t be overlooked.

SECTION 2. THE CHURCH

Over against "the world," "the church." . . . As the Reformation was
primarily a religious movement, some account of the church in the later
Middle Ages must be given. How Christianity was immaculately conceived
in the heart of the Galilean carpenter and born with words of beauty
and power such as no other man ever spoke; how it inherited from him
its background of Jewish monotheism and Hebrew Scripture; how it was
enriched, or sophisticated, by Paul, who assimilated it to the current
mysteries with their myth of a dying and rising god and of salvation by
sacramental rite; how it decked itself in the white robes of Greek
philosophy and with many a gewgaw of ceremony and custom snatched from
the flamen's vestry; how it created a pantheon of saints to take the
place of the old polytheism; how it became first the chaplain and then
the heir of the Roman Empire, building its church on the immovable rock
of the Eternal City, asserting like her a dominion without bounds of
space or time; how it conquered and tamed the barbarians;--all this
lies outside the scope of the present work to describe. But of its
later fortunes some brief account must be given.

[Sidenote: Innocent III 1198-1216]

By the year 1200 the popes, having emerged triumphant from their long
strife with the German emperors, successfully asserted their claim to
the {14} suzerainty of all Western Europe. Innocent III took realms in
fief and dictated to kings. The pope, asserting that the spiritual
power was as much superior to the civil as the sun was brighter than
the moon, acted as the vicegerent of God on earth. But this supremacy
did not last long unquestioned. Just a century after Innocent III,
Boniface VIII [Sidenote: Boniface VIII 1294-1303] was worsted in a
quarrel with Philip IV of France, and his successor, Clement V, a
Frenchman, by transferring the papal capital to Avignon, virtually made
the supreme pontiffs subordinate to the French government and thus
weakened their influence in the rest of Europe. This "Babylonian
Captivity" [Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity 1309-76] was followed by
a greater misfortune to the pontificate, the Great Schism, [Sidenote:
The Great Schism 1378-1417] for the effort to transfer the papacy back
to Rome led to the election of two popes, who, with their successors,
respectively ruled and mutually anathematized each other from the two
rival cities. The difficulty of