‘He laid aside all shame,’ says Matthew Paris of this Pope, ‘he extorted larger sums of money than any before him.’ The ‘sums of money’ enabled Rome to cast down her imperial foe, but the extortion was a dangerous expedient. Throughout the early Middle Ages the Pope had been accepted by Western Christendom as speaking for the Church with the voice of Christ’s authority. In his disputes with kings the latter could never be sure of the loyalty of their people, should they call on them to take up arms against the ‘Holy Father’. With the growth of nations and of Rome as a temporal power a gradual change came over the European outlook; subjects were more inclined to obey rulers whom they knew than a distant potentate whom they did not; they were also less ready to accept papal interference without criticism. Thus a distinction was for the first time drawn between the Pope and the Church. When King Hako of Norway was offered the imperial crown on the deposition of Frederick II by Innocent IV, he refused, saying, ‘I will gladly fight the enemies of the Church, but I will not fight against the foes of the Pope.’ His words were significant of a new spirit. In the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines that racked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were laid the foundations of a movement to control the Popes by Universal Councils in the fifteenth, and of that still more drastic opposition to his powers in the sixteenth that we call the Reformation. XVI THE FAITH OF THE MIDDLE AGES A modern student, when he passes from school to a university, soon finds that he is standing at a cross-roads: he cannot hope, like a philosopher of the sixteenth century, to ‘take all knowledge for his province’, but must choose which of the many signposts he will follow--law, classics, science, economics, chemistry, medicine, to name but a few of the more important. Mediaeval minds would have been sorely puzzled by some of these avenues of knowledge, while the rest they would denounce as mere sidetracks, leading by a devious route to the main high road of theology. Science, for instance, the patient searching after truth by building up knowledge from facts, and accepting nothing as a fact that had not been verified by proof, was a closed book in the thirteenth century. Roger Bacon, an English friar, one of the first to attempt scientific experiments, was regarded with such suspicion on account of his researches and his sarcastic comments on the views of his day that he was believed to be in league with the devil; and even the favour of a pope more enlightened than most of his contemporaries could not save him in later years from imprisonment as a suspected magician.