Since Phocas decreed the bishop of Rome the supreme head of the Church
on earth there had grown up strange power which claimed to decide
beyond appeal respecting everybody and everything--from affairs of
empire to the burial of the dead, from the thoughts of men here to the
estate of their souls hereafter--and to command the anathemas of God
upon any who dared to question its authority. It held itself divinely
ordained to give crowns and to take them away. Kings and potentates
were its vassals, and nations had to defer to it and serve it, on pain
of _interdicts_ which smote whole realms with gloom and desolation,
prostrated all the industries of life, locked up the very graveyards
against decent sepulture, and consigned peoples and generations to an
irresistible damnation. It was omnipresent and omnipotent in civilized
Europe. Its clergy and orders swarmed in every place, all sworn to
guard it at every point on peril of their souls, and themselves held
sacred in person and retreat from all reach of law for any crime save
lack of fealty to the great autocracy.[1] The money, the armies, the
lands, the legislatures, the judges, the executives, the police, the
schools, with the whole ecclesiastical administration, reaching even
to the most private affairs of life, were under its control. And at
its centre sat its absolute dictator, unanswerable and supreme, the
alleged Vicar of God on earth, for whom to err was deemed impossible.
Think of a power which could force King Henry IV., the heir of a long
line of emperors, to strip himself of every mark of his station, put
on the linen dress of a penitent, walk barefooted through the winter's
snow to the pope's castle at Canossa, and there to wait three days at
its gates, unbefriended, unfed, and half perishing with cold and
hunger, till all but the alleged Vicar of Jesus Christ were moved with
pity for his miseries as he stood imploring the tardy clemency of
Hildebrand, which was almost as humiliating in its bestowal as in its
reservation.
Think of a power which could force the English king, Henry II., to
walk three miles of a flinty road, with bare and bleeding feet, to
Canterbury, to be flogged from one end of the church to the other by
the beastly monks, and then forced to spend the whole night in
supplications to the spirit of an obstinate, perjured, and defiant
archbishop, whom four of his over-zealous knights, without his orders,
had murdered, and whose inner garments, when he was stripped to
receive his shroud, were found alive with vermin!
Think of a power which, in defiance of the sealed safe-conduct of the
empire, could seize John Huss, one of the worthiest and most learned
men of his time, and burn him alive in the presence of the emperor!
Think of a power which, by a single edict, caused the deliberate
murder of more than fifty thousand men in the Netherlands alone!