by kings, might have drawn after it that of the temporal power of the popes, if Ganganelli had not detached the interests of the Holy See from those of the Jesuits, and, finally, consummated their abolition. When he died, some months after their suppression, they were accused of having shortened his days. If it were true that he fell the victim of their implacable resentment, as is generally believed, they have by this last crime hastened by many years the extreme decrepitude, and hour of dissolution, of that pontifical power of which they had been the supports. Apparently they were unwilling it should survive them; they immolated the man who alone rendered it tolerable. Since the year 1774, it has done little else than wander about, exhaust itself, fall into agonies, and expire. CHAPTER XII. RECAPITULATION CHRISTIANITY had for a period of seven hundred years, glorified God, sanctified man, and given consolation to the earth, before any minister of the gospel ever thought of erecting himself into a temporal prince. This ambition sprung up in the eighth century, after the dissolution of the Roman empire, and the ravages of the barbarians, in the bosom of universal ignorance, and of troubles which overturned Europe, but in an especial manner rent and divided Italy. But the popes had scarcely obtained the exercise of a precarious civil power when, corrupted by functions so foreign to their apostolic ministry, unfaithful vicars of Christ and of the sovereign, they aspired to be no longer dependent, and speedily to rule. Menacing in the ninth century and dissolute in the tenth, the pontifical court had weakened itself by the publicity of its vices, when the stern Gregory VII. conceived the idea of a universal theocracy: an audacious enterprize, weakly sustained by most of the pontiffs of the twelfth century, but which Innocent III. realized at the opening of the thirteenth; this is the era of the greatest display of the spiritual and temporal supremacy of the bishops of Rome.—Their residence within the walls of Avignon in the fourteenth century, and the schism which was prolonged to the middle of the fifteenth, abated their power and even their ambition; after the year 1450, the popes no longer thought of any thing but the aggrandizement of their families. Julius II. came too late to attempt anew the subjugation of kings; his successors during the sixteenth century, to prevent being too much humbled themselves, had need of an address which those of the seventeenth did not inherit; and the foil of the temporal power of the popes has been only retarded, since the year 1700, by the wise conduct of two pontiffs and the little attention which the errors of others claimed.