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398 almost every crime, the devil, who is the prince of this world, urging them on as it were—have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption to dominate over their equals; namely, over men? To whom, indeed, can we better compare them, when they seek to make the priests of God bend to their footprints, than to him who is head over all the sons of pride and who, tempting the Highest Pontiff Himself, the Head of priests, the Son of the Most High, and promising to Him all the kingdoms of the world, said: "All these I will give unto Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me?" who can doubt but that the priests of Christ are to be considered the fathers and masters of kings and princes and of all the faithful? Is it not considered miserable madness for a son to attempt to subject to himself his father, a pupil his master; and for one to bring into his power and bind with iniquitous bonds him by whom he believes that he himself can be bound and loosed not only on earth but also in Heaven? This the emperor Constantine the Great, lord of all the kings and princes of nearly the whole world, evidently understood—as the blessed Gregory reminds us in a letter to the emperor Mauritius—when, sitting last after all the bishops in the holy council of Nicæa, he presumed to give no sentence of judgment over them, but, even calling them gods, decreed that they should not be subject to his judgment but that he should be dependent upon their will. Also the afore-mentioned pope Gelasius, persuading the said emperor Anastasius not to take offence at the truth which had been made clear to his senses, added this remark: "For, indeed, august emperor, there are two things by which this world is chiefly ruled—the sacred authority of the pontiffs and the royal power; whereby the burden of the priests is by so much the heavier according as they, at the divine judgment of men, are about to render account for the kings themselves."

And a little further on he says: "Thou dost know, therefore, that in these matters thou art dependent on their judgment and that thou art not to wish to reduce them to do thy will."

Very many of the pontiffs, accordingly, armed with such decrees and with such authorities, have excommunicated—