What is the Latin Church?

Inasmuch as there have been from the first century Christians at Rome, and that Europe did at one time universally follow her ritual and allow her supremacy, we must concede to her, as far as antiquity is concerned, a claim superior to all others to be called the church.

It was not till after the first council of Nice that the supremacy of the Romish bishops was generally allowed. The early bishops of Rome are scarcely known in ecclesiastical history. The accession of Innocent I., in the year 402, gave force and definition to this new tenet of the Latin church. Till this time there had been no legal recognition of the supremacy of Rome, though she was considered the principal church in the West, and had been frequently appealed to by the other great bishops for a spiritual judgment in matters of dispute. When the Greek church fell into Arianism, the Latin adhered firmly to the Nicene creed, which raised her much in the opinion of all the West. "Upon the mind of Innocent," says Milman, "appears first to have dawned the vast conception of Rome's universal ecclesiastical supremacy; dim as yet and shadowy, but full and comprehensive in its outline."

In spite of this history of development in doctrine and practice over a period of centuries, the Church of Rome claims to be the first Church and that which Christ established on earth with Peter as the first pope. As Romanism has greatly revived and presses its claims with great activity in our present day, many are becoming ensnared and led astray by its subtle propaganda. Therefore it is necessary that we speak out clearly and faithfully in warning souls as to this false and evil system of Jezebel teaching which the Lord condemned in Thyatira. The true Church, founded by Christ on Himself as the Rock foundation (Matt.16:16-18; 1 Cor.3:11), is found in the book of Acts and in the Epistles of the New Testament. It is "the church, which is His body" and the glorified Christ is its only head. It is the "church of the firstborn," those born again and baptized by the Spirit of God into this divine body, and whose names are written in heaven (Eph.1:21,22; 1 Cor.12:13; Heb.12:23). In the Epistle to the Romans, written by the apostle Paul around 60 AD, we can see what characterized the first Church there and note how vastly different are the doctrines and practices of the Papal system at Rome today. The Church of Rome developed out of the evils which came into the professing Church in the Pergamos period. It is the first corrupt and idolatrous Church, where the elements of Judaism and heathenism were combined into a fixed, systematized teaching under the garb or cloak of Christianity.

I have already tried to point out that every one of these names seems to be significant. Thyatira is perhaps the most difficult of all to define. Scholars tell us that it comes from two words, one meaning a sacrifice, or an incense-offering; the other, that which goes on continually. A suggested interpretation, therefore, is "continual sacrifice." And this is very significant, because Thyatira undoubtedly sets forth the period which was the result of the union of church and State, already noticed. It was in the 7th century that the Bishop of Rome was first regularly recognized as Christ's vicegerent, and visible head of the church. This was, properly speaking, the beginning of the papacy. There was no Roman Catholic church, in the full sense, until the Pope was the acknowledged head of Christendom. It is important for Protestants to keep this in mind. You will often hear papists say, "You know the first church was the Roman Catholic church, and all the different branches of the Protestant church have simply broken off from Rome. There was no Protestant church until the days of Luther." That is an absolute sophistry. There was no such thing as the papacy until the 7th century of the Christian era. For six centuries before that, the church was becoming more and more corrupt -- had been drifting further away from the Word of God until, in the 7th century men professing themselves to be servants of God were ready to acknowledge the Pope as head of all Christendom. A Roman Catholic once asked a bright Protestant school-girl, "Where was your church before the days of Henry VIII?" "Why, sir, where yours never was, in the Bible," was her sensible and correct reply. It is a far cry from the simplicity of early Christians, when in the 7th century they were ready to own the pretensions of the bishop of Rome.

The papal monarchy is now established. The court of France and the papacy are united. Rome is now dissevered from the East, and become the centre of influence over all the West. But having traced the dark lines of the apostasy of Latin Christianity from the beginning of the fourth to the beginning of the ninth century, we will now turn for a little and endeavour to trace the silver line of God's sovereign grace in those who separated from her communion during the same period. If Satan was active in corrupting the outward church, God was active in gathering out His own from the corrupt mass, and strengthening them as His own special witnesses. From the days of Augustine, the noble witness for His grace against Pelagianism in Western Christendom, down to the Reformation, a line of faithful witnesses may be traced who testified against the idolatry and tyranny of Rome, and preached salvation through faith in Christ Jesus without works of merit. Besides multitudes who were nourished in private, both in convents and families, on the simple truth of the gospel, we would briefly notice some of the most prominent who form an important link in the great chain of witnesses, especially as connected with the history of the church in Europe.

The ecclesiastical system which the Italian monks introduced into England rapidly spread, and ultimately triumphed. In about a hundred years after the arrival of Augustine, it was professed and believed throughout Anglo-Saxon Britain. The English church, thus founded on the Roman model, could not fail to hold a position especially dependent on Rome. This union at an early period was promoted and strengthened by English monks, nuns, bishops, nobles, and princes, making frequent pilgrimages to the grave of St. Peter at Rome. In no country were the Roman missionaries more successful than among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors though they were considered the fiercest of the Teutonic race The British clergy, though still adhering to their old ways; and disposed to resist foreign assumption, were compelled to seclude themselves in the extremities of the land. Romanism now prevailed all over England.

