perpetually unjust. He must have intended that it should approximate,
however imperfectly, to the idea of justice which He has revealed. The
State is a divine institution, and therefore man must do his best to
reform the State. The lay ruler, as the representative of justice, is
God's steward and even in a sense His priest. Frederic II, whom his
contemporaries denounced as an apostate and blasphemer, only expressed
in a particularly daring form the tradition of medieval royalty when he
styled himself, or allowed his flatterers to style him, the Corner-Stone
of the Church, the Vicar of God, the New Messiah.

Similarly, the heretics and rationalists, whose criticism was even more
dangerous to the Church than the open violence of the State, had more in
common with their opponents than we should infer from the duration and
the character of the disputes which they provoked. In the background of
medieval history, and developing _pari passu_ with the feud of
Papacy and Empire, there was a war, of arguments and persecution,
against free thought, in which the religious Orders figured as the
protagonists of orthodoxy. Berengar of Tours, who challenged the
doctrine of transubstantiation and so endangered the basis of the
sacerdotal theory, lived in the age when a regenerated Papacy was arming
for the war on secularism; it was Hildebrand himself who pronounced the
final sentence on the first of the heresiarchs. The age of Henry V and
of the Concordat of Worms saw the rise of a medieval Puritanism in
Languedoc and Flanders. Between the Concordat of Worms and the schism of
Frederic Barbarossa lies the age of Abelard,--the metaphysical
free-lance who made philosophy the talk of the street-corner and the
marketplace,--and of Arnold of Brescia, who demanded that the Church
should be reduced to apostolic poverty. To the youthful days of Frederic
II belong the Albigensian Crusade, the futile campaign of authority
against Averroes and Aristotle, the heresy-hunts of volunteer