Page:On papal conclaves (IA a549801700cartuoft).djvu/26

 change, it never occurred to make the nomination of the Pope, in law, independent of the civil power, still less to lodge it in the hands of a select body of ecclesiastics, whose choice should be entitled to exact the homage of clergy and people, until the middle of the eleventh century. That was a period when the Church, as represented by the dignitary who presided over the See of Rome, had drifted down the troubled stream of time, to find itself wedged in against the rocky mass of the Empire, hardened by centuries of high imperial traditions, and specially sharpened by the individual action of the vigorous princes of the Salic race, who then were its imperious representatives. The situation was one in which the timbers of the Church's barque must either push stoutly over obstacles to freer waters beyond, or that vessel would inevitably wreck itself upon the jagged sides of the hard harrier against which it, as jammed. Such a predicament instinctively inspired a demand for increased motive power to the ecclesiastical machinery in the breasts of those who might not be disposed to acquiesce in a timid abandonment of the Church to its fate. It happened, by one of those coincidences which