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come about if the Emperor of Europe and the Pope reached an agree- ment? How the Protestants would pale before such an alliance! Was it not the will of Providence that a virtuous Pope and a mighty Emperor should join hands?
At bottom it was not a new idea concerning the relations between the state and the Papacy which Napoleon was then pondering. Spir- itual government was to be preserved in appearance, but hollowed out in essence; and secular government alone was to rule men in their totality. According to Las Casas he still meditated upon what he believed he had obtained at Fontainebleau after he had become a pris- oner on the Island of St. Helena. "I had finally brought about the greatly desired separation of the spiritual from the temporal," he said. "Blending the two has been very injurious to the holiness of the first and has created disorder in society precisely in the name of, by the hand of, the one who should constitute the centre of harmony. From this moment on, I wanted to elevate the Papacy higher than it had ever been elevated before and to surround it with pomp and homage. I would have brought the Papacy to the point where it no longet complained about its temporal position. I would have made of it an idol. It would have remained my ally. Paris would have been the capital city of the Christian world, and I would have controlled religious life even as I controlled political life.**
During a thousand years the Carolingians, the Ottonians, the Hohcnstaufens, the Habsburgs, the Capetians, the Valois, and the Bourbons had exhausted all the possible ways of helping, injuring and subjugating the See of Peter. And if the new autocrat of Europe had realized his wish to be a Gesar, he could in his relations with the Pope have undertaken nothing that could have seemed to the revolu- tionized world anything more than an outmoded procedure. No new idea, no new act of intervention, made him the master of the most stubborn of his foes. There is comedy of divine profundity in this clash between power and power, between the impotence concealed in the strength of the genius who created a new epoch and of strength hidden in the impotence of a modest old man whose marvellous en- ergies appeared to lie only in the realm of yesterday. For the sake of this yesterday, which after all had not departed since it was the beater of timeless treasure which it was destined to pass on to the u-
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