purpose; but the design is so disguised and so perverted by the
recalcitrance of the materials, that we are irresistibly impelled to ask
how and why they came to be employed.

More than any other human institution the Papacy has suffered from a
supposed necessity of justifying every forward step by precedent and
reference to authority. Twice in the course of sixteen centuries the
Holy See has ventured on a startling change of front, and has been
sorely embarrassed to rebut the charge of inconsistency. One such change
was silently effected at the close of the seventeenth century, when the
Popes ceased to concern themselves more than was unavoidable with
international affairs. This was a great change; yet not so great as that
made in the latter part of the eleventh century, by Gregory VII. For he
revolutionised the whole theory of papal prerogative. Neither a profound
lawyer nor a profound theologian, he regarded the past history of his
office with the idealism of a poet, and looked into its future with the
sanguine radicalism of a Machiavelli or a Hobbes. Gregory VII conceived
of Christendom as an undivided state; of a state as a polity dominated
by a sovereign; of a sovereign as a ruler who must be either absolute or
useless. And who, he asked, but the heir of the Prince of the Apostles
could presume to claim a power so tremendous? For us the audacity of his
pretensions is excused by the lofty aims which they were meant to serve.
To conciliate contemporary opinion it was necessary that the new claims
should be represented as the revival of old rights, as the logical
corollaries of undisputed truths. And this course involved as its
consequence an industrious, if partially unconscious, perversion of past
history. For the Popes who had gone before him claimed powers which,
though extensive, were capable of definition; which, though startling,
could in the main be defended by appeal to well-established usage. The
new policy led to this paradoxical situation, that precedents were