g in exile," he had said on his death-bed: but his works
survived him, and a hundred years after him, in spite of the troubles
which had disturbed the Church under eighteen mediocre and transitory
popes, Innocent III., whilst maintaining, only with more moderation and
prudence, the same principles as Gregory VII. had maintained, exercised
peacefully, for a space of eighteen years, the powers of the right
divine, whilst Philip Augustus was extending and confirming the kingly
power in France. This parallel progress of the kingship and the papacy
had its critics and its supporters. Learned lawyers, on the authority of
the maxims and precedents of the Roman empire, proclaimed the king's
sovereignty in the State; and profound theologians, on the authority of
the divine origin of Christianity, laid down as a principle the right
divine of the papacy in the Church and in the dealings of the Church with
the State.

Thus, at the end of the thirteenth century, there were found face to face
two systems, one laic and the other ecclesiastical, of absolute power.
But the teachers of the doctrine of the right divine do not expunge from
human affairs the passions, errors, and vices of the individuals who put
their systems in practice; and absolute power, which is the greatest of
all demoralizers, entails before long upon communities, whether civil or
religious, the disorders, abuses, faults, and evils which it is the
special province of governments to prevent or keep under. The French
kingship and the papacy, the representatives of which had but lately been
great and glorious princes, such as Philip Augustus and St. Louis,
Gregory VII. and Innocent III., were, at the end of the thirteenth
century, vested in the persons of men of far less moral worth and less
political wisdom, Philip the Handsome and Boniface VIII. We have already
had glimpses of Philip the Handsome's greedy, ruggedly obstinate, haughty
and tyrannical character; and Boniface VIII. had the same defects, with
more hastiness and less ability. The two great poets of Italy in that
century, Dante and Petrarch, who were both very much opposed to Philip
the Handsome, paint Boniface VIII. in similar colors. "He was," says
Petrarch (_Epistoloe Ramiliares,_ bk. ii. letter 3), "an inexorable
sovereign, whom it was very hard to break by force, and impossible to
bend by humility and caresses; "and Dante (_Inferno,_ canto xix.
v. 45 57) makes Pope Nicholas III. say, "Already a