guardian, and to revolt against the Church itself. Thus in a synod assembled at Metz on 28 May 859, the Bishops of the kingdoms of Western Francia and Lorraine do not hesitate to characterise the attempt of Louis the German to seize upon his brother's lands as a "schism in the Holy Church and in Christendom," adding that he is bound to ask "absolution" for it. A month later in an assembly held at Savonnières (14 June 859) Charles the Bald himself appears to give official recognition to the claims of the clergy; in making a complaint against Wenilo (Ganelon), Archbishop of Sens, who had ventured to crown his brother Louis the German king in his place, he expresses astonishment that a claim should have been set up to depose him, "without the case having been submitted to the judgment of the Bishops, by whose ministry he had been consecrated king, and to whose fatherly admonitions and sentences he had been and ever was ready to submit himself."
The episcopal theory was thus expanded to its utmost limits, as it was about to be stated even more rigorously, and with the greatest boldness by the illustrious Archbishop of Rheims, Hincmar, in numerous treatises and letters or in the decrees of councils which on all hands are allowed to be his work. The theory, very simple in itself, may be brought under these few heads: The king is king because the Bishops have been pleased to consecrate him: "It is rather through the spiritual unction and benediction of the Bishops than from any earthly power that you hold the royal dignity," writes Hincmar to Charles the Bald in 868. The Bishops make kings by virtue of their right to consecrate, and so are superior to them, "for they consecrate kings, but cannot be consecrated by them." Kings, then, are the creatures, the delegates of the Bishops: the monarchy "is a power which is preserved and maintained for the service of God and the Church"; it is "an instrument in the hands of the Church which is superior to it, because she directs it towards its true end." Except "for this special power which the king has at his disposal and which lays upon him special duties, he is but a man like other men, his fellows and equals in the city of God. Like them he is bound to live as a faithful Christian."
The whole trend of this ecclesiastical reaction, thus traced in outline during the half century which followed the death of Charlemagne, was to form a system logically invulnerable but making the monarchy the slave of the clergy. To make head against the unbridled appetites of men the Church claimed as its own the twofold task of maintaining union and concord and of directing the monarchy in the paths of the Lord.
Left, however, to their own resources, and compelled, in addition, to resist the claims and the violent attacks of the lay aristocracy, the Bishops would have been in no position to translate their principles into
