The whole life-work of Gregory VII. was based on his conviction that the church has been founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which His will is the only law; that, in her capacity as a divine institution, she outtops all human structures; and that the pope, _qua_ head of the church, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God--or, in other words, a defection from Christianity. Elaborating an idea discoverable in St Augustine, he looked on the worldly state--a purely human creation--as an unhallowed edifice whose character is sufficiently manifest from the fact that it abolishes the equality of man, and that it is built up by violence and injustice. He developed these views in a famous series of letters to Bishop Hermann of Metz. But it is clear from the outset that we are only dealing with reflections of strictly theoretical importance; for any attempt to interpret them in terms of action would have bound the church to annihilate not merely a single definite state, but all states. Thus Gregory, as a politician desirous of achieving some result, was driven in practice to adopt a different standpoint. He acknowledged the existence of the state as a dispensation of Providence, described the coexistence of church and state as a divine ordinance, and emphasized the necessity of union between the _sacerdotium_ and the _imperium_. But at no period would he have dreamed of putting the two powers on an equality; the superiority of church to state was to him a fact which admitted of no discussion and which he had never doubted. Again, this very superiority of the church implied in his eyes a superiority of the papacy, and he did not shrink from drawing the extreme conclusions from these premises. In other words, he claimed the right of excommunicating and deposing incapable monarchs, and of confirming the choice of their successors. This habit of thought needs to be appreciated in order to understand his efforts to bring individual states into feudal subjection to the chair of St Peter. It was no mere question of formality, but the first step to the realization of his ideal theocracy comprising each and every state.