Pope, but false monk.” Gregory, strong alike in virtue and in resolve, and aided by the might of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany and of Robert Guiscard, answered by pronouncing a solemn anathema upon his secular adversary. In awe-struck silence the Council of the Lateran listened to the Pope’s final excommunication of the King, and of all those who dared to associate themselves with him. “I absolve,” said Gregory, “all Christians from the oaths which they have taken or may take to him; and I decree that no one shall obey him as king; for it is fitting that he, who has endeavoured to diminish the honour of the Church, should himself lose that honour which he seems to have.” We all know the final act of that terrible unequal struggle, the duel of brute force against spiritual terrors in a rude age of violence and superstition, which took place in the courtyard of the Castle of Canossa, the Countess Matilda’s fortress in the Apennines. “On a dreary winter morning, with the ground deep in snow, the King, the heir of a long line of Emperors, was permitted to enter within the two outer of the three walls which girded the Castle of Canossa. He had laid aside every mark of royalty or of distinguished station; he was clad only in the thin white linen dress of the penitent, and there, fasting, he awaited in humble patience the pleasure of the Pope. But the gates did not unclose. A second day he stood, cold, hungry and mocked by vain hopes. And yet a third day dragged on from morning till evening over the unsheltered head of the discrowned King. Every heart was moved save that of the representative of Jesus Christ.” [Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO RAVELLO] Can we wonder then that the phrase “to go to Canossa” (_gehen nach Canossa_) has become ingrafted on to the German language, or that so significant an expression was openly used by Prince Bismarck during the fierce religious struggles in the days of the “Kultur-kampf” between the newly-formed Empire and the direct successor of the spiritual Caesar who had thus humbled a former Emperor of Germany? It was in vain that Henry afterwards endeavoured, by making war upon his oppressor, to undo the evil effects of his public recantation at Canossa; the act of humiliation was too marked ever to be wiped out either by himself or by his descendants. For good or for bad, Gregory had succeeded in rendering the Papacy free from lay control; he had gained for ever for the Church one of her most cherished tenets, the absolute independence of the Pope’s election by the College of Cardinals; and he had even partially reduced the Western Empire into a fief of the Church itself. The former of Gregory’s great objects, the freedom of election, still remains intact after an interval of more than eight hundred years; the latter attempt, though long struggled for and apparently with success at times, has, we know, ultimately failed.