At the same time, the relations of Church and state were defined more clearly. Ecclesiastical power was now held to be supreme over secular power and that change was a pronounced revolution. "All the rulers of earth," it was dogmatically affirmed, "are bound to obey the bishop and to bow the neck before him."[338:3] Imperial control of the Church, exercised for eight centuries, was declared to be a usurpation which entailed disputes and wars. The state was represented as unholy, the Church as holy. That proposition struck the sword of justice out of the hand of the temporal prince and removed the clergy from the reach of the secular law. Clergy were freed from political courts and the laymen were excluded, in theory at least, from participation in Church legislation. In short these decretals carried the papal theocracy far beyond any claims made up to that time by the Popes themselves. It was left to Gregory VII. and Innocent III. to make the claim a living reality. These decretals formed a part of the _Corpus Juris Canonici_ for six hundred years and supplied a complete set of laws concerning Church lands, usurpation and spoliation, ordinations, sacraments, fasts, festivals, relics of the cross and of the Apostles, schism and heresy, the use of holy water and the chrism, the consecration of churches, the blessing of the fruits of the field, sacred vessels, garments, etc. In this way society was influenced and modified in all its ramifications. Both the civil and ecclesiastical polity of Europe was affected for centuries to follow. Over and over again they were quoted to prove papal omnipotence against temporal authority. For the purpose of illustration, the decretals were replete with personal incidents and had in them many beautiful axioms of sincere and vital religious truth. The whole tone of the composition was pious and reverential. Pope, bishop, and lower clergy all gained by this shrewd and specious defence of the Papacy. The priesthood actually constituted the Church. In this period of ignorance and lawlessness, while the Empire established by Charles the Great was disintegrating, the Papacy rapidly forged to the front as the champion of united Christendom; and to this end the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals contributed powerfully. How much was contributed that was actually new may be a question. Whether the history of the Church would have been the same had they not appeared is a disputed point. Whether the Pope without them could have become the greatest ruler of western Europe by the middle of the ninth century is not clear. Whether the Papacy would have had a world-wide political interest from this time on without them is a question still unsettled.