Thomas Babington Macaulay, unusual for an Evangelical, became fascinated by the Church of Rome in which he found many things to admire, and in his essay on Ranke's History of the Pope's in the 1840 Edinburgh Review he both argued that it had proved itself the most successful and long-lived of all Western institutions and it had done so because — and this would certainly have been a point particularly surprising to Victorian Protestants — it handled dissent far more positively than had those who broke away from it. — George P. Landow
here is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human
policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic
Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great
ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing
which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of
sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers
bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses
are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme
Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the
Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope
who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin
the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of
fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the
republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and
the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The
Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of
life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending
forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous
as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting
hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted
Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former
age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated
for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency
extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of
the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may
not improbably contain a population as large as that which now
inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not
fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult
to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred
and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that
the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the
commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical
establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no
assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all.
She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on
Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian
eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still
worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in
undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall,
in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch
of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
Related Material
References
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. "Van Ranke." 1840. Project Gutenberg text viewed 16 November 2006.
Ranke, Leopold. The Ecclesiastical and political History of the Popes of Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated from the German, by SARAH AUSTIN. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1840.
Last modified 6 November 2006