the middle, between God and humanity.”  The same great pope has left us a document entitled On the Contempt of the World, which treats of the absolute futility of all things mundane.  There is no reason to look upon the union of this unquenchable thirst for power and complete “other-worldiness” as a contradiction.  The kingdom of God, Augustine’s Civitas Dei, must of necessity be established that the destiny of the world may be fulfilled.  Every pope must account to God for his share in the advancement of the only work which mattered, and the greater the power the ruler of this world had acquired over the souls of men, the more he trembled before God, weighed down by the burden of his enormous responsibility.  “The renunciation of the world in the service of the world-ruling Church, the mastery of the world in the service of renunciation, this was the problem and ideal of the middle ages” (Harnack).  But not only the pope, every priest, as a direct member of the kingdom of God, was superior to the secular rulers.  This was taught emphatically by the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, and Gregory VII., the wildest fanatic of the kingdom of God, said, in writing to a German bishop:  “Who then who possesses even small knowledge and reasoning power, could hesitate to place the priests above the kings?” Even the emperor Constantine, though he was still largely under the sway of the imperial idea, distinctly acknowledged the bishops as his masters; according to the legend he handed to the Bishop of Rome the insignia of his power, sceptre, crown and cloak, and humbly held the bridle of the prelate’s horse.

The theoretic backbone of this mental attitude was the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church and the older scholasticism, pronouncing the illimitable power of human perception; the world’s profoundest depths had been fathomed, its riddle finally solved; there was consequently no room for philosophy, the endless meditation on the meaning of the world and the destiny of man.  Science had but one task:  to bring logical proof of the revealed religious verities.  The greatest champion of this view was Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who in his treatise, Cur Deus Homo proved that God was compelled to become man in order to complete the work of salvation.  Abelard preached a similar doctrine, but carried away by the fervour of thought, arrived at conclusions which he was forced to recant ignominiously; for at the end of his chain of evidence he did not always find the foregone conclusion which should have been there.  This system of a final and infallible knowledge of the world is the very foundation of ecclesiastical government.  The priest alone has all knowledge, for he has the doctrine of salvation.  Had it occurred to any man to defend his own opinions in contradiction to the system of the Church, that man would speedily have come to the conclusion that the devil had tempted him to false observations, or false deductions, and