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216 unique position of the church was one that could admit no rival to her in the secular state. But on the other hand the express preference which Thomas displays for nationality as the basis of the state, shows that he had learned, what the civilians remained ignorant of, that the world had outgrown the imperial conception; which notwithstanding still survived, always less and less of a reality, for upwards of five hundred years. Aquinas wrote in fact on the eve of a revolution in the history of European politics, not the less momentous because its results were defined in no external changes of government, dynasty, or frontier, were almost impalpable to contemporaries, and left all parties for the time as clamorous, as assertive, as before.

This change may be regarded in three sections. First, the opposition between the church and the empire be came broadened into a general opposition between the church and the civil government of each individual kingdom. The consolidation of the French and English monarchies had raised up two forces with which it was far harder for the pope to grapple, than it had been, at all events in recent times, in the case of the empire. For apart from the fact that these powers were growing in solidity and in national feeling, while the German was declining, they had had no tradition which made them coördinate with the apostolic see, and which there fore might appear as a standing menace to the latter; they were in one sense beneath its dignity, and therefore all the freer to expand at their own will and to defy the intrusion of papal claims. The assertion of a national consciousness found imitators, and in Rome itself there were fitful and abortive endeavours (those of Arnold of Brescia in the twelfth, and of Rienzi in the fourteenth, century are notorious) to dissociate the city from the curia and to justify the lineage of the people by an idle claim to elect or to supersede the emperor. In the second place, when the empire did revive, it was but a shadow of its old self. The title of emperor, or of king of the