e Ages have been without such aims and aspirations?
Oh, what a benevolent mission the Papacy performed in its best ages,
mitigating the sorrows of the poor, raising the humble from degradation,
opposing slavery and war, educating the ignorant, scattering the Word of
God, heading off the dreadful tyranny of feudalism, elevating the
learned to offices of trust, shielding the pious from the rapacity of
barons, recognizing man as man, proclaiming Christian equalities,
holding out the hopes of a future life to the penitent believer, and
proclaiming the sovereignty of intelligence over the reign of brute
forces and the rapacity of ungodly men! All this did Leo, and his
immediate successors. And when he superadded to the functions of a great
religious magistrate the virtues of the humblest Christian,--parting
with his magnificent patrimony to feed the poor, and proclaiming (with
an eloquence unusual in his time) the cardinal doctrines of the
Christian faith, and setting himself as an example of the virtues which
he preached,--we concede his claim to be numbered among the great
benefactors of mankind. How much worse Roman Catholicism would have been
but for his august example and authority! How much better to educate the
ignorant people, who have souls to save, by the patristic than by
heathen literature, with all its poison of false philosophies and
corrupting stimulants! Who, more than he and his immediate successors,
taught loyalty to God as the universal Sovereign, and the virtues
generated by a peaceful life,--patriotism, self-denial, and faith? He
was a dictator only as Bernard was, ruling by the power of learning and
sanctity. As an original administrative genius he was scarcely surpassed
by Gregory VII. Above all, he sought to establish faith in the world.
Reason had failed. The old civilization was a dismal mockery of the
aspirations of man. The schools of Athens could make Sophists,
rhetoricians, dialecticians, and sceptics. But the faith of the Fathers
could bring philosophers to the foot of the Cross. What were material
conquests to these conquests of the soul, to this spiritual reign of the
invisible principles of the kingdom of Christ?

So, as the vicegerents of Almighty power, the popes began to reign.
Ridicule not that potent domination. What lessons of human experience,
what great truths of government, what principles of love and wisdom are
interwoven with it! Its growth is more suggestive than the rise of any