VII. in the Council
of Rome, which the official historian of the Church reproduced in the
commencement of the seventeenth century as being authentic and
legitimate, and Rome has never disavowed it. Borrowed in part from the
false Decretals, resting, most of them, on the fabulous donation of
Constantine, and on the successive impostures and usurpations of the
first barbarous ages, they received from the hand of Gregory VII. a new
character of force and unity. That pontiff stamped them with the
sanction of his own genius. Such authority had never before been
created: it made every other power useless and subaltern" ("Life of
Gregory VII.," by Villemain, trans. by Brockley, vol. ii., pp. 53-55).
Thus the struggle became inevitable between the temporal and the
spiritual powers. "In every country there was a dual government:--1.
That of a local kind, represented by a temporal sovereign. 2. That of a
foreign kind, acknowledging the authority of the Pope. This Roman
influence was, in the nature of things, superior to the local; it
expressed the sovereign will of one man over all the nations of the
continent conjointly, and gathered overwhelming power from its
compactness and unity. The local influence was necessarily of a feeble
nature, since it was commonly weakened by the rivalries of conterminous
states and the dissensions dexterously provoked by its competitor. On
not a single occasion could the various European states form a coalition
against their common antagonist. Whenever a question arose, they were
skilfully taken in detail, and commonly mastered. The ostensible object
of papal intrusion was to secure for the different peoples, moral
well-being; the real object was to obtain large revenues and give
support to large bodies of ecclesiastics. The revenues thus abstracted
were not unfrequently many times greater than those passing into the
treasury of the local power. Thus, on the occasion of Innocent IV.
demanding provision to be made for three hundred additional Italian
clergy by the Church of England, and that one of his nephews, a mere
boy, should have a stall in Lincoln Cathedral, it was found that the sum
already annually abstracted by foreign ecclesiastics from England was
thrice that which went into the coffers of the king. While thus the
higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and
abbots vied with counts in the herds of slaves they possessed--some, it
is said, owned not fewer than twenty