In assigning these powers to the pope alone, they entirely ignore everything associated with the original and primitive organization of the Christian Church, and especially the important fact that it was not until the beginning of the sixth century that the bishop of Rome succeeded in acquiring the distinctive title of pope.[3] Before that time they had exercised at Rome only such powers as metropolitan bishops elsewhere--each of them having been called _papa_ or pope. When the Roman bishop acquired by usurpation the exclusive title of _the_ pope, the other metropolitan bishops were reduced to a condition of inferiority and subordination, and he then required only the temporal power to assure to him the power and jurisdiction the Jesuits now claim for him. It took several hundred years of conflict within the Churches and with the civil powers to accomplish this, and was only accomplished at last by subduing impotent kings, and so uniting the power of the Church with that of the State as to hold ignorant populations in subjugation. And now that the Italians, after submitting to this humiliation for more than a thousand years, and finding all the sources of their prosperity withered up, have abolished and destroyed this illicit and usurped temporal power, and taken into their own hands the administration of their own temporal affairs--obeying the example set them by the people of the United States--the Jesuits employ all their energies to reverse this popular verdict, and plunge them again into the dreary chasm from which they have escaped.