The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 680

Appendix
General Notes
Revisions adopted by the E. G. White Trustees November 19, 1956,
and December 6, 1979.
Page 50. Titles.—In a passage which is included in the Roman
Catholic Canon Law, or Corpus Juris Canonici, Pope Innocent III
declares that the Roman pontiff is “the vicegerent upon earth, not of a
mere man, but of very God;” and in a gloss on the passage it is explained
that this is because he is the vicegerent of Christ, who is “very God
and very man.” See Decretales Domini Gregorii Papae IX (Decretals of
the Lord Pope Gregory IX), liber 1, De Translatione Episcoporum, (On
the Transference of Bishops), title 7, ch. 3; Corpus Juris Canonici (2d
Leipzig Ed., 1881), col. 99; (Paris, 1612), tom. 2, Decretales, col. 205.
The documents which formed the decretals were gathered by Gratian,
who was teaching at the University of Bologna about the year 1140. His
work was added to and re-edited by Pope Gregory IX in an edition issued
in 1234. Other documents appeared in succeeding years from time to
time including the Extravagantes, added toward the close of the fifteenth
century, all of these, with Gratian’s Decretum, were published as the
Corpus Juris Canonici in 1582. Pope Pius X authorized the codification
in canon law in 1904, and the resulting code beca