Principles of western civilisation

280 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

superiority of spiritual interests to temporal welfare, being taken as a concept fundamental and unchallenged, the long dispute of the centuries as to who was to be the ultimate authority in spiritual matters reaches at last its inevitable culmination. The claim of the civil ruler is once and for all disposed of. That spectacle which had repeated itself throughout the centuries in the past, of the temporal sovereign against whom a censure or a bull of excommunication had been launched, assembling a council of the bishops or powers of his own people to condemn the excommunication or censure, and to retaliate on the power which had launched it,’ may still be repeated, as it was about to be repeated in France. But it has been met in the Bull ““Unam Sanctam” by the inevitable overruling counter claim: ‘there is one holy catholic and apostolic church, outside of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins,’? and “‘ we declare, announce and define, that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.”* The position involved in such a claim throughout the secular affairs of the world is stated at last with clearness and precision. It is that towards which the movement of history had ripened through the struggles of the past. There were in the world, it is asserted in the Bull, two swords—the spiritual and the temporal—but the claim respecting them is now definite and emphatic. It is that ‘Both swords, the spiritual and the

1 Cf History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. ii. p. 144.

2 The Bull ‘‘ Unam Sanctam,” in Henderson’s Select Historical Documents

of the Middle Ages, the text being quoted from the latest revision in Revue des questions historigues, July 1889. 3 Tbed.