Page:History of Freedom.djvu/250

 206

ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

be reconstructed out of ruins, the Church everywhere addresses herself to the kings, and seeks to strengthen and to sanctify their power. The royal as well as the imperial dignity received from her their authority and splendour. Whatever her disputes on religious grounds with particular sovereigns, such as Lothar, she had in those ages as yet no contests with the encroachments of monarchical power. Later on in the Middle Ages, on the contrary, when the monarchy had prevailed almost every- where, and had strengthened itself beyond the limits of feudal ideas by the help of the Roman law and of the notions of absolute power derived froIll the ancients, it stood in continual conflict with the Church. From the time of Gregory V I I., all the lTIOst distinguished pontiffs were engaged in quarrels with the royal and imperial power, which resulted in the victory of the Church in Germany and her defeat in France. In this resistance to the exaggeration of monarchy, they naturally en- deavoured to set barriers to it by promoting popular institutions, as the Italian deillocracies and the aristocratic republics of Switzerland, and the capitulations which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were imposed on almost every prince. Times had greatly changed when a Pope declared his amazement at a nation which bore in silence the tyranny of their king. 1 In modern times the absolute monarchy in Catholic countries has been, next to the Reformation, the greatest and most formidable enemy of the Church. For here she again lost in great measure her natural influence. In France, Spain, and Germany, by Gallicanism, ]osephislll, and the Inquisi- tion, she came to be reduced to a state of dependence, the more fatal and deplorable that the clergy were often instrumental in maintaining it. All these phenomena 1 Innocent IV, wrote in 1246 to the Sicilians: II In omnem terram vestrae sonus tribulation is exivit. ,, multis pro miro vehementi ducentibus, quod pressi tam dirae servitutis opprobrio, et personarum ac rerum gravati multiplici detri. mento, neglexeritis habere concilium, per quod vobis, sicut gentibus caeteris, aliqua provenirent solatia libertatis, , , super hoc apud sedem apostolicam vas excusante formidine,, , , Cogitate itaque corde vigili, ut a collo vestrae servitutis catena decidat, et universitas vestra in libertatis et quietis gaurlio reflorescat; sitque ubertate conspicuum, ita divina favente potentia secura sit libertate decorum t. (Raynaldus, Ann. ad ann, 1246).