Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/233

Rh members and Ho see that no citizen suffers want. To these points we only advert in order to show that in them, just as in the optional or variable character assigned to the ultimate form of government, a churchman like Thomas Aquinas approaches nearer to the opinions of modern times than the generality of those who defended the claims of the emperor as against the pope, by a theory of the necessary, the indefeasible, the divine, basis of the imperial dignity.

With this idea Thomas had of necessity no concern. The empire might be held to have expired with Frederick the Second; and if Thomas wrote his book Of the Rule of Princes before the year 1266, it was at a time when the title of king of the Romans was disputed by two candidates neither of whom possessed, one of whom hardly aspired to, the shadow of real power. No emperor was again crowned until thirty years after Aquinas death; and he was naturally led to the inference that the empire was absorbed into, or reunited with, the mother-church: it has not ceased, he said, but is changed from the temporal to the spiritual. It is indeed evident that his view of the