e is to be judged at all, if we are even to attempt to
understand him, have we given a sketch of the careers of those Popes who
immediately preceded him, with whom as Vice-Chancellor he was intimately
associated, and whose examples were the only papal examples that he
possessed.

That this should justify his course we do not pretend. A good churchman
in his place would have bethought him of his duty to the Master whose
Vicar he was, and would have aimed at the sorely needed reform. But we
are not concerned to study him as a good churchman. It is by no means
clear that we are concerned to study him as a churchman at all. The
Papacy had by this time become far less of an ecclesiastical than a
political force; the weapons of the Church were there, but they were
being employed for the furtherance not of churchly, but of worldly aims.
If the Pontiffs in the pages of this history remembered or evoked their
spiritual authority, it was but to employ it as an instrument for the
advancement of their temporal schemes. And personal considerations
entered largely into these.

Self-aggrandizement, insufferable in a cleric, is an ambition not
altogether unpardonable in a temporal prince; and if Alexander aimed at
self-aggrandizement and at the founding of a permanent dynasty for
his family, he did not lack examples in the careers of those among his
predecessors with whom he had been associated.

That the Papacy was Christ's Vicarage was a fact that had long since
been obscured by the conception that the Papacy was a kingdom of this
world. In striving, then, for worldly eminence by every means in his
power, Alexander is no more blameworthy than any other. What, then,
remains? The fact that he succeeded better than any of his forerunners.
But are we on that account to select him for the special object of our
vituperation? The Papacy had tumbled into a slough of materialism in
which it was to wallow even after the Reformation had given it pause
and warning. Under what obligation was Alexander VI, more than any other
Pope, to pull it out of that slough? As he found it, so he carried it
on, as much a self-seeker, as much a worldly prince, as much a family
man and as little a churchman as any of those who had gone immediately
before him.

By the outrageous discrepancy between the Papacy's professed and actual
aims it was fast becoming an object of execration, and it is Alexander's
misfortune that, coming when he did, he has remained as