Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/660

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supply an instructive contrast. In each case a bishop is arraigned before a civil tribunal; in each case the bishop appeals to the Pope; but beyond that the three men have little in common. William and Thomas were both of them, though in widely different senses, playing a part; it is Anselm alone who is throughout perfectly simple and unconscious. Through the whole of Anselm's life, we feel that he never could have acted otherwise than as he did act. He never stopped to think what was the right thing for a saintly archbishop to do; he simply did at all times what his conscience told him that he ought to do. Thomas, perfectly sincere, thoroughly bent on doing his duty, was still following a conscious ideal of duty; he was always thinking what a saintly archbishop ought to do; above all things, we may be sure, he was thinking what Anselm, in the like case, would have done. Thus, while Anselm acts quite singly, Thomas is, consciously though sincerely, playing a part. William of Saint-Calais is playing a part in a far baser sense; he appeals to the Pope, he appeals to ecclesiastical privileges in general, simply to serve his own personal ends. He appealed to those privileges more loudly than anybody else, when he thought that by that appeal he might himself escape condemnation. He trampled them under foot more scornfully than anybody else, when he thought that by so doing he might bring about the condemnation of Anselm and his own promotion. But it is curious to see how in some points the sincere acting of Thomas and the insincere acting of William agree as distinguished from the pure single-mindedness of Anselm. Both William and Thomas distinctly appeal to the Pope from the sentence of the highest court in their own land. We cannot say that Anselm did this; he does not refuse the sentence of the King's court; he does not ask the Pope to set aside the sentence of the King's court; the utmost that he does is