Two forms of the Referendum should be carefully distinguished the facullative or optional (brought into play only on the demand of a fixed number of citizens), and the obligatory or compulsory (which obtains in all cases that lie within its sphere as defined in the constitution). The Initiative exists only in the facultative form, being exercised when a certain number of citizens demand it. Both came into common use during the Liberal reaction in Switzerland after the Paris revolution of July 1830. In 1831 St Gall first adopted the facultative referendum" (then and for some time after called the "Veto "), and its example was followed by several cantons before 1848. The "obligatory referendum" appears first in 1852 and 1854 respectively in the Valais and the Grisons, when the older system was reformed, but in its modern form it was first adopted in 1863 by the canton of rural Basel. The Initiative was first adopted in 1845 by Vaud. Of course the cantons with Landsgemeinden, Uri, Unterwalden, Appenzell and Glarus (where the citizens appear in person) possessed both from time immemorial. Excluding these there were at the end of 1907 91 cantons which had the "obligatory referendum (Aargau, rural Basel, Bern, the Grisons, Schaffhausen, Schwyz, Soleure, Thurgau, the Valais and Zürich), while 7 cantons possess only the "facultative referendum" (Basel town, Geneva, Lucerne, Neuchâtel, St Gall, Ticino, Vaud and Zug). Fribourg alone had neither, save an obligatory referendum (like all the rest) as to the revision of the cantonal constitution. As regards the Initiative, all the cantons have it as to the revision of the cantonal constitution; while all but Fribourg have it also as to bills or legislative projects. In the case both of the facultative referendum and of the Initiative each canton fixes the number of citizens who have a right to exercise this power. The constitution of the Swiss confederation lags behind those of the cantons. It is true that both in 1848 (art. 113) and in 1874 (art. 120) it is provided that a vote on the question whether the constitution shall be revised must take place if either house of the federal legislature or 50,000 qualified voters demand it of course a popular vote (obligatory referendum) must take place on the finally elaborated project of revision. But as regards bills the case is quite different. The " facultative referendum was not introduced till 1874 (art. 89) and then only as regards all bills and resolutions not being of a pressing nature, 8 cantons or 30.000 qualified voters being entitled to ask for such a popular vote. But the Initiative did not appear in the federal constitution till it was inserted in 1891 (art. 121), and then merely in the case of a partial (not a total) revision of the constitution, if 50,000 qualified voters require it, whether as regards a subject in general or a draft bill,of course the federal legislature had an Initiative in this matter in 1848 already. The results of the working of these two institutions in federal matters up to the end of 1908 are as follows. Excluding the votes by which the two federal constitutions of 1848 and 1874 were adopted, there have been 30 (10 of them between 1848 and 1874) votes (obligatory referendum) as to amendments of the federal constitution; in 15 cases only (of which only one was before 1874) did the people accept the amendment proposed. In the case of bills there have been 30 votes (very many bills have not been attacked at all), all of course since the facultative referendum was introduced in 1874; in 11 cases only have the people voted in the affirmative. Finally, with regard to the Initiative, there have been 7 votes, of which two only were in the affirmative. Thus, between 1874 and 1907, of 57 votes 27 only were in the affirmative, while if we include the 10 votes between 1848 and 1874 the figures are respectively 67 and 28, one only having been favourable during that period. The result is to show that the people, voting after mature reflection, are far less radically disposed than has sometimes been imagined.

The method of referendum by itself is also in use in some of the states of the American Union (see UNITED STATES) and in Australia, and under the name of plébiscite has been employed in France; but it is best studied in the Swiss constitution.

AUTHORITIES.-W. A. B. Coolidge, "The Early History of the Referendum (article in the English Historical Review for October (Bern, 1900) (Fr. trans. by J. Ronjat with additions by the author, 1891); T. Curti, Die schweizerischen Volksrechte, 1848 bis 1900 Paris, 1905)-Curti's earlier work, Geschichte d. schweiz. Volksgesetzgebung (Bern, 1882), is not entirely superseded by his later one; S. Deploige, The Referendum in Switzerland, Engl. trans. with additional notes (London, 1898); N. Droz, The Referendum in Switzerland (article in the Contemporary Review, March 1895); J. M. Vincent, Government in Switzerland, chaps. v. and xiv. (New York and London, 1900). See also, for the United States and generally, the American works on the Referendum by E. P. Oberholtzer (1893 and 1900). (W. A. B. C.)

