially due that the institution of bishops, as the basis of episcopal government, ceased to be confounded with investiture. The collect in his office rightly speaks of him as the defender of ecclesiastical liberty. We owe it to him that the Latin Church did not sink, like the Greek, into the puppet of imperial despotism, and that the human conscience was recognised in the Western world as a domain into which the jurisdiction of temporal princes did mot extend. But Gregory was the saviour of political freedom too. He was the founder of communal liberty in Italy ; the apostle of Italian independence. The triumph of the spiritual element over brute force involved the triumph of municipal and national freedom over feudal tyranny. The liberty of the Church, in every age is in exact proportion to the general liberties enjoyed. And the distinction between the two powers, spiritual and temporal, the two orders, ecclesiastical and civil, is the very foundation on which individual freedom rests, in this modern world of ours — the supreme gain of modern society over the politics of antiquity. It is a distinction which materialism, the expression of the paganism innate in human nature, manifesting itself in the public order, in the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, is ewr attempting to obliterate. It seemed to have disappeared from the world in what Mr. Matthew Arnold happily calls the " sea suous tumult of the Renaissance," and in the period of absorbing and absolute monarchy which followed. Especially in the eighteenth, century, the century of the era in which the Catholio Church reached her deepest degradation— and nowhere was she more degraded than in Catholic countries — but few traces of it are to be found by the most diligent search in Continental Europe, although in England, thanks to the casting out of the " new monarchy " in 1688, it gradually established itself under the altered form which the dissolution of religious unity had compelled it to assume, of freedom of worship and freedom of the Press. Yes, that liberty of conscience before human law, which the English speaking races enjoy in this nineteenth century, is but the expression in the shape required by this changed time, of the great principle for which Gregory fought. There is not a Glassite, a Sandemanian, a Seventh Day Baptist, a. Recreative Religionist among us who is not directly indebted to this Catholic saint for his right to the enjoyment of his uncouth stoibboleths; not a newspaper exponent cf sensualism or secularism, of the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion, who does not owe to this great Pontiff the right to abound in his own sense — or nonsense. And the forces which in Gregory's time fought against this freedom are fighting against it in our own time.