The exclusive dominion of the Latin or Roman church was now drawing to a close. Since the pontificate of Gregory the Great, or for nearly a thousand years, she had reigned supreme. But the oppressed Teuton was now raising the arm of rebellion against the tyranny of the Roman. The warfare ended in a great secession of the Teutons, in wresting from the papacy a large portion of her dominions, and in the breaking up of Christendom, like the ship in which Paul sailed to Rome.

For some period after the first profession of Christianity in the West of Europe, all christian writers seemed to have used the Greek as the ecclesiastical language, and not the Latin — no doubt for two reasons, mainly. In the first place, the apostles and early emissaries from the East spoke Greek, and, in many cases, no other tongue. Respect for these teachers, and imitation of them, naturally produced a continuation of their speech. In the second place, there existed a strong and a reasonable wish to preserve the unity of the Church, and to keep it from separating into fragments.

This wish, however, was in vain. In the third century, there were many influences at work, which were fast tending to divide the huge Roman empire, and the Church along with it, into two parts. In the West, the people of Italy, Spain, Gaul, and that portion of the other continent then known emphatically as Africa, of which Carthage was the principal city, spoke Latin, and owed their civilisation and their Christianity also, almost entirely to Rome. They stood apart, therefore, from the people of the East, who spoke Greek, whose civilisation and Christianity both were of older date than those of Rome; and who, in some respects, considered the Italians as still barbarous. In consequence of this constitutional variance between the East and the West, the Greek language obtained no permanent footing in the latter, but was gradually driven back to its original seats; and Latin Christians began to discard the Greek, and to revert to Latin as their common tongue.

And as gradually, and almost imperceptibly, a Latin version of the scriptures came into notice, which soon displaced the Septuagint. It was a literal translation from that venerable document, as far as the Old Testament was concerned, and from the original Greek of the New Testament. The exact time and place when this version was made are quite uncertain; but from being called the Old Italic (Vetus Itala) in the 4th century, it must have been effected soon after the completion of the New Testament. It could not have been effected before that completion, because it contained the whole of the Canon; at the same time it must have come into being before the year 200, A.D., for it is referred to by the renowned Tertullian, an advocate of Carthage, who lived about that time. The age of the Old Italic may safely be placed in the first half of the second century; and its birth-place was very probably the neighbourhood of Carthage. It was here that Tertullian flourished, who was the first known christian writer who used Latin, and to the influence of whose name in the West the gradual adoption of Latin by other Christians has been traced.

It is very clear that this cleavage points to the fulfilment of prophecy. If the testimony of Christendom were marked by only one religion, when the rising up on the one hand of the Romish Empire, and of that of Gog and Magog (Russia, etc.,) as the great northern confederacy takes place that would introduce a very difficult element in the working out of prophecy. On the other hand if Gog and Magog (Russia, etc.) were marked by the Greek religion, and the revived Roman Empire by the Roman religion, there would be no restraint imposed by religion when the political uprising of these empires takes place. It seems as if the details and practices that Roman Catholicism stands for, as foretold in Revelation 17, and which have largely passed into history, identifies the prophecy concerning Thyatira as indicating the Western church, and not the Eastern. The Eastern church thrives among the Slav nations; the Western among the Latin races.

First, unity. That the church of God was one at the beginning, and manifestly and publicly such, is evident to every one that reads the scriptures. That it is not, if we consider it as a public visible body on earth (for the true body of Christ will be infallibly so in glory, and is so always in the living unity of the Spirit) is equally evident, from the simple fact that we are inquiring which of two or three bodies, or if any of them, be the true church. Unity of doctrine, and general discipline, which you give as being unity, is not sufficient. These may prove sameness in two bodies, as well as unity. There must be corporate unity — a single body. I therefore seek more than you do in unity. Further, your proofs of unity are utterly vain and useless; they are as true of the Greek body, which detests and rejects you, as of the Romish, which denounces the Greek as schismatic and heretical. They have bishops and the assemblings on Sundays, and the Eucharist, and the same doctrines, and the same general discipline, which you plead as proofs for Rome. You would find these in the Protestant Episcopal church too all over tile world. Perhaps, indeed, we may except a confession to a priest. But what a strange mark of unity you have given us here. It is perfectly certain that if it be one, no Christian for centuries after Christ was in the one true church. There is not an historical point more incontestable than this, that private confession to a priest is a novelty unknown to the early church. After the earliest times men did public penance for scandalous falls, and no confession was imposed as to others. There was indeed for a time one penitentiary priest at Constantinople, and, as it appears elsewhere; and such scandal arose, on a certain occasion, from it, that it was abolished by Nectarius; and his successor, Chrysostom, at the end of the fourth century, urges, over and over again, confession to God alone. Augustine's words are equally clear; so are Ambrose's. In the thirteenth century alone it was first made obligatory by the Lateran Council under Innocent III — the same pope under whom the Inquisition was established, and the Crusades formed against the Albigenses, and the atrocities of that "holy war" perpetrated in the south of France.