were a subject of complaint in every European state, Frederic II put
himself forward as the champion of the common interest, and appealed
from the Pope to the bar of public opinion. It was his turn today, he
said with perfect truth; the turn of kings and princes would come when
the Emperor was overthrown. His eloquence made some impression; but his
fellow-sovereigns could not or would not prevent the Pope from taxing
their clergy and recruiting their subjects for the Holy War against the
secular chief of Christendom, the head and front of whose offending was
that he opposed the interests of the State to the so-called rights of
the Church.

It is no mere accident that the heyday of sacerdotal pretensions
coincided with the golden age of the religious orders; that the
Hildebrandine policy took shape when the Cluniac movement was
overflowing the borders of France into all the adjacent countries; that
Alexander III was a younger contemporary of St. Bernard, and that the
death-grapple between Empire and Papacy followed hard upon the
foundation of the mendicant fraternities by St. Francis and St. Dominic.
The monks and the friars were the militia of the Church. Not that the
medieval orders devoted themselves to a political propaganda with the
zeal and system of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. The
serviceswhich the Cluniacs and the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the
Franciscans, rendered to the militant Papacy were more impalpable and
indirect. From time to time, it is true, they were entrusted with
important missions--to raise money, to preach a crusade, to influence
monarchs, to convert or to persecute the heretic; St. Bernard, the
founder of Clairvaux and the incarnation of the monastic spirit, was for
twenty years (1133-1153) the oracle to whom Pope after Pope resorted for
direction. But even in St. Bernard's time, and even when the reigning
Pope was his nominee or pupil, there was a certain divergence between