The spurious donation of Constantine, by which the first Christian sovereign was alleged to have conveyed to Pope Sylvester I. the title to the Western Empire, and with it the inherited authority of the Cæsars, was supplemented in the eighth century by the Forged Decretals, a series of epistles declared to have been promulgated by the first Bishops of Rome, whose names and order of apostolic succession are themselves either apocryphal or based entirely on uncertain tradition. The inconsistencies, contradictions, and absurdities of the Decretals, which afford abundant internal evidence of the ignorance of those who composed them, and their entire want of concord on important points of doctrine, have demonstrated beyond question their fraudulent origin. But in an age of superstition their authority was amply sufficient to accomplish the object for which they were invented,--the autocracy of the Popes. The general deficiency of critical knowledge, assisted by the reverence entertained by the masses for the decisions of the Successor of St. Peter, caused these glaring forgeries to be accepted with the same faith which was accorded to the precepts of the Gospel. They conferred the most extensive and dangerous prerogatives on the Papacy. They subjected the claims of every temporal sovereign to the extravagant pretensions of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The right of regal investiture was by their maxims declared to be inherent in members of the sacerdotal order, and the title of a monarch alleged to be imperfect until he had been crowned by a servant of the Church. By their incorporation into the civil procedure of Europe,--for centuries dominated by the canon law,--they established on a permanent basis the ideas and the principles of Papal supremacy. No measure of statecraft has ever advanced the interests of the Holy See to such an extent as the publication of the Decretals, nor has any genuine series of laws exercised over society a more potent influence than that imposed by these fraudulent epistles upon subsequent legislation.