Copy 1, Volume 1

The history of the popes, their church and state, and especially of their conflicts with Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Translated by E. Foster.

  • Leopold von Ranke
Date:
1847-1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of the popes, their church and state, and especially of their conflicts with Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Translated by E. Foster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    words. He had not where to lay his head. Yet, even from the worldly point of view whence we consider it, we may safely assert, that nothing more guileless or more impressive, more exalted or more holy, has ever been seen on earth than were his life, his whole conversation, and his death. In his every word there breathes the pure spirit of God. They are words, as St. Peter has expressed it, of eternal life. The _ records of humanity present nothing that can be compared, however remotely, with the life of Jesus. If the earlier forms of belief had ever contained an element of true religion, this was now entirely obscured; they no longer, as we have said, could pretend to the slightest signifi- cance. In Him who united the nature of man with that of God, there shone forth, in contrast with these shadows, the universal and eternal relation of God to the world, and of man to God. Jesus Christ was born among a people broadly separated and distinguished from all others by ritual laws of rigid and exclusive severity, but which also possessed the inappreciable merit of holding steadfastly to that worship of the one true God in which they had persisted from their earliest existence, and from which no power could sever them. It is true that they considered this monotheism as a national worship only, but it was now to receive a much wider significance. Christ abolished the law by fulfilling it; the Son of Man declared himself Lord also of the Sabieth, and rendered manifest the eternal import of those forms, which a narrow understanding had as yet but imperfectly comprehended. Thus, from the bosom of a people hitherto separated by insurmountable barriers of opinion and customs from every other, there arose, with all the force of truth, a faith which invited and re- ceived all men. The Universal Father was now proclaimed, —that God who, as St. Paul declared to the Athenians, “‘ hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” For this sublime doctrine, the moment, as we have seen, had now arrived—a race of men existed who could appreciate its value. ‘ Like a sunbeam,” says Eusebius, “it streamed over the face of the earth.”* * Hist. Eccl. ii. 3. B 2
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