the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal: without the Roman Empire there could not be a Roman, nor by necessary consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church[50]. For, as will be shewn more fully hereafter, men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought: Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian state: they were but two names for the same thing. Thus urged, the Pope took a step which some among his predecessors are said to have already contemplated[51], and towards which the events of the last fifty years had pointed. The moment was opportune. The widowed empress Irene, equally famous for her beauty, her talents, and her crimes, had deposed and blinded her son Constantine VI: a woman, an usurper, almost a parricide, sullied the throne of the world. By what right, it might well be asked, did the factions of Byzantium impose a master on the original seat of empire? It was time to provide better for the most august of human offices: an election at Rome was as valid as at Constantinople--the possessor of the real power should also be clothed with the outward dignity. Nor could it be doubted where that possessor was to be found. The Frank had been always faithful to Rome: his baptism was the enlistment of a new barbarian auxiliary. His services against Arian heretics and Lombard marauders, against the Saracen of Spain and the Avar of Pannonia, had earned him the title of Champion of the Faith and Defender of the Holy See. He was now unquestioned lord of Western Europe, whose subject nations, Keltic and Teutonic, were eager to be called by his name and to imitate his customs[52]. In Charles, the hero who united under one sceptre so many races, who ruled all as the vicegerent of God, the pontiff might well see--as later ages saw--the new golden head of a second image[53], erected on the ruins of that whose mingled iron and clay seemed crumbling to nothingness behind the impregnable bulwarks of Constantinople. [Sidenote: Coronation of Charles at Rome, A.D. 800.]