or decrees of Popes. The customary limitation-that he cannot dispense with the law of God—was frequently superseded by the canonists, especially since Innocent ♫I., by his declaration about marriage, and the yet holier bond between a bishop and his diocese, which the Pope can dissolve at his good pleasure, prepared the way for the belief that it is not beyond papal power to dispense with some at least of the laws of God.

Whenever the Pope issued a new law the Curia reckoned what the necessary dispensations would bring in, and many laws were unmistakably framed with a view to the purchase of dispensations. So too with exemptions from episcopal jurisdiction; every exempted corporation or monastery had to pay a yearly tribute to the See of Rome, whose interest it was to thwart and restrain episcopal authority whenever it tried to act. And thus a bishop who took in hand the administration of his diocese in good earnest found himself cramped at every step, surrounded, as it were, in his own country by hostile fortresses closed against him, and in perpetual danger of incurring suspension or excommunication, or being cited to Rome for violating some papal privilege ; for every college and convent watched jealously over its own privileges and exemptions, and regarded the bishops

as its natural enemies. And as bishops and corporations were in mutual hostility, so the parochial clergy found opponents and dangerous rivals in the richly privileged Mendicant Orders, who were indefatigable in their attempts to appropriate the lucrative functions of the priesthood, and to decoy the people from the parish churches into their own. The members of the Curia, as John of Salisbury remarks, had one common view : whoever did not agree to their doctrines was either a heretic or a schismatic.1 The Curia wanted to be infallible even before the Popes made that claim. They thought this shield indispensable for carrying on their business.

The Popes made their first experience with the Pallium of the irresistible charm, which signs of honour, decorations, titles, distinctions in the colour and cut of a garment, have for ordinary men, and especially clerics, and thus learnt what effective instruments of power they might become. From the fifth century the Popes had bestowed the pall on archbishops named as vicars of their patriarchal rights, and in the eighth it began also to be given to metropolitans, although

1

Polycrat. 6, 24. Opp. (ed. Giles), iv. 61. sentit, aut haereticus aut schismaticus est."

66

Qui a doctrinâ vestrâ dis

these last hesitated to receive it on the conditions offered by Rome, as was proved by the attitude of the Frankish archbishops towards the thoroughly Romanizing Boniface.1 On the strength of the pseudo-Isidorian fabrications, which exercised a most destructive influence on metropolitan rights, the Popes who became founders of the new system-Nicolas I., John VIII., Gregory VII.-insisted that a metropolitan could perform no ecclesiastical function before receiving this ornament. The next step was to ascribe a secret and mystical power to it, and when Paschal II., and all the Popes after him, and the Decretals maintained that the fulness of high priestly office was attached to it, it inevitably followed that this office is an outflow of the papal plenary power, so far as it extends. Meanwhile this notion of metropolitan jurisdiction being delegated from the Pope was developed in contradiction to facts; for the Popes had appropriated to themselves the weightiest and most valuable rights of metropolitans, and did this still more after the beginning of the thirteenth century; and next they began to give the pall to some bishops avowedly as a mere ornament, and without any single right being attached to it. But as a means

1 Bonif. Epist. (ed. Serarius); Ep. 141, 142, pp. 211, 212.

for reducing metropolitans to complete dependence on Rome, sealed moreover by an oath of obedience, it quite answered its end. Gregory VII. altered the previous form into a regular oath of vassalage, so that the relation was one of personal loyalty, and the terms of the oath were borrowed from oaths of civil fealty.1

The next thing was to mould the bishops by a vow of obedience into pliant tools of the Roman sovereignty, and guard against any danger of opposition on their part to the expanding schemes and claims of the Curia. For a long time bishops were much better off than metropolitans, for in the thirteenth century they still received their confirmation-which in the ancient Church was not separated from ordination-from the metropolitan, while the latter had to buy the pall and the accompanying license to exercise this office at a high price from Rome.2

Innocent III. grounded on a misrepresentation of a passage of Leo I.'s letter to the Bishop of Thessalonica, whom he had made his vicar, saying, that he had committed to him part of his responsibility, and on one

1 The "Regulæ Patrum," which the metropolitan previously swore to observe, was changed into "Regalia S. Petri."

2 In the fifteenth century, German archbishops had to pay 20,000 florins [£1600], equivalent to ten times that sum now, for the pallium.

of the Isidorian fabrications, the principle that the Pope alone has plenary jurisdiction in the Church, while all bishops are merely his assistants for such portions of his duty as he pleases to intrust to them. This may be said to be the completion of the papal system. It reduces all bishops to mere helpers, to whom the Pope assigns such share of his rights as he finds good, whence he can also assume to himself at his arbitrary will such of their ancient rights as he pleases.1

And now the term "Universal Bishop," used by the Pope, gained its true significance. Though rejected even by Leo. IX., it described quite correctly the Pope's position as understood at Rome since the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the ancient sense of the word there were no more any bishops, but only delegates and vicars of the Pope.

A number of rights never thought of by the ancient Popes followed as a matter of course. There was no need of particular laws or papal reservations in many cases; it was enough to draw the necessary consequences from the Isidorian or Gregorian fabrications and interpolations. It seemed self-evident that the Pope alone 1 Innoc. III. Ep. i. 350; Decret. Greg. 3. 8.