Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/57

 on Castile, Portugal, and Arragon, dictated to Philip Augustus of France, and even received the spiritual homage of the Eastern Empire (from the usurper Baldwin), and of the kings of Bulgaria and Armenia. "In each of the three leading objects which Rome had pursued," says Hallam, "independent sovereignty, supremacy over the Christian Church, control over the princes of the earth, it' was the fortune of this pontiff to conquer."

Precisely in the fulness of its power and authority, the Papacy began to work its own downfall. Its ever increasing and accumulated assumptions were extended from the reigning monarch to the humblest of his subjects, from national and international relations to the bed and board of every individual in every State of Christendom, until at last the very nausea of oppression produced inevitable revolt. Christianity would have been repudiated and rejected by the nations of Europe if they had not distinguished between the faith itself and the guardians of the faith who had violated it. For not only religion, but even morality and the sanctions of society were made to depend on the subtleties of fallible men, who, whilst discrediting the intellect, applied their own imperfect intellects to the definition of good and evil for their fellow-creatures.

And this was not by any means the worst of the spiritual assumption, for the Pope claimed power, after laying down the law of good and evil, to dispense men from the obligation to' do good, and to indulge them in the commission of evil. Pope Innocent, and doctors of the Church like St. Thomas