and enable them to face the
barbarian in the name of that great people whose very memory still awed
him; whose baths, aqueducts, palaces, he looked on as the work of demons;
whose sages and poets were to him enchanters; whose very gems, dug out of
the ruins by night, in fear and trembling, possest magic influence for
healing, for preservation, for good fortune in peace or war.

Politic; and in their eyes, true. Easy enough to be believed honestly,
by men who already believed honestly in their own divine mission. They
were the representatives of Christ on earth. Of that fact there could be
then, or can be now, no doubt whatsoever. Whatsoever truth, light,
righteousness, there was in the West, came to it through them. And
Christ was the King of kings. But He delayed his coming: at moments, He
seemed to have deserted the earth, and left mankind to tear itself in
pieces, with wild war and misrule. But it could not be so. If Christ
were absent, He must at least have left an authority behind Him to occupy
till He came; a head and ruler for his opprest and distracted Church. And
who could that be, if not the Pope of Rome?

It ought to be so.--It must be so--thought they. And to men in that
mood, proofs that it was so soon came to hand, and accumulated from
generation to generation; till the Pope at last found himself
proclaiming, and what was more, believing, that God had given the whole
world to St. Peter, and through St. Peter to him; and that he was the
only source of power, law, kingship, who could set up and pull down whom
he would, as the vicegerent of God on earth.

Such pretensions, of course, grew but slowly. It was not, I believe,
till the year 875, 180 years after the time of which I am speaking, that
Pope John VIII. distinctly asserted his right, as representative of the
ancient Roman Empire, to create the Caesar; and informed the Synod of
Pavia that he had 'elected and approved Charles the Bald, with the
consent of his brothers the bishops, of the other ministers of the Holy
Roman Church, and' (significant, though empty words) 'of the Roman senate
and people.'

At the time of which I speak, the power was still in embryo, growing,
through many struggles: but growing surely and strongly, and destined
speedily to avenge the fall of Rome on the simple barbarians who were
tearing each other to pieces over her spoils.

It is not easy to explain the lasting and hereditary hatred of the Popes
to the Lombar