Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/220

202 country with what they believed to be their duty towards God.

The Hildebrandine policy thus contained within it the seeds of danger alike to society and to the church itself. But, over and above these intrinsic defects, the idea of a catholic church was confronted and menaced by another idea that did not yield to it in the magnificence and universality of its pretensions. The circumstances of the time brought the pope into peculiar relations with Italy and Germany, the inheritors of the title and traditions of Roman empire. Hitherto the emperor had been understood to represent on earth the unity and order of the divine government, holding in the secular estate a rank equal, and often very far superior, to that occupied by the pope in the spiritual. He was the vicegerent of God; that title had not yet been appropriated by the papacy. With such a doctrine Gregory would have nothing to do; his attitude with respect to it was unequivocally, defiantly revolutionary. He treated civil government at lame as a human institution so deeply polluted by its sinful origin,—Cain and Nimrod, it was commonly explained, were its first founders,—as to be by itself helpless and criminal. Between the two opposing principles no compromise, no lasting peace was possible. But the points on which we would dwell are not so much the broad issues raised in the interminable controversy, as the incidental consequences that were drawn from them. There are few facts more striking than the readiness with which the church admitted any form of civil government that would listen to her claims. Theoretically she had no preference for monarchical institutions; rather, it should seem, she was inclined to promote a democratic system. Granted only the superiority of the ecclesiastical power, there was no concession she would not make in favour of popular rights: and her advocates speak, now with the voice of 'revolution-whigs,' of the official character of kingship; now with the earnestness of Cromwell's independents, of the necessity, the duty, of