n damnation for the sake
of mundane pleasures--a rich legacy in the hour of death might save him.
Not infrequently the fear of the devil was transformed into
indifference, and sometimes even into demonolatry. A single ungodly
thought might involve eternal death, and as many a man, more
particularly many a priest, realised his inability to live continuously
in the presence of God, he surrendered his soul to the anti-god, not
from a longing for the pleasures of the senses, but from despair. The
worship of the devil, far from being an invention of fanatical monks,
actually existed, and was often the last consolation of those who held
themselves forsaken by God. The hierarchy did not hesitate a moment to
make the utmost use or the power conferred upon them by the mental
attitude of the people. The government of kings and princes, in addition
to the ecclesiastical government, could only be a transient, sinful
condition; the time was bound to come when the pope would be king of the
earth, and the great lords of the world his vassals, appointed by him to
keep the wicked world in check, and deposed by him if he found them
incapable, worshippers of the devil, or disobedient to the Church. The
whole world was a hierarchy whose apex reached heaven and bore, as the
representative of its invisible summit, the pope. He stood, to quote
Innocent III., "in the middle, between God and humanity." The same great
pope has left us a document entitled _On the Contempt of the World_,
which treats of the absolute futility of all things mundane. There is no
reason to look upon the union of this unquenchable thirst for power and
complete "other-worldiness" as a contradiction. The kingdom of God,
Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, must of necessity be established that the
destiny of the world may be fulfilled. Every pope must account to God
for his share in the advancement of the only work which mattered, and
the greater the power the ruler of this world had acquired over the
souls of men, the more he trembled before God, weighed down by the
burden of his enormous responsibility. "The renunciation of the world in
the service of the world-ruling Church, the mastery of the world in the
service of renunciation, this was the problem and ideal of the middle
ages" (Harnack). But not only the pope, every priest, as a direct member
of the kingdom of God, was superior to the secular rulers. This was
taught emphatically by the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for inst