Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas
Babington Macaulay, unusual for an Evangelical,
became fascinated by the Church of Rome in which he found many things
to admire, and in his essay on Ranke's History
of the Pope's
in the 1840 Edinburgh
Review he
both argued that it had proved itself the most successful and
long-lived of all Western institutions and it had done so because —
and this would certainly have been a point particularly surprising to
Victorian Protestants — it handled
dissent far
more positively than had those who broke away from it. — George
P. Landow
here
is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so
well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The
history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human
civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the
mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the
Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian
amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when
compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace
back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the
nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and
far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is
lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in
antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with
the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy
remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but
full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still
sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as
zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still
confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she
confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any
former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than
compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual
ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the
plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century
hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which
now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not
fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to
show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and
twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term
of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all
the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now
exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined
to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the
Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine,
when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were
still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in
undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in
the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of
London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
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