the State. To these sources of power and influence another has yet to be added. The power of the Papacy was the band which bound together the bundle of sticks, that is to say, which sufficed for a long time to outweigh all the jealousies between regulars and seculars, between monks and friars, between dignified and lower clergy, and to bind the whole sacerdotal order into one vast army, with the Pope for its emperor and generalissimo. That army, extending into and quartered in every civilised country in the world, was at all times ready to obey orders from headquarters, and though bound by ties of natural feeling and considerations of self-preservation, to keep some sort of terms with the civil government of each of them, yet was ready, always in idea, and very commonly also in practice, to sacrifice those feelings and considerations to the supposed higher law imposed upon them by the Church.
The ideal of the Papacy was perhaps the noblest which has ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. According to it, the Pope was to be the High Priest of God and Vicar of Christ, higher than the kings of the earth. He was to sit above the kings of the earth, surrounded by an atmosphere of tranquillity and holiness, and thence was to act as their visitor, moderator, and peacemaker, swayed by no meaner consideration than the desire to carry out the very law of Christ and the spirit of His Gospel, and thus to make in very deed of the kingdoms of the earth the kingdom of God and His Christ. The contrast presented to this lofty ideal by the spectacle displayed to the world in the courts of the Borgias and the Medici—the swinish sensuality of Alexander VI., the all but undisguised paganism of Leo X., the cowardly and pettifogging politics and unabashed lying of
