Lectures on the Reunion of the Churches (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1872 Excerpt: ...the unspeakable misery of the people, so utterly neglected, deceived, and plundered by their pastors, all this was fully admitted on the other side. And more than this too: the Popes themselves could not deny--for it was too notorious--that Eome itself was the seat and source of corruption, and the Popes its authors and disseminators. Adrian VI. had it openly proclaimed at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522, that everything in the Church had been perverted, and a disease had spread from the head to the members, from the Popes to the rest of the rulers of the Church.1 And what Adrian proclaimed in general, in accents of penitence, the Germans read in detail twelve years later in the famous memorial drawn up at the command of Paul III. by nine Eoman prelates, including Caraffa, afterwards Paul iv., where the theory invented by sycophants of the Pope's absolute dominion over the whole Church was characterized as the source of all this corruption.1 One member of the Commission, Cardinal Contarini, who was afterwards papal legate in Germany, expressly maintained the impiety of this doctrine, which made the Pope absolute lord and master of the whole Church, and defended Luther's work on the Babylonish Captivity, where the doctrine of Christian liberty is opposed to this tyrannical doctrine. 1 Adrian vi., a Netherlander, who succeeded Leo x. in 1522, was a man of deep piety, but he reigned only one year. He was the last non-Italian Pope. What was communicated to the Emperor Charles V. as the wish and advice of the Pope, was mainly comprised in the request to put down the German movement by force of arms. The Legate Campeggio represented in 1530 that capital punishment and the establishment of the Inquisition in all German countries 1 Paul in. commenced his reign by sum...