From the period when Christianity became the recognised religion of the Roman empire, the head of the state participated in the nomination of bishops, who were supposed to be chosen by their flock, approved of and consecrated by their fellow clergy, and confirmed in their appointment by their temporal ruler. The voice of the people had long been silenced, on account of the disgraceful tumults and outrages so frequently occurring at the election of bishops, when instead of a little band of devout believers purified by the test of persecution, the flock was composed of the licentious rabble of a city. The voice of the clergy was intended by the policy of Hildebrand to become a mere echo of the Lateran; and the voice of the ruler of the state to be no more heard except in liege acquiescence. The conduct of the princes of that era afforded ample scope to Hildebrand for appearing in the character of a reformer of the abuses of the age, for as the elections of bishops by the popular voice had too often degenerated into scenes of tumult and factious violence, so in the hands of princes they had become but too frequently mere mercantile transactions. Bishoprics and abbacies were either openly bestowed upon the highest bidder, or were suffered to remain vacant for years that their revenues might be appropriated to purposes of private emolument; and too many of the superior clergy were very ready to profit by an abuse which opened an easy access to the high places of the church, to those whose profligacy would otherwise have barred their advance to preferment of which they were utterly unworthy. Had the policy of Hildebrand been directed simply to the correction of such abuses, and to the establishment or restoration of a discipline which he deemed essential, its motives would have been high and holy; but it is only too evident that earthly ambition was the ruling principle of a mind elevated above the meaner vices of the age, and that the reforms which he advocated served as a cloak for promoting with unscrupulous energy that temporal aggrandizement of the Papal See, which attained its culminating point when Innocent the Third proclaimed himself “less than God, but more than man, God’s Christ, and Pharoah’s God.”[214]