rters should have formed a
unanimous determination, and have taken immediate steps to procure the
adhesion of the Holy See, before the resolutions of the popular assembly
were definitively carried into effect.

This measure simply indicates the character of the opinions which were
received at the time in Europe, as well as the strong consciousness on
the part of the patriarch, and those who acted with him, of the
expediency of throwing the voice and countenance of the Church into the
scale alike against the tribunitial oligarchy and against local
jealousies and prejudices. There was perhaps in this case the additional
inducement that the proposal to invest the doge with supreme power and
jurisdiction over the Church, as well as over the state, might seem to
involve an indirect surrender, either now or hereafter, on the part of
the Holy See of some of its power, as a high-priest or grand pontiff,
who was also a secular prince, might prove less pliant than an ordinary
liegeman of the Church. But the men of 697 acted, as we must allow,
sagaciously enough, when they presented their young country to the
consideration of the papacy as possessing a party of order, into which
the Church entered, and from which it now stood conspicuously and
courageously out to take this very momentous initiative.

The creation of an ecclesiastical system had been one of the foremost
aims of the first founders, who discerned in the transplantation of the
churches of the _terra firma_, and their familiar pastors to the islands
the most persuasive reconcilement of the fugitives to a hard and
precarious lot; and after all the intervening years it was the elders of
the Church who once more stepped forward and delivered their views on
the best plan for healing discord, and making life in the lagoons
tolerable for all. They sought some system of rule, after trying
several, which would enable them to live in peace at home, and to gain
strength to protect themselves from enemies. They would have been the
most far-seeing of human beings if they had formed a suspicion of what
kind of superstructure they were laying on the foundation. The nearest
model for their adoption or imitation was the Lombard type of government
almost under their very eyes; and so far as the difference of local
postulates suffered, it was that to which they had recourse, when they
vested in their new chieftain undivided jurisdiction, but primarily
military attributes and a title th