6 PETER IN CHAINS
when the extensiveness of its efforts gave rise constantly to a cry for a deeper religious life, resounding all the more loudly when there was peril of ruinous worldliness. And that danger grew much more im- minent when the highest Captains of the Church seemed more like Anti-Christ than Christ, of whom the witnesses to all the evils that afflicted the Papacy declared that only He, though He might be asleep on the ship, had guided the Church safely through storm and wave. The Church existed nearly a century under figureheads or villains who termed themselves Popes; and the people kept alive and honoured the idea of the Papacy, despite the succession of traitors to that idea.
At the close of the first millennium, three powers struggled for the possession of Peter's See: first of all, the two political powers, Nation- alistic Romanism and the Roman Empire of the German nation; and then the autonomous religious ideal of a politically free Church. They followed one another historically and then gradually disappeared; but all laid hands upon the whole treasure-trove of spiritual and tem- poral power which the Roman See had become. The religious ideal proved itself the strongest of the three. With its help, the universal Papacy triumphed over its national Roman and its imperial German rivals. But when the historian views the development as a whole and its consequences he learns that victory and defeat are only names which like all conclusions to which he may arrive are likely to be proved erroneous and inaccurate by later events.
The aged Pope Hadrian II took up the reins when the great Nicholas dropped them. He reconciled the adulterous Lothar with the Church and gave him Holy Communion at Monte Cassino. Then the King died on the journey homeward, and both the women who mourned him took the veil. It seemed as if Lothar's restless soul were haunt- ing the land he had left behind him the land that had become an eternal battlefield between neighbours to the east and west. Against the will of the Pope, who had wanted Louis II (the Emperor who was battling against die Saracens in Southern Italy), to be the heir to Lorraine, Charles the Bald took possession of the kingdom and was crowned by Hinkmar, Archbishop of Rheims, who, with Gallican in- dependence, ignored the Pope's request. It was also in vain that the
CHARLES
