Clement VII.—may suffice to make us wonder that the reaction of the Reformation was not far more sweeping than was actually the case, unless, indeed, we are prepared to re-echo the sentiments of Boccaccio's Abraham. Nevertheless the idea was not without its value. It held its ground, no doubt, more easily in various countries in proportion to their remoteness from the monstrous reality, but it served for many generations to nourish the loyalty of innocent and guileless souls. Just as in our own time we have heard of Irish peasants sending hard-earned Peter's-pence to Rome, in the honest hope of mitigating the rigour of the imprisonment which they were taught that Pio Nono was suffering at the hands of the godless Italian Government, so in the middle age, and even up to the very end of it, to all those quiet, honest, homespun souls who have through all our history made up the staple of the English nation, and constituted the very salt and savour of English religion, the Pope remained as at first, the symbol of all that was at once holy and venerable and orthodox, and the rumours of the actuality of the Curia and court of Rome, which could not but reach their ears from time to time, were put aside as the suggestions of mere wicked malice, or at best as the wild exaggerations of disappointed suitors or angry and unscrupulous partisans.
The development of the papal power as a whole from the stage of that of the great spiritual adviser of kings—confessorial power as I may call it—through that of an authoritative visitor, up to the fully developed supremacy which we find claimed and exercised by Gregory VII. or Innocent III., it is beyond my province to trace. It is sufficient for me to show that there is no ground for the assertion, that when so established it
