ance,
and Gregory VII., the wildest fanatic of the kingdom of God, said, in
writing to a German bishop: "Who then who possesses even small knowledge
and reasoning power, could hesitate to place the priests above the
kings?" Even the emperor Constantine, though he was still largely under
the sway of the imperial idea, distinctly acknowledged the bishops as
his masters; according to the legend he handed to the Bishop of Rome
the insignia of his power, sceptre, crown and cloak, and humbly held the
bridle of the prelate's horse.

The theoretic backbone of this mental attitude was the doctrine of the
Fathers of the Church and the older scholasticism, pronouncing the
illimitable power of human perception; the world's profoundest depths
had been fathomed, its riddle finally solved; there was consequently no
room for philosophy, the endless meditation on the meaning of the world
and the destiny of man. Science had but one task: to bring logical proof
of the revealed religious verities. The greatest champion of this view
was Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who in his treatise, _Cur Deus
Homo_ proved that God was compelled to become man in order to complete
the work of salvation. Abelard preached a similar doctrine, but carried
away by the fervour of thought, arrived at conclusions which he was
forced to recant ignominiously; for at the end of his chain of evidence
he did not always find the foregone conclusion which should have been
there. This system of a final and infallible knowledge of the world is
the very foundation of ecclesiastical government. The priest alone has
all knowledge, for he has the doctrine of salvation. Had it occurred to
any man to defend his own opinions in contradiction to the system of the
Church, that man would speedily have come to the conclusion that the
devil had tempted him to false observations, or false deductions, and
his submission to the Church would have been the outward sign of his
victory over the evil which had blinded his spiritual vision. A man had
to choose between the worship of God and the worship of the devil, there
was no alternative. Nobody knew the limits of human knowledge;
everybody, the learned ecclesiastic as well as the unlearned, plain man,
believed others to be in possession of the key to profound secrets and
unlimited power. One thing only was needful: to possess one's self of
the philosopher's stone; therefore the belief in witchcraft and the
fear of certain men supposed