We do not know; but it is an incontestable fact that it was in Rome itself under the pontificate of Adrian,
- Hist. Eccl. liv. xliv.
made such haste that he overlooked some faults and chronological errours which were afterward corrected by more exact criticism." Thus, then, the Decretals of the first three centuries are false; nevertheless they are substantially true. Such is the Ultramontane system. It only remains to say, to make the business complete, that the texts of St. Leo and St. Gregory the Great, which are found in these Decretals, do not belong to those fathers, who, in that case, must have copied them from the Decretals of their predecessors. It would be quite as reasonable to maintain this opinion, as to say that we only find in the False Decretals a few faults and chronological errours.
To this first system of defence, the Ultramontanes add a second. They make a great display of eloquence to prove that an unknown person without any authority could never have introduced a new code in the Church. We think so too. But there is one great fact of the very highest importance which our Ultramontanes have left out of sight, that, at the time when the False Decretals appeared, the see of Rome had for about two centuries taken advantage of every occurrence to increase her influence and to put into practice what the False Decretals lay down as the law. Every one knows that after the fall of the Roman empire, most of the Western nations were essentially modified by the invasion of new races; that the Church seriously felt this change; that the pursuit of learning was abandoned, and that after the seventh century the most deplorable ignorance reigned in the Western churches. From that time the Bishops of Rome began to take part directly in the government of individual churches, which frequently' lay in the hands of only half-Christianized conquerors. They sent missionaries to labour for the conversion of the invading tribes; and these missionaries, like St. Boniface of Mayence, retained for the Popes who sent them, the feelings of disciples for their masters. The churches newly founded by them, remained faithful to these sentiments. It would not, therefore, be surprising if the fabricator of the False Decretals lived in or near Mayence. He composed that work of fragments from the councils and the Fathers, and added regulations which were in perfect harmony with the usages of the see of Rome at the end of the eighth century, and which Rome, doubtless, inspired.
This coïncidence, joined to the ignorance which then prevailed, explains sufficiently how the False Decretals could be accepted without protest — the see of Rome using all its influence to spread them. As most of the churches had been accustomed for two centuries to feel the authority of the Bishops of Rome, they accepted without examination documents which seemed to be no more than the sanction of this authority. The False Decretals did not therefore create a new code for the Western churches; they only came in aid of a régime which, owing to political disturbances, the Popes themselves had created.
Thus the Romanists have their labour for their pains, when they seek to defend the Decretals by saying that an unknown author without authority could not have established a new code.
Here are the objections that Fleury makes to the False Decretals: "The subject-matter of these letters* reveals their spuriousness. They speak of archbishops, primates, patriarchs, as if these titles had existed from the birth of the Church. They forbid the holding of any council, even a provincial one, without permission from the Pope, and represent appeals to Rome as habitual. Frequent complaint is therein made of usurpations of the temporalities of the Church. We find there this maxim,
