the ownership of land.* Until the German king had gone to Rome and had been crowned he was only emperor-elect. Such was the idea of those times. When the Apostle commanded Christians to "honour the king" the governing powers were heathen; yet, notwithstanding their heathenism, they were the ministers of God for certain purposes. When Constantine became Christian, or semi-Christian, he had an interest in Church matters to which his predecessors were utter strangers. He very properly professed, whatever we may think of his actions, as a layman to sit at the feet of the clergy in spiritual matters. Not so was it with the medieval emperors. They felt that their divine Commission must extend to the spiritualty, and that in that sphere the ecclesiastic must "honour the king." They believed that unless the clergy were subject to them they would constitute a dangerous imperium in imperio, threatening their authority as a whole. Feudalism, the one theory of government which had possession of men's minds then, as democracy has in these days, increased very much this apprehension. Although the emperor, as such, was not a feudal lord, the feudal idea so pervaded all relations that whoever was not a

* See anecdote of Frederick Barbarossa and the jurist Bulgarus mentioned in Bryce's "Holy Roman Empire," Chap. XII.

If

sovereign was thought of as somebody's man. a wealthy archbishop or abbot, who by virtue of his office was the feudal lord of a domain, and maintained knights and men-at-arms, was not the emperor's man, whose man was he? He must be compelled to receive his benefice from the emperor, and to acknowledge him as his lord, by taking the ring and staff from him. The pope, the head and representative of all churchmen, on the other hand, looked at the spiritual side of the prelatical office; and that side needed attention very seriously. Simony was universal and rampant. Other vices were entirely too frequent. The Lord had commissioned St. Peter and his successors to watch over the lives of their brethren in the priesthood and to strengthen them. against sin. Feudalism had also taken possession of the minds of the pope and papalists, and colored their way of thinking of all government. The clergy all owed homage and obedience to the Fisherman, who in turn would protect them from the encroachments of the civil power. The emperor also, holding a peculiarly sacred office, and receiving his crown from the pope, must be subject to the pope in some degree, as the bishops were. Problems of which some (by no means all) appear to have been solved, and others have become obsolete or quiescent to us, were in full force to the medieval mind; and then, as ever,

conviction or self-interest, according to the moral condition of each character, drove men to strong advocacy of one side or the other of questions which they were not able to solve. Feudalism and its proselyte, the Empire, on the one side, contended against the Church's liberty and its ally, the feudalistic papacy; and God, in the course of centuries, wrought out results which would have astonished Gregory beyond measure. What would he have thought if he could have seen, in at least one great Catholic realm, a poor and chaste clergy, living with their wives and families, doing the work of God in peace, and respected by all the people? What if he could have seen that this community had been lifted out of the mire of political and religious chaos in which a self-willed and licentious tyrant had raged against both clerical and Papal Supremacy, albeit with complete success only as to the latter? So far history has brought us. What will it yet show? May we try to imagine him as foreseeing the further progress of that Church, going on, without papal protection, to a complete restoration of the Catholic use of sacraments and devout ascetic life after the ancient manner? God knows. When to our wondering thankfulness for facts accomplished we attempt to add prophecy, we are at sea. Gregory could not tell what was coming,

and we cannot. It is enough if, like him, we act well our part.

The conflict between the pope and the emperor was begun like a veritable battle of the giants. Both of them knew perfectly well what was to be the real issue. Gregory held a synod in which he denied, in a short and pithy decree, the possibility of investiture in sacred offices by the temporal sovereign. Both the cleric accepting and the sovereign bestowing investiture were cut off by this decree from all the privileges of the Church. Then Henry determined to resist. He had made himself powerful in Germany. He had appeared to be the submissive son of the Church until a Saxon insurrection was put down, and so long as he was only called upon to express regret for his personal faults and to oppose simony and clerical incontinence. But now he deliberately violated the rule laid down by Gregory's synod. He granted the Archbishopric of Milan and investiture to Bishops of Fermo and Spoleto, without the knowledge or consent of the pope. Gregory did not hesitate to summon him to Rome to answer for his disobedience. Henry, of course, did not purpose to appear; but he was a good general, and knew two things about his subjects which it is well for us to note. Germany had been christianized from Rome and had imbibed with the fundamentals of the faith the idea that Rome

was the mother of churches. The imperial authority, on the other hand, not being a strictly feudal power, had not a very strong hold on their mental allegiance. I refer to popular feeling.* It was not that the Papal Supremacy was distinctly held as a doctrine by priest and people; but that to Henry's vassals Rome represented Heaven, and was a power to be feared because of sanctions extending beyond this life, while the empire was of their own creation. He therefore

* It is to this kind of feeling, I think, that we must attribute such mistakes as that of Dr. Bryce and other writers, who, only superficially considering the ecclesiastical point of view, speak of "the universal and undisputed authority of the pope " ("Holy Roman Empire," end of Chap. XII.). In a note the distinguished author explains that it was only universal and undisputed as to the West. But it would have been more accurate to have spoken of an alleged universality even in the West. Such disregard of the whole ecclesiastical bearing of facts makes books of this class, however entertaining they may be, of slight value for the purposes of serious churchmen. It may be confidently said that there never was a time when the doctrine of the Papal Supremacy, strictly speaking, was apprehended and admitted throughout the entire West. To look to Rome as the head often meant no more than the missionary and colonial churches looking to Canterbury means in modern Anglicanism. It would not be difficult to imagine a case arising in Africa to-day which would have exactly the ecclesiastical features of Germany's and England's relation to Rome in early papal times. And yet no one in Africa even dreams of the Archbishop as having a papal supremacy over the colonies.