own below were the poor, the toilers, who were taught resignation and
obedience, and promised the kingdom of futurity, the divine and eternal
reward--an admirable monument which has lasted for ages, and which is
entirely based on the promise of life beyond life, on the
inextinguishable thirst for immortality and justice that consumes
mankind.

Pierre had completed this first part of his book, this history of the
past, by a broad sketch of Catholicism until the present time. First
appeared St. Peter, ignorant and anxious, coming to Rome by an
inspiration of genius, there to fulfil the ancient oracles which had
predicted the eternity of the Capitol. Then came the first popes, mere
heads of burial associations, the slow rise of the all-powerful papacy
ever struggling to conquer the world, unremittingly seeking to realise
its dream of universal domination. At the time of the great popes of the
middle ages it thought for a moment that it had attained its goal, that
it was the sovereign master of the nations. Would not absolute truth and
right consist in the pope being both pontiff and ruler of the world,
reigning over both the souls and the bodies of all men, even like the
Deity whose vicar he is? This, the highest and mightiest of all
ambitions, one, too, that is perfectly logical, was attained by Augustus,
emperor and pontiff, master of all the known world; and it is the
glorious figure of Augustus, ever rising anew from among the ruins of
ancient Rome, which has always haunted the popes; it is his blood which
has pulsated in their veins.

But power had become divided into two parts amidst the crumbling of the
Roman empire; it was necessary to content oneself with a share, and leave
temporal government to the emperor, retaining over him, however, the
right of coronation by divine grant. The people belonged to God, and in
God's name the pope gave the people to the emperor, and could take it
from him; an unlimited power whose most terrible weapon was
excommunication, a superior sovereignty, which carried the papacy towards
real and final possession of the empire. Looking at things broadly, the
everlasting quarrel between the pope and the emperor was a quarrel for
the people, the inert mass of humble and suffering ones, the great silent
multitude whose irremediable wretchedness was only revealed by occasional
covert growls. It was disposed of, for its good, as one might dispose of
a child. Yet the Church really contributed t