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392 all one voice, as it were, terribly complaining over the truculent madness of a certain false monk called pope Gregory VII., and asking why the invincible king allowed the same to rage so long unhindered when Paul, the vase of election, testifies that a prince does not wield the sword without cause; and when Peter, the chief of the apostles, proclaims that not only is the king pre-eminent but that it is his place to send out commanders to punish, indeed, the evil, but to reward the good. In answer to these representations, therefore, it seemed just to the most illustrious king and to his princes that the judgment of the bishops and the sentence of the divine wrath against this same Hildebrand should precede the material sword; so that him the royal power might afterwards, "with more right, declare an object of pursuit whom the bi.shops of the churches should first have deposed from his proud eminence. What one of the faithful, indeed, who knows him would fear to hurl against him the javelin of damnation? For from his earliest years he has striven through vain glory to commend himself in the world as more than man —no merits calling for it—and to prefer his own divinations and those of others to the divine orderings; to be a monk in dress and not by profession; to consider himself beyond ecclesiastical discipline, subject to no master; to assist, more than laymen, at obscene theatrical amusements; for the sake of sordid gain publicly to watch the tables of the money-changers in the path of the passers by. Having accumulated money, then, by such pursuits, he invaded the abbey of St. Paul's, supplanting the abbot. Then, inducing by deception a certain man named Mancius to sell him the office, he seized the archdeaconship; and, against the will of pope Nicholas, in the midst of a popular tumult he had himself raised to the office of administrator. Moreover, by the outrageous death, through poison, of four Roman pontiffs at the hand of a certain intimate of his— John Brachintus—he is convicted of being a murderer; as the minister of death himself, although repenting late, did testify with dire clamourings when in the very grasp of death—all others having kept silence. Finally this oftmentioned pest-bearer, on the very night when the body of pope Alexander was being honoured with the funeral 