REFLECTION OF LIGHT. When a ray of light in a homogeneous medium falls upon the bounding surface of another medium, part of it is usually turned back or reflected and part second medium. The scattered rays (also termed the irreguis scattered, the remainder traversing or being absorbed by the larly or diffusely reflected rays) play an important part in rendering objects visible-in fact, without diffuse reflection non-luminous objects would be invisible; they are occasioned law as holds for regular reflection. This law is the incident by irregularities in the surface, but are governed by the same reflecting surface at the point of incidence, and are coplanar and reflected rays make equal angles with the normal to the with the normal. This is equivalent to saying that the path of the ray is a minimum.1 In fig. 1, MN represents the section plane mirror; OR is the incident ray, RP the reflected ray, and TR the normal at R. Then

of

the law states that the angle of incidence ORT equals the angle

OR. RT and RP are in the same of reflection PRT, and that M plane.

This natural law is capable of ready experimental proof (a simple

FIG. I.

one is to take the altitude of a star with a meridian circle, its depression in a horizontal reflecting surface of mercury and the direction of the nadir), and the most delicate instruments have failed to detect any divergence from it. Its explanation by the Newtonian corpuscular theory is very simple, for we have only to of a corpuscle is reversed, whilst the horizontal velocity assume that at the point of impact the perpendicular velocity is unchanged (the mirror being assumed horizontal). The wave-theory explanation is more complicated, and in the simple form given by Huygens incomplete. The theory as developed by Fresnel shows that regular reflection is due to a small zone in the neighbourhood of the point R (above), there being destructive interference at all other points on of the reflected light when incident at a certain angle (see the mirror; this theory also accounts for the polarization POLARIZATION OF LIGHT). The smoothness or polish of the surface largely controls the reflecting power, for, obviously, crests and furrows, if of sufficient magnitude, disturb the phase relations. The permissible deviation from smoothness depends on the wave-length of the light employed: it appears that surfaces smooth to within th of a wave-length reflect regularly; hence long waves may be regularly reflected by a surface which diffuses short waves. Also the obliquity of the incidence would diminish the effect of any irregularities; this is experimentally confirmed by observing the images produced by matt surfaces or by smoked glass at grazing incidence.

We now give some elementary constructions of reflected rays, or, what comes to the same thing, of images formed by mirrors.

1. If O be a luminous point and OR a ray incident at R on the plane mirror MN (fig. 1) to determine the reflected ray and the

image of O. If RP be the reflected ray and RT perpendicular

This principle of the minimum path, however, only holds for plane and convex surfaces; with concave surfaces it may be a maximum in certain cases.

distances are shown in the table (F is the principal focus and C the centre of curvature of the mirror MA).

CONCAVE MIRROR

Character of Image.

Real.

same size magnified Virtual, erect, magnified Erect, same size

F

Between C and F Between F and A A

Between F and C C Between C and ∞ Between A and

A

The above discussion of spherical mirrors assumes that the mirror has such a small aperture that the reflected rays from any point unite in a point. This, however, no longer holds when the mirror has a wide aperture, and in general the reflected rays envelop a caustic (q.v., see also ABERRATION). The only mirror which can sharply reproduce an object-point as an image-point has for its section an ellipse, which is so placed that the object and image are at its foci. This follows from a property of the curve, viz. the sum of the focal distances is constant, and that the focal vectores are equally inclined to the normal at the point. More important than the elliptical mirror, however, is the parabolic, which has the property of converting rays parallel to the axis into a pencil through its focus; or, inversely, rays from a source placed at the focus are converted into a parallel beam; hence the use of this mirror in searchlights and similar devices.

