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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PAPACY UNDER CHARLES. 13 The establishment of this great symbol of a united Christendom could not but produce ultimately an accession The to the Papal dignity, though under Charles himself uy the Pope held the position of a grateful subordinate, j The Empire was the representation of God's king- es dom on earth; the Emperor, not the Pope, was the 800858. vicegerent of the Most High; the Pope was his chief minister in ecclesiastical affairs, standing in the same relation towards him as did the high priest towards the divinely-appointed king of the Jewish theocracy. But the strong hand of Charles was needed to keep his Empire together. Under his feeble successors local feeling again made head against the tendencies towards centralisation. The name of Emperor became merely an ornamental title of him who, in the partition of the dominions of Charles, obtained the kingdom of Italy. Under the degenerate rulers of the line of Charles, it was impossible to look upon the Empire as the representation on earth of the kingdom of God. It was at this time that the Papacy first stood forward as the centre of the state-system of Europe. The J ' Basis of Empire had fallen after having given an expression, the Papal . . r monarchy as emphatic as it was brief, to the political ideas in the that lay deep in the minds of men. The unity Decfetais. embodied in the Empire of Charles had been broken J up into separate states; but it still was possible to combine these states into a theocracy under the rule of the Pope. The theory of the Papal monarchy over the Church was not the result merely of grasping ambition and intrigue on the part of jjtfdividual Popes; it corresponded rather to the deep- seated'belief of Westeni Christendom. This desire to unite Christendom un...

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