Gregory himself had sat silent for a moment, overwhelmed with the awe of the great crisis. When he rose it was with a breaking voice and tears in his eyes: and the form of the deliverance was as remarkable as its tenor. Gregory addressed--not the Council: but, with an extraordinary outburst of emotion, the Apostle in whose name he pronounced judgment and in whose chair he sat. Nothing could have been more impressive than this sudden and evidently spontaneous change from the speech expected from him by the awed and excited assembly, to the personal statement and explanation given forth in trembling accents but with uplifted head and eyes raised to the unseen, to the great potentate in heavenly places whose representative he believed himself to be. However vague might be the image of the apostle in other eyes, to Gregory St. Peter was his living captain, the superior officer of the Church, to whom his second in command had to render an account of his procedure in face of the enemy. The amazement of that great assembly, the awe suddenly imposed even on the great body of priests, too familiar perhaps with holy things to be easily impressed--much more on the startled laymen, Rudolf's envoys and their attendants, by this abstract address, suddenly rising out of the midst of the rapt assembly to a listener unseen, must have been extraordinary. It marked, as nothing else could have done, the realisation in Gregory's mind of a situation of extraordinary importance, such an emergency as since the Church came into being had seldom or never occurred in her history before. He stood before the trembling world, himself a solitary man shaken to the depths, calling upon his great predecessor to remember that it was not with his own will that he had ascended that throne or accepted that responsibility--that it was Peter, or rather the two great leaders of the Church together, Peter the Prince of the Apostles, Paul the Doctor and instructor of the nations, who had chosen him, not he who had thrust himself into their place. To these august listeners he recounted everything, the whole story of the struggle, the sins of Henry, his submission and absolution, his renewed rebellion, always against the Church, against the Apostles, against the Ecclesiastical authority: while the breathless assembly around, left out in this solemn colloquy, sat eager, drinking in every word, overcome by the wonder of the situation, the strange attitude of the shining figure in the midst, who was not even praying, but reporting, explaining every detail to his unseen general above. Henry had been a bad king, a cruel oppressor, an invader of every right: and it would have been the best policy of the Churchman to put forth these effective arguments for his overthrow. But of this there is not a word. He was a rebel against the Church, and by the hand of the Church it was just and right that he should fall.