REFORMATION, THE. The Reformation, as commonly understood, means the religious and political revolution of the 16th century, of which the immediate result was the partial disruption of the Western Catholic Church and the establishment of various national and territorial churches. These agreed in repudiating certain of the doctrines, rites and practices of the medieval Church, especially the sacrifice of the Mass and the headship of the bishop of Rome, and, whatever their official designations, came generally to be known as 'Protestant." In some cases they introduced new systems of ecclesiastical organization, and in all they sought to justify their innovations by an appeal from the Church's tradition to the Scriptures. The conflicts between Catholics and Protestants speedily merged into the chronic political rivalries, domestic and foreign, which distracted the European states; and religious considerations played a very important part in diplomacy and war for at least a century and a half, from the diet of Augsburg in 1530 to the English revolution and the league of Augsburg, 1688-89. The terms Reformation " and Protestantism are inherited by the modern historian; they are not of his devising, and come to him laden with reminiscences of all the exalted enthusiasms and bitter antipathies engendered by a period of fervid religious dissension. The unmeasured invective of Luther and Aleander has not ceased to re-echo, and the old issues are by no means dead.

clusively a

The heat of controversy is, however, abating, and during the past thirty or forty years both Catholic and Protestant The Re- investigators have been vying with one another in formation adding to our knowledge and in rectifying old misnot ex- takes; while an ever-increasing number of writers Religious pledged to neither party are aiding in developing an Revolu idea of the scope and nature of the Reformation which tion. differs radically from the traditional one. We now appreciate too thoroughly the intricacy of the medieval Church; its vast range of activity, secular as well as religious; the inextricable interweaving of the civil and ecclesiastical governments; the slow and painful process of their divorce as the old ideas of the proper functions of the two institutions have changed in both Protestant and Catholic lands: we perceive all too clearly the limitations of the reformers, their distrust of reason and criticism-in short, we know too much about medieval institutions and the process of their disintegration longer to see in the Reformation an abrupt break in the general history

That the religious elements in the Reformation have been greatly overestimated from a modern point of view can hardly be questioned, and one of the most distinguished students of Church history has ventured the assertion that "The motives, both remote and proximate, which led to the Lutheran revolt were largely secular rather than spiritual." "We may," continues Mr. H. C. Lea, "dismiss the religious changes incident to the Reformation with the remark that they were not the object sought, but the means for attaining the object. The existing ecclesiastical system was the practical evolution of dogma, and the overthrow of dogma was the only way to obtain permanent relief from the intolerable abuses of that system" (Cambridge Modern History, i. 653). It would perhaps be nearer the truth to say that the secular and spiritual interests intermingled and so permeated one another that it is almost impossible to distinguish them clearly even in thought, while in practice they were so bewilderingly confused that they were never separated, and were constantly mistaken for one another.

Resem

to the

It is

The first step in clarifying the situation is to come to a full realization that the medieval Church was essentially an international state, and that the character of the Protestant secession from it was largely determined by this fact. blance As Maitland suggests: "We could frame no ac- of the ceptable definition of a State which would not com- medieval prehend the Church. What has it not that a State Church should have? It has laws, law givers, law courts, State. lawyers. It uses physical force to compel men to obey the laws. It keeps prisons. In the 13th century, though with squeamish phrases, it pronounced sentence of death. no voluntary society; if people are not born into it they are baptized into it when they cannot help themselves. If they attempt to leave they are guilty of crimen laesae majestatis, and are likely to be burned. It is supported by involuntary contributions, by tithe and tax" (Canon Law in the Church of England, p. 100). The Church was not only organized like a modern bureaucracy, but performed many of the functions of a modern State. It dominated the intellectual and profoundly affected the social interests of western Europe. Its economic influence was multiform and incalculable, owing to its vast property, its system of taxation and its encouragement of monasticism. When Luther made his first great appeal to the German people in his Address to the German Nobility, he scarcely adverts to religious matters at all. He deals, on the contrary, almost exclusively with the social, financial, educational, industrial and general moral problems of the day. If Luther, who above all others had the religious issue ever before him, attacks the Church as a source of worldly disorder, it is not surprising that his contemporary Ulrich von Hutten should take a purely secular view of the issues involved. Moreover, in the fascinating collection of popular satires and ephemeral pamphlets made by Schade, one is constantly impressed with the absence of religious fervour, and the highly secular nature of the matters discussed. The same may be said of the various Gravamina, or lists of grievances against the papacy drafted from time to time by German diets.

