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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 to 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 vigor.
So wrote Macaulay more than 150 years ago. The occasion for this memorable essay, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1840, was the appearance of an English version of Leopold von Ranke's The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Neither Ranke nor Macaulay entertained any intrinsic sympathy for the Church of Rome; both were Protestants, though it is probably safe to say that Ranke took his Lutheranism rather more seriously than Macaulay did the evangelical Anglicanism in which he had been reared. Macaulay at any rate tempered his appreciation of the papacy's "youthful vigor" with puzzlement: "The stronger our conviction that reason and scripture were decidedly on the side of Protestantism, the greater is the reluctant admiration with which we regard that system of tactics against which reason and scripture were employed in vain."
More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that both men, in quite different ways, stood at the cutting edge of the writing of history in their day, both represented the first generation of historians who consciously modeled their work on the inductive method of the physical sciences. Taking as their exemplar the physicist in his laboratory, this new breed of researchers into the past pulled away the straitjacket of moral uplift into which their discipline had been bound since Aristotle's time. They repudiated the traditional wisdom that history functioned as a barely respectable species of ethics, teaching virtue by examples. For Ranke, what mattered was to ransack the archives and to find the documentary sources that would make it possible to reconstruct the past "wie es eigentlich gewensen—as it had really happened"; for Macaulay, what mattered was a reconstruction of the past that would provide a literate and plausible explanation of the institutional realities of the present.
It cannot be surprising, therefore, that both of them, despite whatever confessional or intellectual distaste they may have felt, were fascinated by the papal phenomenon, by its antiquity, by its phoenixlike capacity to recover from calamity. Brought time and again to the brink of dissolution, most recently—indeed, within the living memory of them both—by the seemingly irresistible assault of Voltaire and Robespierre, of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, popery had emerged stronger than before. "It is not strange," Macaulay wrote, "that in the year 1799 even sagacious observers should have thought that, at length, the hour of the Church of Rome was come. … But the end was not yet. Again doomed
to death, the milk white hind was still fated not to die. Even before the funeral rites had been performed over the ashes of Pius VI, a great reaction had commenced, which, after the lapse of more than 40 years, appears still to be in progress." The "milk white hind" was, of course, Dryden's metaphor in The Hind and the Panther, which still rang with Catholic defiance of a Protestant culture: "In Pope and Council who denies the place, / Assisted from above with God's unfailing grace."
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