could be extracted from them by a violent adaptation of
metaphor. It is no doubt usual, he says, m among pro-
fessors of theology to take a double sense in the words of
Scripture, the literal or historical, and the mystical or
spiritual : but for purposes of argument none but
former can be valid.[1] He at once applies this axiom to
demolish the favourite theory, at least as old as Gregory
the Seventh, which found in the relation of the sun to the
moon an apt and conclusive evidence of the subordination of the secular to the spiritual power, and suggested
a variety of arithmetical puzzles as to the exact amount
of their proportional magnitudes. [2]
It was in fact in the purely critical work of controversy that the assailants of the hierarchy had almost uniformly the advantage : when they passed from criticism to the building up of a system of their own, their proposals are, in the view of a political philosopher, hardly less weak than those of their opponents. The French, as we have said, write with greater freedom than their imperial brethren ; but in the latter too we find no lack of skill, no lack even of historical perception : and if their ablest recruits were drawn from the university of Paris, still the man who overtopped them all in the abstract splendour of his ideal was an independent Italian. Yet Dante s books De Monarchic!., striking as they are, labour under the inevitable defect attaching to the attempt to exchange one impossible theory for another equally impossible. Supposing the human race to be entirely homogeneous, one might at once concede Dante s main proposition that the right and necessary form of government of one universal state by a sole universal ruler. But in truth he has no practical arguments to adduce in favour of this, only the general a priori principle of the virtue
- ↑ The same statement occurs in the Supplication du peuple de France au roy centre le pape Boniface le VIII, Dupuy 210, also nearly certainly the work of du Bois.
- ↑ According to one calculation the pope was thus 7744J times greater than the emperor; another made the ratio as low as 47: 1. See Fricdberg 1. 6 n. 4.
