Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Biographie Universelle, and
the Encyclopaedias.



HILDEBRAND.

A. D. 1020-1085.

THE PAPAL EMPIRE.


We associate with Hildebrand the great contest of the Middle Ages
between spiritual and temporal authority, the triumph of the
former, and its supremacy in Europe until the Reformation. What
great ideas and events are interwoven with that majestic
domination,--not in one age, but for fifteen centuries; not
religious merely, but political, embracing as it were the whole
progress of European society, from the fall of the Roman Empire to
the Protestant Reformation; yea, intimately connected with the
condition of Europe to the present day, and not of Europe only, but
America itself! What an august power is this Catholic empire,
equally great as an institution and as a religion! What lessons of
human experience, what great truths of government, what subtile
influences, reaching alike the palaces of kings and the hovels of
peasants, are indissolubly linked with its marvellous domination,
so that whether in its growth or decay it is more suggestive than
the rise and fall of any temporal empire. It has produced,
probably, more illustrious men than any political State in Europe.
It has aimed to accomplish far grander ends. It is invested with