is lawful for subjects to accuse princes....  The Pope can loose subjects from the oath of fealty.’  Such are the fundamental articles promulgated by Gregory VII. in the Council of Rome, which the official historian of the Church reproduced in the commencement of the seventeenth century as being authentic and legitimate, and Rome has never disavowed it.  Borrowed in part from the false Decretals, resting, most of them, on the fabulous donation of Constantine, and on the successive impostures and usurpations of the first barbarous ages, they received from the hand of Gregory VII. a new character of force and unity.  That pontiff stamped them with the sanction of his own genius.  Such authority had never before been created:  it made every other power useless and subaltern” ("Life of Gregory VII.,” by Villemain, trans. by Brockley, vol. ii., pp. 53-55).  Thus the struggle became inevitable between the temporal and the spiritual powers.  “In every country there was a dual government:—­1.  That of a local kind, represented by a temporal sovereign. 2.  That of a foreign kind, acknowledging the authority of the Pope.  This Roman influence was, in the nature of things, superior to the local; it expressed the sovereign will of one man over all the nations of the continent conjointly, and gathered overwhelming power from its compactness and unity.  The local influence was necessarily of a feeble nature, since it was commonly weakened by the rivalries of conterminous states and the dissensions dexterously provoked by its competitor.  On not a single occasion could the various European states form a coalition against their common antagonist.  Whenever a question arose, they were skilfully taken in detail, and commonly mastered.  The ostensible object of papal intrusion was to secure for the different peoples, moral well-being; the real object was to obtain large revenues and give support to large bodies of ecclesiastics.  The revenues thus abstracted were not unfrequently many times greater than those passing into the treasury of the local power.  Thus, on the occasion of Innocent IV. demanding provision to be made for three hundred additional Italian clergy by the Church of England, and that one of his nephews, a mere boy, should have a stall in Lincoln Cathedral, it was found that the sum already annually abstracted by foreign ecclesiastics from England was thrice that which went into the coffers of the king.  While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts in the herds of slaves they possessed—­some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand—­begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor.  There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the labourers” ("Conflict between Religion and Science,” Draper, pp. 266, 267).