ecclesiastical: it is merely a means for working out the higher
purpose entrusted to the Church. Pope Gregory VII goes farther still
in depreciation of the temporal power. He declares roundly that it is
the work of sin and the devil. "Who does not know," he writes, "that
kings and dukes have derived their power from those who, ignoring God,
in their blind desire and intolerable presumption have aspired to rule
over their equals, that is, men, by pride, plunder, perfidy, murder,
in short by every kind of wickedness, at the instigation of the prince
of this world, namely, the devil?" But in this he is only re-echoing
the teaching of St. Augustine; and he is followed, among other
representative writers, by John of Salisbury, the secretary and
champion of Thomas Becket, and by Pope Innocent III. To all three
there is an instructive contrast between a power divinely conferred
and one that has at the best been wrested from God by human
importunity.

[Sidenote: Illustration of relations.]

There are two illustrations of the relation between the spiritual and
secular powers very common among papal writers. Gregory VII, at the
beginning of his reign, compares them to the two eyes in a man's head.
But he soon substitutes for this symbol of theoretical equality a
comparison to the sun and moon, or to the soul and body, whereby he
claims for the spiritual authority, as represented by the soul or the
sun, the operative and illuminating power in the world, without and
apart from which the temporal authority has no efficacy and scarcely
any existence. An illustration equally common, but susceptible of more
diverse interpretation, was drawn from the two swords offered to our
Lord by His disciples just before the betrayal. It was St. Bernard
who, taking up the idea of previous writers that these represented the