But, it may be said, is the Catholic Church unanimous on the one hand, and the Anglican communion, restricted to one small province, left alone in her protest on the other? Did not she, whom they would call "the already decrepit rebel of three hundred years," submit from 596 to 1534 to that very authority which she now denies? It would be quite beyond my present limits to trace, as I had first purposed, the Roman Bishop's power from that point at which it stood when St. Gregory sent our Apostle Augustin into England, to that point which it had reached in the thirteenth century, and which it strove to maintain in the sixteenth. I can only now very briefly point out a few of the steps in that most wonderful rise. The two centuries, then, which succeeded St. Gregory, were even more favourable to this growth than those which went before. While the confusion and violence of secular governments by the breaking in and settlement of the various northern tribes were greater than ever,--while the ecclesiastical constitution was all that yet held together the scattered portions of the shattered Western empire--the single Apostolical See of the West, whose Bishop was in constant correspondence with the spiritual rulers of these various countries, whose voice was ever and anon heard striving to win and soften into mercy and justice those temporal rulers, would be, as it were, "a light shining in a dark place." The Bishops, everywhere miserably afflicted by their own sovereigns, found a stay and support in one beyond the reach of the feudal lord's violence. The benefit they thus derived from the Roman Patriarch was so great, that they would be disposed to overlook the gradual change which was ensuing in the relation between themselves and him, the deference which was deepening into subjection. Or, if here and there, what Leo would have called "a presumptuous spirit," such as Hincmar of Rheims, or our own Grossetete, in after times, set himself against the stream, it would all be in vain. However good his cause might be, if he did not yield, he would be beaten down like St. Hilary of Arles. Moreover, as the great heresy of Mahomet invaded and hemmed in three of the Patriarchal Sees of the East, their counterpoise to the originally great influence of the Roman See was removed. Political separation from the East, and the difficulty of communication, would of themselves greatly tend to this result. To this must be added the great increase of power which the house of Charlemagne, for their own political purposes, bestowed on the Roman See; it was worth while building up a popedom for an imperial crown. De Maistre says, "The Popes reign since the ninth century at least."[165] But it is a somewhat naive confession, "The French had the singular honour, one of which they have not been at all sufficiently proud, of having set up, humanly, the Catholic Church in the world, by raising its august head to