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movers of the public power, and the oracles of the court, the nobility, and the people. The Councils of Toledo, which were true legislative bodies, better and more methodically constituted than the assemblies of the great barons, not only legislated in religious and ecclesiastical matters, but in all political branches of the administration and of the government. To these celebrated assemblies is owing the _Fuero-Juzgo_, the most ancient of the codes promulgated in the new monarchies founded on the ruins of the empire. But what gave most renown to these assemblies was the system which they embraced with respect to the relations between the court of the Gothic kings and the pontifical see. In no Catholic nation was the ecclesiastic independence consolidated with greater vigour than in the Spanish church of those times. In truth the Pope, as such, exercised no authority whatever, directly or indirectly, either in the discipline or the administration of that church. He was acknowledged as the first of its bishops, but only as equal in power to each of them. Thus it was that the bishops of the Spanish peninsula had formerly no need of recourse to Rome for the presentation of candidates, the investiture of ecclesiastical dignities, or for matrimonial and other dispensations. Spain presented, at that time, an edifying spectacle of pure and evangelical Christianity, resembling that which prevailed in the primitive ages of the church, when neither councils nor traditions, nor the _motu propria_ of popes, had corrupted the dogma and the ritual. In the fourth Eliberitan council, celebrated in Granada, not only the worship but even the use of images, pictures, and sculpture, was prohibited in the temples, a prohibition before unheard of in the annals of that age,--an age in which the practice of invoking saints had become familiar, and more importance was beginning to be attached to the pomp of rites than to true piety and sincere devotion. The Spanish clergy, it is true, were then powerful, and could do much; but there is no reason to think that they abused such power, or that their conduct was regulated, at that early period, with a view to their temporal interests. That golden age, however, was of short duration; at least there are strong grounds for believing that, under the reign of Alfonso the Wise, the manners of the clergy had become greatly corrupted, and still more so under that of John II. Their ambition had s
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