depended for success upon a public opinion which was hard to move. Not
because the average layman was critical or anti-clerical, but because he
was illogical and unimaginative, he remained cold to any programme of
reform which could only be justified by long trains of deductive
reasoning; his natural impulse was against violent innovations, and he
felt rather than argued that the State, as the ultimate guarantee of
social order, must be maintained even at some cost of theological
consistency. Until he could be convinced that high moral issues and his
own salvation were at stake, it was useless or dangerous to
excommunicate his king and to lay his country under interdict. For want
of lay support the Church failed to make good such important claims as
those of immunity from national taxation and of jurisdiction in cases of
commercial contract. More striking still, she was prevented from
establishing the Inquisition in states where that tribunal would have
found no lack of work.

Still, in spite of clerical divisions and lay conservatism, "the freedom
of the Church" was an ideal which commanded universal homage; and it was
necessary for the most obstinate opponent of ecclesiastical privilege to
make it clear that his policy involved no real attack upon this freedom.
Otherwise, defeat was certain. Thrice in two hundred years the cry for
freedom was raised against the Holy Roman Empire; and three prolonged
conflicts ended in the discomfiture of the most resolute and resourceful
statesmen who ever held that office-Henry IV (1056-1105), Henry V
(1106-1125), Frederic Barbarossa (1152-1190), and Frederic II
(1212-1250). In the first of these great conflicts the question at issue
was the reformation of the national clergy and their emancipation from
secular authority. Henry IV paid for his assertion of prerogative and
custom, both by the ignominious though illusory surrender at Canossa
(1077), and by the unparalleled humiliations of his latter days, when he