But not only is the character of the Reformation differently conceived from what it once was; our notions of the process of change are being greatly altered. Formerly, Historic writers accounted for the Lutheran movement by so continumagnifying the horrors of the pre-existing regime ity of the that it appeared intolerable, and its abolition conse- tion. quently inevitable. Protestant writers once contented themselves with a brief caricature of the Church, a superficial

Reforma

account of the traffic in indulgences, and a rough and ready assumption, which even Köstlin makes, that the darkness was greatest just before the dawn. Unfortunately this crude solution of the problem proved too much; for conditions were no worse immediately before the revolt than they had been for centuries, and German complaints of papal tyranny go back to Hildegard of Bingen and Walther von der Vogelweide, who antedated Luther by more than three centuries. So a new theory is logically demanded to explain why these conditions, which were chronic, failed to produce a change long before it actually occurred. Singularly enough it is the modern Catholic scholars, Johannes Janssen above all, who, in their efforts further to discredit the Protestant revolt by rehabilitating the institutions which the reformers attacked, have done most to explain the success of the Reformation. A humble, patient Bohemian priest, Hasak, set to work toward half a century ago to bring together the devotional works published during the seventy years immediately succeeding the invention of printing. Every one knows that one at least of these older books, The German Theology, was a great favourite of Luther's; but there are many more in Hasak's collection which breathe the same spirit of piety and spiritual emulation. Building upon the foundations laid by Hasak and other Catholic writers who have been too much neglected by Protestant historians, Janssen produced a monumental work in defence of the German Church before Luther's defection. He exhibits the great achievements of the latter part of the 15th and the early portion of the 16th centuries; the art and literature, the material prosperity of the towns and the fostering of the spiritual life of the people. It may well be that his picture is too bright, and that in his obvious anxiety to prove the needlessness of an ecclesiastical revolution he has gone to the opposite extreme from the Protestants. Yet this rehabilitation of pre-Reformation Germany cannot but make a strong appeal to the unbiased historical student who looks to a conscientious study of the antecedents of the revolt as furnishing the true key to the movement. Outwardly the Reformation would seem to have begun when, on the 10th of December 1520, a professor in the university of Wittenberg invited all the friends of evangelical truth among his students to assemble outside the various wall at the ninth hour to witness a pious spectacle European the burning of the "godless book of the papal govern- decrees." He committed to the flames the whole from the body of the canon law, together with an edict of papal the head of the Church which had recently been monarchy.; ́issued against his teachings. In this manner Martin Luther, with the hearty sympathy of a considerable number of his countrymen, publicly proclaimed and illustrated his repudiation of the papal government under which western Europe had lived for centuries. Within a generation after this event the states of north Germany and Scandinavia, England, Scotland, the Dutch Netherlands and portions of Switzerland, had each in its particular manner permanently seceded from the papal monarchy. France, after a long period of uncertainty and disorder, remained faithful to the bishop of Rome. Poland, after a defection of years, was ultimately recovered for the papacy by the zeal and devotion of the Jesuit missionaries. In the Habsburg hereditary dominions the traditional policy and Catholic fervour of the ruling house resulted, after a long struggle, in the restoration of the supremacy of Rome; while in Hungary the national spirit of independence kept Calvinism alive to divide the religious allegiance of the people. In Italy and Spain, on the other hand, the rulers, who continued loyal to the pope, found little difficulty in suppressing any tendencies of revolt on the part of the few converts to the new doctrines. Individuals, often large groups, and even whole districts, had indeed earlier rejected some portions of the Roman Catholic faith, or refused obedience to the ecclesiastical government; but previously to the burning of the canon law by Luther no prince had openly and permanently cast off his allegiance to the international ecclesiastical state of which the bishop of Rome was head. Now,

