That which must render the pontificate of Eugenius III. memorable in the History of the Power of the Popes is, the approbation which he bestowed on Gratian’s Decree. The name of ‘Decree’ designates in this place, a canonical compilation at first entitled ‘Concord of the Discordant Canons,’ which was completed in 1152, by the aforesaid Gratian, a Benedictine monk bom in Tuscany. The then recent discovery of Justinian’s Pandects, caused the revival in Italy of the study of civil jurisprudence: the collection of Gratian, became the ‘text’ of ecclesiastical jurisprudence; and the first of these studies, soon subjected to the other, appeared only as its appendage. This collection is divided into three parts, of which one treats of general principles and ecclesiastical persons, the second of judgment, and the third of sacred things. The tautology, the impertinencies, the irregularity, the errors in proper names, the disregard of correctness in the quotations, are the smallest faults of the compiler; mutilated passages, canons, false decretals, every species of falsehood, abound in this monstrous production. Its success was only the more rapid; they began to expound it in the schools, to cite it at the tribunals, to invoke it in treaties; and it had almost become the general law of Europe, when the return of learning slowly dissipated these gross impostures. The clergy withdrawn from the secular tribunals; the civil power subjected to the ecclesiastical supremacy; the estates of individuals, and the acts which determined them, sovereignly regulated, confirmed, annulled, by the canons, and by the clergy; the papal power freed from all restriction; the sanction of all the laws of the church conferred on the Holy See, itself independent of the laws published and confirmed by it: such are the actual consequences of this system of jurisprudence. Some churches, and that of France in particular, have modified it; but it is preserved pure and unaltered in the Roman Church, which has availed itself of it in the succeeding centuries to trouble the world. From the end of the eighth century the decretals of Isidore had sowed the seeds of the whole pontifical power. Gratian has compiled and enriched them. Represented as the source of all irrefragable decisions, the universal tribunal which-determines all differences, dissipates all doubts, clears up all difficulties, the Court of Rome beholds itself consulted from all parts, by metropolitans, bishops, chapters, abbots, monks, by lords, by princes, and even by private individuals. The pontifical correspondence had no limits but in the slowness of the medium of communication; the flow of questions multiplied bulb, briefs and epistles; and from these fictitious decretals, attributed to the popes of the first ages, sprung up and multiplied, from the time of Eugenius III. millions of responses and too well authenticated sentences. Matters, religious, civil,