The strife between Church and State was, in fact, taking every day a new harshness.  Gregory VII. a century earlier had suggested that kingly power was of diabolic origin.  “Who is ignorant that kings and princes have their beginning in this, that knowing not God, they by rapine, perfidy, and slaughter, the devil moving them, affect rule over their equals-that is, over men, with blind greed and intolerable presumption.”  But the papal theory of a vast Christian republic of all peoples, under the leadership of Rome, found little favour with the kings of the rising states which were beginning to shape themselves into the great powers of modern Europe.  Henry, steeped in the new temper, proposed a rival theory of the origin of government.  “Thou,” he wrote to the Pope, “by the papal authority granted thee by men, thinkest to prevail over the authority of the royal dignity committed to me by God.”  The wisest of the churchmen of England used more sober language than all this.  “Ecclesiastical dignity,” wrote Ralph of Diceto, later the Dean of St. Paul’s, “rather advances than abolishes royal dignity, and the royal dignity is wont rather to preserve than to destroy ecclesiastical liberty, for kings have no salvation without the Church, nor can the Church obtain peace without the protection of the king.”  To the fiery zeal of the archbishop, on the other hand, the secular power was as “lead” compared to the fine “gold” of the spiritual dignity.  Henry, he cried loudly, was a “tyrant"-a word which to medieval ears meant not an arbitrary or capricious ruler, since that was the admitted right of every ruler, but a king who governed without heeding the eternal maxims of the “law of nature,” an idea which theologians had borrowed from the theories of the ancient law of Rome, and modified to mean the law of Scripture or of the Church.  But in the arguments of Thomas this law took the narrowest proportions, with no wider interpretation than that given by the pedantic temper of a fanatical ecclesiastical politician.  He fought his battles too often by violent and vulgar methods, and Henry reaped the profit of his errors.  How far our national solution of the problem raised between Church and State might have been altered or delayed if the claims of the Church had at this moment been represented by a leader of supreme moral and spiritual authority, it is hard to say.  But Thomas was far from being at the highest level of his own day in religious thought.  When some years later the holy Hugh of Lincoln forbade his archdeacons and their officers to receive fines instead of inflicting penance for crimes, he was met by the objection that the blessed archbishop and martyr Thomas himself had taken fines.  “Believe me,” said Hugh, “not for that was he a saint; he showed other marks of holiness, by another title he won the martyr’s palm.”