Gregory VII., adopting novel maxims, and carrying them to greater lengths, openly asserted that, as Pope, he had the right to depose all sovereigns who were rebellious to the Church, and grounded these pretensions on the power of excommunication, his opponents had no defence to make. Conceding the principle that excommunication involves temporal results, Gregory was invincible. But the consequence was a vast extension of the papal authority.
And of course this vastly extended authority affected the weight of every papal claim. Gosselin's study of the temporal power of the Papacy is exceedingly interesting as an illustration of development. It shows how easily developments may be defended on theological theories with which those developments had really nothing whatever to do. Its shows how little we can trust ultimate developments merely on the ground of their existence; as if prevalence and legitimacy were invariably one and the same. It shows the insecurity of assuming that the theories by which developments are supported are necessarily the causes by which they were produced.
The Episcopate still retained in the year 1300 its dignity, as the ultimate court of appeal when in Council assembled; but the Papacy had made gigantic strides from the conditions of its tenure in the Cyprianic age. The Vincentian test of Catholic doctrine by identity with the past was being exchanged for submission to a living authority in Rome. The ancient appeal to the Universal Church was being exchanged for a theory which identified the Roman Communion with the Catholic Church. A strong and dangerous tendency had arisen to substitute à priori conceptions of the appropriate for appeal to ancient facts. Speculative theories of ecclesiastical principle were being made a substitute,
