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of clean-hearted greatness, dedicated to God. Torn apart from the common life, uncompanionable, lonely and bowed down by the bur- den of a prophetic mission, he was inwardly troubled by doubts con- cerning his Charisma. He hungered and thirsted after justice, and never attained happiness because this justice never assumed the form he visioned in his ardent desire. There is no other word which passed his lips so frequently, so feelingly, as this word justitia the cause of justice, the cause of God, the eternal law, the world-order according to the divine idea. Actuality was to become reasonable, what was rea- sonable was to be realized: this modern phrase would have suited him, if by "reason" were meant the divine spirit of order, which in itself is already a summons to carry on ceaselessly the reform of the world.
The gulf which lies between what mankind is and what it ought to be had tormented Hildebrand almost beyond endurance. Now that he was Pope, he sensed the dreadful command to carry out his office as viceroy of God's Kingdom. He felt the wholeness of Peter's power within himself more deeply, ardently, mystically, than did even Leo the Great. In a letter to Henry he declared that whatever the Emperor said or wrote to him was said or written to the Aposde himself. It was Peter who with unearthly insight divined the con- viction underlying the lines, the words, which die Pope read or lis- tened to. Gregory felt sure that he was in person the Rock, the Bearer of the Keys, the authorized antagonist of Satan. That which was imperious in his nature was not the self-glorification of human genius, as Cassar and Napoleon exemplify it. He lived, acted and gave orders by the power of another, who had seized upon his person in order to act through it.
But the person is also a limitation; and even the holiest human will must make use of human means. Gregory, who had become a monk long ago at Cluny, struggled to bring about the complete, untarnished supremacy of the spirit of the Church, in the priesdy office and the life of the laity. He wanted to make freedom a striving towards the highest goals, and on his side were the heroic counsels of the Gospel. Yet what this Gospel defines as summons and ideal he made law and compulsion. Having put on the armour of that Gospel he gave batde for men's right to renounce for religion's sake blood, tribe and family* Besides there lay embedded in his nature a chill suspicion that the
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