THE THRONE OF THE WORLD
declared that all the hieratic actions of a priest who did not lead a life in conformity with the strictest apostolic rule were invalid and worth- less* It was better, he said, that the laity should tell their sins to one another than to such a priest. He repudiated the temporal power and the temporal possessions of the Church. A powerful orator, he thundered in Rome against the kingship of Priest and Pope, bidding the Eternal City to voice its right to world-dominion and to free elec- tion, wholly independent of Papal control, of an Emperor by the Roman people. Eugene III, more conciliatory than the far-sighted Abbot of Clairvaux, who had driven the rebel Arnold out of France and then out of Zurich, was nevertheless finally forced to exile him as a schismatic, and to curb all priests who consorted with him with a threat of removal. But the Senate protected its prophet who was the true master of the young republic; and so there was postponed a decision which neither the Pope nor the Abbot lived to see. Frederic Barbarossa was unanimously elected Emperor after Conrad's death, and signed the Treaty of Constance in which he ignored the Senate's loudly profferred invitation to accept the crown from its hands; he promised to make no peace either with the Normans nor with the Romans without the Pope's concurrence, and to restore to the Holy Sec the control of Rome and the Papal states. Shortly afterward, during the summer of 1153, Eugene and Bernard died within a few weeks of each other.
Now there ensued a long, difficult struggle between the Papacy and die Hohenstaufens. Against the iron-willed defenders of die spirit of Hildebrand there was arrayed an Imperial power with a firmer basis in law and a new awareness of its historical mission. The Emperor was a strong, virtuous man. Meanwhile, however, the new forces of nationalist independence and civic self-government had arisen. It was the Papacy which understood more deeply what this trend signi- fied and which welcomed it as a new world of the spirit into its empire. But later on alien reality, a secular culture and an autonomous state, developed out of these trends. Changing peoples gave this reality new forms, according to political and spiritual circumstances, while trying to convert to their points of view a Church unable to surrender its theocratic claims.
THE
