seat, forever damned. (Here follow the signatures of the bishops, etc., first the cardinal Hugo Candidus, then the king, etc.)
14. Letter of Grregory VII. to Bishop Hermann of Metz, March 15th, 1081.
Bishop Gregory, servant of the servants of God, to his beloved brother in Christ, Hermann bishop of Metz, greet- ing and apostolic benediction. It is doubtless owing to a dispensation of God that, as we learn, thou art ready to bear labours and dangers in defence of the truth. For such is His ineffable grace and wonderful mercy that He never allows His chosen ones completely to go astray— never permits them utterly to fall or to be cast down. For, after they have been afflicted by a time of persecution—a useful term of probation as it were,—He makes them, even if they have passed through some trepidation, stronger than before. Since, moreover, manly courage impels one strong man to act more bravely than another and to press forward more boldly—even as among cowards fear induces one to flee more disgracefully than another,—we wish, beloved, with the voice of exhortation, to impress this upon thee: thou should' st the more delight to stand in the army of the Christian faith among the first, the more thou art convinced that they are the most worthy and the nearest to God the victors. Thy demand, indeed, to be aided, as it were, by our writings and fortified against the madness of those who babble forth with unhallowed mouth that the authority of the holy and apostohc see had no right to excommunicate Henry—a man who despises the Christian law; a destroyer, namely, of the churches and of the empire; a favourer of heretics and a partaker with them—or to absolve any one from the oath of fealty to him, does not seem to us to be altogether necessary when so many and such absolutely certain proofs are to be found in the pages of Holy Scripture. Nor do we believe, indeed, that those who, heaping up for themselves damna- tion, impudently detract from the truth and run counter to it have joined these charges to the audacity of their defence so much from ignorance as from a certain mad-
