7. =Breach between Henry and Thomas.=--The first act of the new Archbishop was to surrender his Chancellorship. He was unable, he said, to serve two masters. It is not difficult to understand his motives. The Church, as the best men of the twelfth century believed, was divinely instituted for the guidance of the world. It was but a short step for the nobler spirits amongst the clergy to hold it necessary that, in order to secure the due performance of such exalted duties, the clergy should be exempted from the so-called justice of laymen, which was often only another name for tyranny, even if the exemption led to the infliction upon wicked clerks of lesser punishments than were meet. In this way the clergy would unconsciously fall into the frame of mind which might lead them to imagine it more to the honour of God that a wicked clerk should be insufficiently punished than that he should be punished by a layman. Of all men Archbishop Thomas was the most likely to fall into this mistake. He was, as Chancellor, prone to magnify his office, and to think more of being the originator of great reforms than of the great reforms themselves. As Archbishop he would also be sure to magnify his office, and to think less, as Anselm would have thought, of reconciling the true interests of the kingdom with the true interests of the Church, than of making the Archbishop's authority the centre of stirring movement, and of raising the Church, of which he was the highest embodiment in England, to a position above the power of the king. All this he would do with a great, if not a complete, sincerity. He would feel that he was himself the greater man because he believed that he was fighting in the cause of God. [Illustration: A bishop ordaining a priest. (From a MS. of the latter part of the twelfth century.)]