This was an old-fashioned excommunication; and we in these days have but a faint idea what a dreadful thing it was, especially when accompanied with an interdict.  The churches were everywhere shut; the dead were unburied in consecrated ground; the rites of religion were suspended; gloom and fear sat on every countenance; desolation overspread the land.  The king was regarded as guilty and damned; his ministers looked upon him as a Samson shorn of his locks; his very wife feared contamination from his society; his children, as a man blasted with the malediction of Heaven.  When a man was universally supposed to be cursed in the house and in the field; in the wood and in the church; in eating or drinking; in fasting or sleeping; in working or resting; in his arms, in his legs, in his heart, and in his head; living or dying; in this world and in the next,—­what could he do?

And what could Henry do, with all his greatness?  His victorious armies deserted him; a rival prince laid claim to his throne; his enemies multiplied; his difficulties thickened; new dangers surrounded him on every side.  If loyalty—­that potent principle—­ had summoned one hundred thousand warriors to his camp, a principle much more powerful than loyalty—­the fear of hell—­had dispersed them.  Even his friends joined the Pope.  The sainted Agnes, his own mother, acquiesced in the sentence.  The Countess Matilda, the richest lady in the world, threw all her treasures at the feet of her spiritual monarch.  The moral sentiments of his own subjects were turned against him; he was regarded as justly condemned.  The great princes of Germany sought his deposition.  The world rejected him, the Church abandoned him, and God had forsaken him.  He was prostrate, helpless, disarmed, ruined.  True, he made superhuman efforts:  he traversed his empire with the hope of rallying his subjects; he flew from city to city,—­but all in vain.  Every convent, every castle, every city of his vast dominions beheld in him the visitation of the Almighty.  The diadem was obscured by the tiara, and loyalty itself yielded to the superior potency of religious fear.  Only Bertha, his neglected wife, was faithful and trusting in that gloomy day; all else had defrauded and betrayed him.  How bitter his humiliation!  And yet his haughty foe was not contented with the punishment he had inflicted.  He declared that if the sun went down on the 23d of February, 1077, before Henry was restored to the bosom of the Church, his crown should be transferred to another.  That inexorable old pontiff laid claim to the right of giving and taking away imperial crowns.  Was ever before seen such arrogance and audacity in a Pope?  And yet he knew that he would be sustained, he knew that his supremacy was based on a universally recognized idea.  Who can resist the ideas of his age?  Henry might have resisted, if resistance had been possible.  Even he must yield to irresistible necessity.  He was morally certain that he would