s,
as the achievements and authority of Rome.

The Roman Church inherited, together with the city, the tradition of
Roman dominion over the world. Ancient Rome largely shaped modern
Christianity,--by the transmission of the idea of the authority which
the Empire once exerted to the Church which grew up upon its ruins. The
tremendous drama of Roman history displayed itself to the imagination
from scene to scene, from act to act, with completeness of poetic
progress and climax,--first the growth, the extension, the absoluteness
of material supremacy, the heathen being made the instruments of Divine
power for preparing the world for the revelation of the true God; then
the tragedy of Christ's death wrought by Roman hands, and the expiation
of it in the fall of the Roman imperial power; followed by the new era
in which Rome again was asserting herself as mistress of the world, but
now with spiritual instead of material supremacy, and with a dominion
against which the gates of hell itself should not prevail.

It was, indeed, not at once that this conception of the Church as the
inheritor of the rights of Rome to the obedience of mankind took form.
It grew slowly and against opposition. But at the end of the eleventh
century, through the genius of Pope Gregory VII., the ideas hitherto
disputed, of the supreme authority of the Pope within the Church and of
the supremacy of the Church over the State, were established as the
accepted ecclesiastical theory, and adopted as the basis of the
definitely organized ecclesiastical system. Little more than a hundred
years later, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Innocent III.
enforced the claims of the Church with a vigor and ability hardly less
than that of his great predecessor, maintaining openly that the
Pope--Pontifex Maximus--was the vicar of God upon earth.

This theory was the logical conclusion from a long series of historic
premises; and resting upon a firm foundation of dogma, it was supported
by the genuine belief, no less than by the worldly interests and
ambitions, of those who profited by it. The ideal it presented was at
once a simple and a noble conception,--narrow indeed, for the ignorance
of men was such that only narrow conceptions, in matters relating to the
nature and destiny of man and the order of the universe, were possible.
But it was a theory that offered an apparently sufficient solution of
the mysteries of religion, of the relation between God and