England herself owes something to the authority of the popes, who, by overwhelming John Lackland with excommunications, rendered him powerless in his attempts to enslave the English people, or to resist the demands of the barons and the commons. This is a truth which impartial history cannot deny or doubt, and which disposes us not to approve, but to blame with less bitterness, excesses and abuses of power of which all the effects have not been deplorable.[253] The populace of London, who burn every year the effigy of the pope, would be much astonished if, amidst a fanatical delirium, they were told that the army which once fought for the independence of Great Britain was called _the army of God and of the Holy Church_; if they were reminded that the great charter of the Forest, the first monument of British liberty, was the fortunate fruit of the menaces and thunders of the Church of Rome, and that this charter would never have been granted by John, without the redoubtable influence and the imperious counsels of the sovereign pontiff.[254] Without wishing to justify the domination of the popes, we may say that they were led to grasp at supreme power by the circumstances in which Europe was placed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. European society, without experience or laws, and plunged in ignorance and anarchy, cast itself into the arms of the popes, and believed that it placed itself under the protection of Heaven. As nations had no other ideas of civilization than such as they received from the Christian religion, the sovereign pontiffs naturally became the supreme arbiters between rival or neighbouring countries; amidst the darkness which the light of the Gospel had a continued and never-ending tendency to diminish, their authority must naturally have been the first established and the first recognised; temporal power stood in need of their sanction; people and kings implored their support and consulted their wisdom: they believed themselves authorized to exercise a sovereign dictatorship. This dictatorship was often exercised to the advantage of public morality and social order; it often protected the weak against the strong; it arrested the execution of criminal plots; it re-established peace between states; and it preserved a young society from the excesses of ambition, licentiousness, and barbarism. When we cast our eyes over the annals of the middle ages, we cannot help being struck by one of the most beautiful spectacles that human society has ever presented,—it is that of Christian Europe recognising but one religion, having but one law, forming as it were but one empire, governed by a single head, who spoke in the name of God, and whose mission was to make the Gospel reign upon earth.