Where the whole of the clerical order presented a
solid front, it was sometimes possible to make good a claim against which there
was much to be said on grounds of common sense; as, for instance, benefit of
clergy,--the exclusive jurisdiction of the Church over criminous
ecclesiastics,--which was enforced even against a sovereign so powerful and so
astute as Henry II of England. But, in the last resort, the pretensions of the
Church depended for success upon a public opinion which was hard to move.
Not because
the average layman was critical or anti-clerical, but because he was illogical
and unimaginative, he remained cold to any programme of reform which could only
be justified by long trains of deductive reasoning; his natural impulse was
against violent innovations, and he felt rather than argued that the State, as
the ultimate guarantee of social order, must be maintained even at some cost of
theological consistency. Until he could be convinced that high moral issues and
his own salvation were at stake, it was useless or dangerous to excommunicate
his king and to lay his country under interdict. For want of lay support the
Church failed to make good such important claims as those of immunity from
national taxation and of jurisdiction in cases of commercial contract. More
striking still, she was prevented from establishing the Inquisition in states
where that tribunal would have found no lack of work.
