indefinitely, and few historians will doubt that this temporal
development led directly to that degradation of the Papacy which
rendered it unfit to exercise moral influence on Europe. The Papacy
became a princedom to attract the covetous and the ambitious, and the
line of Popes sank so low by the tenth century that the grossest
characters were able to occupy the chair of Peter at a time when the
nations of Europe were sufficiently advanced to be susceptible of a
sincere moral influence. The record of the Papacy, from the ninth
century to the nineteenth, contains on almost every page a bloody
struggle for the temporal power. The most religious and most eminent of
the Popes, such as Gregory VII and Innocent III, were the most prompt to
set in motion the machinery of war in defence of their territories or in
punishment of rebels against their authority. Not one of them was in a
position to bid kings disband their armies, or ever dreamed of enjoining
them to do more than observe a few days' truce or keep their swords from
each other in order to save them for the common enemy of Christendom.

It would be useless to speculate about the date when the new nations of
Europe had become sufficiently civilised to hear a gospel of peace. The
idea of superseding the military system of Europe by a juridical system
occurred to no Christian leader, and therefore we need not consider what
prospect it might have had of realisation. The Christian gospel of
meekness had become a mockery: even the great abbeys, in which the
gentler and more religious were supposed to be immured, had their
troops, and abbots and bishops, and very often Papal Legates, appeared
at the head of armies. Two Popes, John X and Julius II, marched
themselves at the head of their troops. Cardinals had their suites of
swordsmen, and the castles of the Roman aristocracy were at times strong
fortifications from which war of the most ferocious and unscrupulous
character was waged. Christendom was steeped in violence; only a gentle