undermined feudalism in France, and established absolutism as one
of the needed forces of his turbulent age, even as Napoleon gave
law and order to France when distracted by the anarchism of a
revolution which did not comprehend the liberty which was invoked.
So Hildebrand was raised up to establish the only government which
could rescue Europe from the rapacities of feudal nobles, and
establish law and order in the hands of the most enlightened class;
so that, like Peter the Great, he looms up as a reformer as well as
a despot. He appears in a double light.

Now you ask: "What were his reforms, and what were his schemes of
aggrandizement, for which we honor him while we denounce him?" We
cannot see the reforms he attempted without glancing at the
enormous evils which stared him in the face.

Society in Europe, in the eleventh century, was nearly as dark and
degraded as it was on the fall of the Merovingian dynasty. In some
respects it had reached the lowest depth of wretchedness which the
Middle Ages ever saw. Never had the clergy been more worldly or
devoted to temporal things. They had not the piety of the fourth
century, nor the intelligence of the sixteenth century; they were
powerful and wealthy, but had grown corrupt. Monastic institutions
covered the face of Europe, but the monks had sadly departed from
the virtues which partially redeemed the miseries that succeeded
the fall of the Roman Empire. The lives of the clergy, regular and
secular, still compared favorably with the lives of the feudal
nobility, who had, in addition to other vices, the vices of robbers
and bandits. But still the clergy had fallen far from the high
standard of earlier ages. Monasteries sought to be independent of
all foreign control and of episcopal jurisdiction. They had been