When the storm subsides, there emerges the august conception of the Holy Roman Empire. For the noblest expression of the ideal of a universal Christian Empire, read Dante's _De Monarchia_. The history of the Holy Roman Empire is too large a subject to enter upon. It is important to remember that the struggles between the Popes and the Emperors that fill so large a space of mediaeval history were not struggles between Church and State. Western Europe was conceived of as one Christian Society--an attempt to realise the City of God of St Augustine's great treatise--and the question at issue was whether the Pope or the Emperor was to be regarded as the supreme head of this great society. The unity of Western Christendom found a crude, but real, expression in the Crusades, and it is significant that the decline of the crusading impulse coincides in time with the rise of national feeling in the two western states, England and France. What was to be the attitude of the Catholic Church towards this new national instinct? In the 14th and 15th centuries the question becomes increasingly urgent, and the Council of Constance may be regarded as the last sincere effort to find an answer. The answer suggested there, to which the English Church still adheres, was the recognition of a General Council of the Church as the supreme spiritual authority. Such a General Council might gather the glory and honour of the nations into the City of God, and might even, it was hoped, restore the broken unity between East and West. How the Council failed, how Constantinople was left to its fate, how a Papacy growing more and more Italian in its interests brought to a head the long-simmering revolt of the nations--all this you know. The Reformation was, in part, a struggle of the nations to give religious expression to their national life. The threefold bond that had held together the Church of the West--the bond of common language, law and ceremonial--was broken. At the threshold of the new order stand the figures of Luther and Machiavelli, as champions of the supremacy of the State. True, Luther thinks of the State as a Christian society, while Machiavelli is the father of the modern German doctrine of the non-moral character of state action. But the Augsburg compromise, _cujus regio_, _ejus religio_, was a frank subordination of the Church to secular authority. The Tudor sovereigns adopted the doctrine with alacrity, and imposed on the Church of England a subjection to secular authority from which it has not yet been able to disentangle itself.