fore, in the following paragraphs, to
offer explanatory facts derived from Catholic authors, and, indeed, to
present them as nearly as I can in the words of those writers.

The story I am about to relate is a narrative of the transformation of a
confederacy into an absolute monarchy.

In the early times every church, without prejudice to its agreement with
the Church universal in all essential points, managed its own affairs
with perfect freedom and independence, maintaining its own traditional
usages and discipline, all questions not concerning the whole Church, or
of primary importance, being settled on the spot.

Until the beginning of the ninth century, there was no change in the
constitution of the Roman Church. But about 845 the Isidorian Decretals
were fabricated in the west of Gaul--a forgery containing about one
hundred pretended decrees of the early popes, together with certain
spurious writings of other church dignitaries and acts of synods. This
forgery produced an immense extension of the papal power, it displaced
the old system of church government, divesting it of the republican
attributes it had possessed, and transforming it into an absolute
monarchy. It brought the bishops into subjection to Rome, and made the
pontiff the supreme judge of the clergy of the whole Christian world. It
prepared the way for the great attempt, subsequently made by Hildebrand,
to convert the states of Europe into a theocratic priest-kingdom, with
the pope at its head.

Gregory VII., the author of this great attempt, saw that his plans
would be best carried out through the agency of synods. He, therefore,
restricted the right of holding them to the popes and their legates. To
aid in the matter, a new system of church law was devised by Anselm
of Lucca, partly from the old Isidorian forgeries, and partly from new
inventions. To establish the supremacy of Rome, not only had a new
civil and a new canon law to be produced, a new history had also to
be invented. This furnished needful instances of the deposition
and excommunication of kings, and proved that they had always been
subordinate to the popes. The decretal letters of the popes were put on
a par with Scripture. At length it came to be received, throughout
the West, that the popes had been, from the beginning of Christianity,
legislators for the whole Church. As absolute sovereigns in later times
cannot endure representative assemblies, so the papacy, when it wished
t