Commenting on the Church during the third century:
But we must confess that the power of the Roman pontiff, and his
relation to the universal Church, were not fully developed. Like all other essential parts of the
constitution of the Church, the supremacy was known and acknowledged from the beginning
as a divine institution, but it required time to unfold its faculties:
it assumed by degrees the determined form, in which the bishop of Rome exercised
systematically the authority entrusted to him for the preservation of the
internal and external unity of the Church. It was in the natural order of
events, that the formation of particular Churches should precede, and that the
connexion of the bishop with his clergy and flock should be firmly established:
then came the time for the institution of the metropolitan authority; and as
the union of the Churches became more formal and more close, the supremacy came
forth, the operations of which were less frequent in times that were employed
in propagating the faith, in founding and in establishing new Churches; but it
displayed itself the more evidently the more the unity of the Church was, in
later times, shaken by dangerous assaults, and the more it was torn by heresy and
schism. (Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, A History of the Church, 4
vols. (trans. Edward Cox; London: C. Dolman, 1840], 1:263; note that this was
written when the author was still a faithful, believing Roman Catholic and
before he wrote The Pope and the Council)
