with
Macchiavelli. It is true that our materials grow from year to year; that
the criticism of original authorities as taught in the Ecole des Chartes
has become something like an exact science; that thanks to Lord Bryce
the Holy Roman Empire has become intelligible; that the structure and
function of institutions have been patiently analysed by Waitz and
Stubbs, Fustel de Coulanges and Vinogradoff, Maitland and Gierke; that
literature and art, scholasticism and the Universities, have found their
chroniclers and interpreters; that every ruler and every State, every
treaty and every council, may be studied in monographs innumerable. But
the Middle Ages were above all the reign of the Catholic Church; and we
are still far from agreement as to the merits and influence of that
venerable institution which, be it human or divine, occupies a unique
place in the story of civilization.

In the middle decades of last century the history of the mediaeval
Church was related from very different standpoints in the widely-read
works of Neander and Milman; but it was only with the opening of the
Vatican archives by Pope Leo XIII in 1881 that it became possible to set
forth the whole story of the Papacy and to understand the working of the
machinery of Catholicism. So vast is the accumulation of official acts
and documents, and such technical training is required for the task,
that we shall have to wait many years till the material is surveyed in
its entirety and its results made available for the use of the
historian. Some idea of the value of the Registers may be gained from
the Master of Balliol's pregnant lectures on Church and State in the
Middle Ages, based on the 8,000 documents of the eleven years of the
rule of Innocent IV in the middle of the thirteenth century. The study
of these documents, he tells us, stirred him to admiration of the
organization of the Papacy, and convinced him of its enormous
superiority over its secular contemporaries as a centre not merely of
religion but of law and government; but he adds that he derived an
equally profound impression of the abuses which ate into the heart of
the system, of the growing bitterness which it inspired, and of the
devastating effects of the passion to erect a powerful principality in
the heart of Italy.

No Protestant historian is tempted to glorify the record of the Papacy
in the last two centuries before the Reformation; but it is generally
agreed that in the earlier h