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The commons demanded a fresh confirmation of the charters; the punishment of the royal ministers who had infringed them, or the Articuli super cartas of the previous session, and the completion of the proposed disafforestments. In addition, the prelates declared that they could not assent to any tax being imposed upon the clergy contrary to the papal prohibition.
But the papal position had been formulated, and that before a German assembly. The Pope was no longer a suppliant: he claimed to be more than an equal. He had thrown down a challenge. Frederick proceeded to pick it up.
He was particularly angry to hear Tetzel's wicked proclamation that "when one dropped a penny into the box for a soul in purgatory, so soon as the money chinked in the chest, the soul flew up to heaven." The papal red cross hung above Tetzel's money-counter, and he sat there and called on all to buy.
As he emerged on the side of the apse, his eyes at first plunged into the papal gardens, whose clumps of trees seemed mere bushes almost level with the soil; and he could retrace his recent stroll among them, the broad /parterre/ looking like a faded Smyrna rug, the large wood showing the deep glaucous greenery of a stagnant pool.
The outward evils of the Papal system are put clearly before the people: the scandals among the priesthood and in the convents, the iniquities of the Romish courtiers and creatures of the Pope, who pandered with menial subservience to the magnates at Rome, in order to fatten on German benefices, and reap their harvest of taxes and extortions of every kind.
What Louis XIV and Bossuet strove for was the limitation of papal power in matters affecting property and political rights. The real questions upon which Gallican and Ultramontane differed were the appointment of bishops and abbots, the contribution of the Church to the needs of the State, and the priest's standing as a subject of the king.
Naturally these Papal pretensions led to feuds with the Empire. The freedom of secular aspirations clashed with the claims of spiritual dominion. In the portentous struggle of the two Powers for the supremacy, a struggle which inflicted heavy losses on the German Empire, the Imperial cause was worsted.
Such had been the tyranny of ecclesiastical control that the subjects of the Pope in that most ancient and famous seat of learning welcomed the French with unfeigned joy; and the fairest portion of the Papal States passed by its own desire from under the old yoke. The successor of St. Peter was glad to ransom his capital by a payment nominally of twenty-one million francs.
With capacity to figure as a country curate, he occupies the post of the chief Secretary of State to the Pope; and though nearly of the same age, but of a much weaker constitution than his Sovereign, he was ambitious enough to demand Bonaparte's promise of succeeding to the Papal See, and weak and wicked enough to wish and expect to survive a benefactor of a calmer mind and better health than himself.
Florry, did not the teachers of the dark ages put their light under a bushel? Dark ages will ever follow the increase of papal power. It is part of their system to keep the masses in ignorance.
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