But perhaps none of these impostures surpassed in audacity that offered by a monastery in Jerusalem, which presented to the beholder one of the fingers of the Holy Ghost! Modern society has silently rendered its verdict on these scandalous objects.
Though they once nourished the piety of thousands of earnest people, they are now considered too vile to have a place in any public museum.
How shall we account for the great failure we thus detect in the guardianship of the Church over Europe?
This is not the result that must have occurred had there been in Rome an unremitting care for the spiritual and material prosperity of the continent, had the universal pastor, the successor of Peter, occupied himself with singleness of purpose for the holiness and happiness of his flock.
The explanation is not difficult to find.

It is contained in a story of sin and shame.

I prefer, therefore, in the following paragraphs, to offer explanatory facts derived from Catholic authors, and, indeed, to present them as nearly as I can in the words of those writers.
The story I am about to relate is a narrative of the transformation of a confederacy into an absolute monarchy.
In the early times every church, without prejudice to its agreement with the Church universal in all essential points, managed its own affairs with perfect freedom and independence, maintaining its own traditional usages and discipline, all questions not concerning the whole Church, or of primary importance, being settled on the spot.
Until the beginning of the ninth century, there was no change in the constitution of the Roman Church.

But about 845 the Isidorian Decretals were fabricated in the west of Gaul--a forgery containing about one hundred pretended decrees of the early popes, together with certain spurious writings of other church dignitaries and acts of synods.

This forgery produced an immense extension of the papal power, it displaced the old system of church government, divesting it of the republican attributes it had possessed, and transforming it into an absolute monarchy.