Note 865 — Chapter IV

With the increase of wealth and the progress of learning in the Christian community, the number and variety of clerical offices was greatly multiplied, and all the paraphernalia of pomp and gorgeous ritual were added. A multitude of inferior ecclesiastical dependants hung upon the church, absorbing its strength, corrupting its virtue, and degrading its character. The knowledge of their very names and offices has become a difficult task. Thus we have sacristarii, or keepers of the sacred vestments and vessels; cappellani, or attendants on the altar; matricularii, or marshals of the public processions; staurophori, or cross bearers; ceroferarii and thuriferarii, the bearers of tapers and incense; and parafrenarii, or coachmen of the higher ecclesiastics—the latter, according to Mabillon, being themselves reckoned among the clergy. There were also œconomi, or stewards of church lands; thesaurii, or treasurers of ecclesiastical funds; notarii, or secretaries; apocrisiarii, or legates; cancellarii, or chancellors; syndici, or syndics; and hermeneutai, or interpreters, chiefly in the Syrian and African churches, where the congregation used different languages—speaking to the people in an unknown tongue is a Romish innovation. Even the offices of highest dignity were indefinitely multiplied. There were several orders of bishops:—metropolitans, archbishops, patriarchs, primates, and exarchs; bishops diocesan, bishops quiescentes, that is, without charges, and titular bishops with charges in partibus infidelium; suffragan bishops and chorepiscopi; cardinals and vicars general; and many other officers of lordly titles, princely wealth, and vast political power. But of these we find no examples, no prototypes in the epitaphs of the Catacombs, nor in the lowly pastors of the persecuted flock of Christ in the primitive ages of the church. The application of the title of pope with its present signification to the early bishops is a ludicrous anachronism and misnomer, as nothing could be further from the reality than the idea which it now suggests.

Like the vine, which, twining round some noble elm, seems to enhance its beauty, but in time completely stifles its strength in its strangling embrace, so the rank growth of human institutions has strangled the life of the goodly tree of Roman Christianity, and blighted the promise of its early years. Forms of ritual should be but the trellis for the support of a spiritual worship; else, better that, like the brazen serpent, they be broken in pieces, and, like the body of Moses, buried in an unknown sepulchre, than become the objects of idolatrous homage or of superstitious veneration.