a part of a vast organisation extending throughout—nay even beyond—the civilised world; its officers, while in every nation numbered amongst the great ones of the earth, belonged at the same time to an independent theocratic State, whose sovereign, as such, was the earthly equal of earthly kings at the same time that, as the declared vicegerent of God, he claimed superiority over the highest of them. It was thus, and thus only, that the rivalry between Church and State in so many countries, and in England especially, arose and was maintained. Had the Church been in truth the Church of England it would have been a mere imperium in imperio, and would never have been able to hold its own generation after generation and century after century against the State, often represented by powerful and able monarchs such as Henry H. or Edward III. It was just because it was not the Church of England but a mere extension into England of the powerful Western Church, having its rights and its interests and its officers in every nation, and its independent seat of empire at Rome, and thus enabled to enlist one nation against another, or a nation against its own rulers, that it became in a greater or less degree, and for periods varying in different countries, independent of the State, and a rival of the State. Had the Church in England been in truth the Church of England, a Becket or even a Dunstan would have been impossible; it was just because they could fall back upon a foreign power independent of and formidable to the Government of their own country, that those prelates were enabled to treat with their own sovereigns as on equal terms.
No author of repute, however insular his point of view, would venture to write of one of the great religious orders—the Cistercians, say, or the Franciscans, or the
