All those who dared to oppose the clergy by word or deed were doomed to everlasting perdition--this was a fact which it were futile to doubt; at the most, a man shrugged his shoulders at certain damnation for the sake of mundane pleasures--a rich legacy in the hour of death might save him. Not infrequently the fear of the devil was transformed into indifference, and sometimes even into demonolatry. A single ungodly thought might involve eternal death, and as many a man, more particularly many a priest, realised his inability to live continuously in the presence of God, he surrendered his soul to the anti-god, not from a longing for the pleasures of the senses, but from despair. The worship of the devil, far from being an invention of fanatical monks, actually existed, and was often the last consolation of those who held themselves forsaken by God. The hierarchy did not hesitate a moment to make the utmost use or the power conferred upon them by the mental attitude of the people. The government of kings and princes, in addition to the ecclesiastical government, could only be a transient, sinful condition; the time was bound to come when the pope would be king of the earth, and the great lords of the world his vassals, appointed by him to keep the wicked world in check, and deposed by him if he found them incapable, worshippers of the devil, or disobedient to the Church. The whole world was a hierarchy whose apex reached heaven and bore, as the representative of its invisible summit, the pope. He stood, to quote Innocent III., "in the middle, between God and humanity." The same great pope has left us a document entitled _On the Contempt of the World_, which treats of the absolute futility of all things mundane. There is no reason to look upon the union of this unquenchable thirst for power and complete "other-worldiness" as a contradiction. The kingdom of God, Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, must of necessity be established that the destiny of the world may be fulfilled. Every pope must account to God for his share in the advancement of the only work which mattered, and the greater the power the ruler of this world had acquired over the souls of men, the more he trembled before God, weighed down by the burden of his enormous responsibility. "The renunciation of the world in the service of the world-ruling Church, the mastery of the world in the service of renunciation, this was the problem and ideal of the middle ages" (Harnack). But not only the pope, every priest, as a direct member of the kingdom of God, was superior to the secular rulers. This was taught emphatically by the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, and Gregory VII., the wildest fanatic of the kingdom of God, said, in writing to a German bishop: "Who then who possesses even small knowledge and reasoning power, could hesitate to place the priests above the kings?" Even the emperor Constantine, though he was still largely under the sway of the imperial idea, distinctly acknowledged the bishops as his masters; according to the legend he handed to the Bishop of Rome the insignia of his power, sceptre, crown and cloak, and humbly held the bridle of the prelate's horse.