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Show 364 THE CITY OF THE SAINTS. CHAP. IX ism in El Islam, still shows its traces in the worship and various observances of a doxology which by literalism and exaggeration has wholly separated itself from the older creeds of the world. Thus we find Mormonism to be in its origin English, Protestant, anti-Catholic, Methodistic. It may be advisable briefly to trace the steps by which we arrive at this undesirable end. The birth of Eomanism, according to the Eeformed writers, dates from certain edicts issued by Theo-dosius II. and by Valentinian III., and constituting the Bishop of Eome " Eector of the whole Church." The newly-born hierarchy, found tender nurses in Justinian, Pepin, and Charlemagne, and in the beginning of the eleventh century St. Gregory VH. (Hilde-brand the Great) supplied the prime want of the age by establishing a visible theocracy, with a vicar of Jesus Christ at its head. To the existence of a mediatorial priestly caste, the officials of a spiritual despotism, claiming power of censure and excommunication, and the gift of the crown terrestrial as well as celestial, anti-papistical writers trace the various vices and corruptions inherent in a semi-barbarous age, the "melancholy duality" of faith and works of religion and morality which seems to belong to the Southern mind, and the Oriental semi-Pelagianism which taught that man might be self-sanctified or vicariously saved, with its logical deductions, penance, benefices, indulgences. An excessive superstition endured for a season. Then set in the inevitable reaction : the extreme religiousness, that characteristic of the earnest quasi-pagan age of the Christian Church, in the fullness of time fell into the opposite excess, Eationalism and its natural consequences, infidelity and irreligion. Beformers were not wanting before the Eeformation. As early as 1170, Pierre Vaud, or Valdo, of Lyons, sold off his merchandise, and appealing from popery to Scripture and to primitive Christianity, as in a later day did Jeremy Bentham from St. Paul to his Master, attacked the Eoman hierarchy. John Wicliffe (1310-1385) is claimed by his countrymen to have originated the "liberal ideas" by which British Protestantism was matured; it is owned even by foreigners that he influenced opinion from Oxford to far Bohemia. He died peaceably, but the Wiclifiites, who presently were called Lollards-"tares" sown by the fiend-though supported by the Commons against Henry IV. and his party, the dignified clergy, suffered, until the repeal of the Act " de hsereticis comburendis," the fiercest persecution. During the reign of Henry V. they gained strength, as the pronunciamento of 20,000 men in St. Giles's Fields under Sir John Oldcastle proves: the cruel death of their leader only served to strengthen them, supported as they were by the lower branch of the Legislature in their opposition to the crown. On the Continent of Europe the great follower of Wicliffe was John Huss, who preached in Bohemia about a century before the days of Luther, and who, condemned by the |
