power,--the spiritual power,"--said the pope to the Chancellor of
France, "embraces the temporal, and includes it." "Be it so," answered
Peter Flotte; "but your power is nominal, the king's real."

Here was a coarse challenge hurled by the crown at the tiara: and
Boniface VIII. unhesitatingly accepted it. But, instead of keeping the
advantage of a defensive position by claiming, in the name of lawful
right, the liberties and immunities of the Church, he assumed the
offensive against the kingship by proclaiming the supremacy of the Holy
See in things temporal as well as spiritual, and by calling upon Philip
the Handsome to acknowledge it. On the 5th of December, 1301, he
addressed to the king, commencing with the words, "Hearken, most dear
son" (_Ausculta, carissime fili_), a long bull, in which, with
circumlocutions and expositions full of obscurity and subtlety, he laid
down and affirmed, at bottom, the principle of the final sovereignty of
the spiritual power, being of divine origin, over every temporal power,
being of human creation. "In spite of the insufficiency of our deserts,"
said he, "God hath established us above kings and kingdoms by imposing
upon us, in virtue of the Apostolic office, the duty of plucking away,
destroying, dispersing, dissipating, building up and planting in His name
and according to His doctrine; to the end that, in tending the flock of
the Lord, we may strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken
limbs, raise the fallen, and pour wine and oil into all wounds. Let
none, then, most dear son, persuade thee that thou hast no superior, and
that thou art not subject to the sovereign head of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy; for he who so thinketh is beside himself; and if he
obstinately affirm any such thing, he is an infidel, and hath no place
any longer in the fold of the good Shepherd." At the same time Boniface
summoned the bishops of France to a council at Rome, "in order to labor
for the preservation of the liberties of the Catholic Church, the
reformation of the kingdom, the amendment of the king, and the good
government of France."

Philip the Handsome and his councillors did not misconceive the tendency
of such language, however involved and full of specious reservations it
might be. The final supremacy of the pope in the body politic, and over
all sovereigns, meant the absorption of the laic community in the
religious, and the abolition of the State's independence, not in