[Sidenote: Church and State.] Gradually the alliance of the Church and State came to its inevitable conclusion. The Church began to share the ambitions of the State. Christianity armed itself with the sword and strove to wrest from the Moslem the sepulcher of the Prince of Peace. A measure of the true spirit of the Nazarene remained in such as Raymond Lull, who protested against extending God’s kingdom by the sword and testified to his convictions by giving up his life. The great missionary societies of the Church, the Jesuit, the Dominican, the Capuchin, accepted in the main the Church’s theory of conquest, a theory made enormously advantageous by the discovery of new continents. The missionary enterprises of Spain and Portugal were marked by hideous oppression of those who would not accept the offered religion.
Upon the ministers of the Church the alliance with the State wrought its evil effect. The ambitions of a bishop of Rome led him in 442 to ask the weak Emperor that he be made the head of western Christendom. Henceforth the See of Rome grew more and more powerful. The Church lost entirely the democratic quality of its early life. Pope Gregory claimed toward the end of the Eleventh Century that he had power not only over the souls of men but over all rulers. The lives of great prelates grew evil, the administration of ecclesiastical affairs venal, the pure Gospel was obscured. A mistaken emphasis was put upon good works as a means of winning that forgiveness of sin which God had promised for Christ’s sake. Before the missionary stream could flow for the blessing and healing of mankind, a clear passage must be opened to its Source.
[Sidenote: Boniface.] Among the missionaries who had set out full of zeal from the English Church in the Eighth Century was Boniface, a man of extraordinary energy and power. Among the fields in which he worked was that of Thuringia in Germany. Here, among the dark forests, encouraged and supported by the Pope and by the ruler, Charles Martel, he preached the Gospel, converting thousands and binding them to Rome. With the Gospel he gave them a new sort of superstition, an idolatrous reverence for Rome and a deep awe of the sacred relics which he brought with him. He established monasteries, synods, schools, and required not only faith but knowledge of the forms of the Church, such as the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. When an old man, he went to visit the country of Friesland which had rejected his early preaching and there with his companions was murdered.