Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

176 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY.
I
The Eomish idea of the living presence of Christ with His
Church, in the person and in the judgments
of the Chief
Bishop of Christendom, was hardly condensed into form in
the twelfth Century. It was floating in a nebulous state in
the atmosphere of mediaeval society,
and it touched ith some wr
thing of its unearthly lustre every minister and ordinance
of the Church. Then the Church was the ruling idea, now
it is the Pope. Men trembled before churchmen because
of the Higher Presence that was supposed to be in them :
and there was a constant struggle between the reverence
which the priest challenged as the organ of Christ, and
the hatred and contempt which the actual priest, as a
person, constantly awakened. So long as reverence for the
Church remained a sentiment pervading in a vague way
the whole body of Christian society, its
power was incal
culable. When this sentiment of the Holy
Presence settled
finally into a theory of Papal autocracy ;
when men could
look at it as an institution and judge
it as a law, its
power
began to wane. This is true on a wider scale. In every
age and in every region of man s experience, how much
vital vigour is lost in the transition from idea to institution,
from sentiment to law.
Becket stands as the representative of the pure Church
idea, which is not the same thing as the Ptomish system,
v With him it is not Pope against King,
it is Church
against King. Becket was a Latin churchman, and acknow
ledged the Pope as his earthly head. But the help
of the
Pope, though valuable, was not essential to his position.
In the twelfth century, we repeat, the idea of the Church
as a corporation of spiritual persons with their belongings,
acting as the organ of the unseen and dreaded Lord, had
not finally centred itself in Ptome. It was gravitating
that way, but there was much papal schisms, papal avarice,
papal corruption, and the like to hinder it. To the great