Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/149

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DIES 135

far away he now seemed from the monastic spirit of silent prayer and labour, how remote from the power of the mercy that belonged to those consuls of God who had wrestled with Attila and thrown about Rome a mantle of motherly tenderness! And yet Gregory's only object had been to build up Rome's heritage in accordance with the law laid down long before his time. The ruins he left behind did not deflect his mind and will from the social structure he longed to build. His battle was a world-wide one for the victory of the spiritual prin- ciple over the Centaur of mankind. It was a revolution which pro- ceeded downward from above; and of it the Papacy was to make a permanent uprising.

Even in his final misfortunes he did not swerve from his determina- tion or his conception; and his bitter anger at the ruler who over- powered him dwindled not a drop. While his legates visited the countries of Europe urging a revolt against the Emperor, Gregory dreamed his last dream of returning to the Eternal City with an army. Soon also he uttered his last words: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity and therefore I die in exile." He had spent what remained of his days on earth in Salerno. No Brutus slew this Caesar. Like the Emperor of St. Helena he died sundered from the seed he had sown for all rime. Toward the close of May 1085 shortly before his own death Robert Guiscard buried the Pope in the newly erected Cathedral of that southern city. There the ashes of the greatest Pontiff lie in a simple tomb, quite as if Rome had wished that even the spirit of the dead man should dwell in exile rather than within its own walls.

Gregory's ideas had brought him to grief, but they did not die with him. His plan to make of the world a system of independent sovereign states, of moderate strength and dependent upon the recogni- tion of the Petrine See, dominated Papal policy for the next hundred years. On the basis of the Catholic ecclesiastical state in which civil citizenship and church membership coincided, the Casar Papa had brought into being the Papa Ctesar, the King-priest had summoned the Priest-king. It was eminently natural that the emancipation of the State should bring about the emancipation of the Church, and that the Church, once grown free, should also now seek to give this State,


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