Revolt of the

ments

66

a prince or legislative assembly that accepted the doctrine of Luther, that the temporal power had been "ordained by God for the chastisement of the wicked and the protection of the good and must be permitted to exercise its functions “ unhampered throughout the whole Christian body, without respect to persons, whether it strikes popes, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, or whoever else "-such a government could proceed to ratify such modifications of the Christian faith as appealed to it in a particular religious confession; it could order its subject to conform to the innovations, and could expel, persecute or tolerate dissenters, as seemed good to it. A reformed " prince could seize the property of the monasteries, and appropriate such ecclesiastical foundations as he desired. He could make rules for the selection of the clergy, disregarding the ancient canons of the Church and the claims of the pope to the right of ratification. He could cut off entirely all forms of papal taxation and put an end to papal jurisdiction. The personnel, revenue, jurisdiction, ritual, even the faith of the Church, were in this way placed under the complete control of the territorial governments. This is the central and significant fact of the so-called Reformation. Wholly novel and distinctive it is not, for the rulers of Catholic countries, like Spain and France, and of England (before the publication of the Act of Supremacy) could and did limit the pope's claims to unlimited jurisdiction, patronage and taxation, and they introduced the placet forbidding the publication within their realms of papal edicts, decisions and orders, without the express sanction of the government-in short, in many ways tended to approach the conditions in Protestant lands. The Reformation was thus essentially a stage in the disengaging of the modern state from that medieval, international ecclesiastical state which had its beginning in the ecclesia of the Acts of the Apostles. An appreciation of the issues of the Reformationor Protestant revolt, as it might be more exactly called-depends therefore upon an understanding of the development of the papal monarchy, the nature of its claims, the relations it established with the civil powers, the abuses which developed in it and the attempts to rectify them, the sources of friction between the Church and the government, and finally the process by which certain of the European states threw off their allegiance to the Christian commonwealth, of which they had so long formed a part.

monarchy

It is surprising to observe how early the Christian Church assumed the form of a state, and how speedily upon entering into its momentous alliance with the Roman imperial Character government under Constantine it acquired the chief of the privileges and prerogatives it was so long to retain. papal In the twelfth book of the Theodosian Code we see and its the foundations of the medieval Church already laid; claims. for it was the 4th, not the 13th century that established the principle that defection from the Church was a crime in the eyes of the State, and raised the clergy to a privileged class, exempted from the ordinary taxes, permitted under restrictions to try its own members and to administer the wealth which flowed into its coffers from the gifts of the faithful. The bishop of Rome, who had from the first probably enjoyed a leading position in the Church as the successor of the two most glorious of the apostles," elaborated his claims to be the divinely appointed head of the ecclesiastical organization. Siricius (384-389), Leo the Great (440-461), and Gelasius I. (492-496) left little for their successors to add to the arguments in favour of the papal supremacy. In short, if we recall the characteristics of the Church in the West from the times of Constantine to those of Theodoric-its reliance upon the civil power for favours and protection, combined with its assumption of a natural superiority over the civil power and its innate tendency to monarchical unity-it becomes clear that Gregory VII. in his effort in the latter half of the 11th century to establish the papacy as the great central power of western Europe was in the main only reaffirming and developing old claims in a new world. His brief statement of the papal powers as he conceived them is found in his Dictatus. The bishop of Rome,

1

who enjoys a unique title, that of "pope," may annul the decrees of all other powers, since he judges all but is judged by none. He may depose emperors and absolve the subjects of the unjust from their allegiance. Gregory's position was almost inexpugnable at a time when it was conceded by practically all that spiritual concerns were incalculably more momentous than secular, that the Church was rightly one and indivisible, with one divinely revealed faith and a system of sacraments absolutely essential to salvation. No one called in question the claim of the clergy to control completely all "spiritual "matters. Moreover, the mightiest secular ruler was but a poor sinner dependent for his eternal welfare on the Church and its head, the pope, who in this way necessarily exercised an indirect control over the civil government, which even the emperor Henry IV. and William the Conqueror would not have been disposed to deny. They would also have conceded the pope the right to play the rôle of a secular ruler in his own lands, as did the German bishops, and to dispose of such fiefs as reverted to him. This class of prerogatives, as well as the right which the pope claimed to ratify the election of the emperor, need not detain us, although they doubtless served in the long run to weaken the papal power. But the pope laid claim to a direct power over the civil governments. Nicholas II. (1058-1061) declared that Jesus had conferred on Peter the control (jura) of an earthly as well as of a heavenly empire; and this phrase was embodied in the canon law. Innocent III., a century and a half later, taught that James the brother of the Lord left to Peter not only the government of the whole Church, but that of the whole world (totum seculum gubernandum). So the power of the pope no longer rested upon his headship of the Church or his authority as a secular prince, but on a far more comprehensive claim to universal dominion. There was no reason why the bishop of Rome should justify such acts as Innocent himself performed in deposing King John of England and later in annulling Magna Carta; or Gregory IV. when he struck out fourteen articles from the Sachsenspiegel; or Nicholas V. when he invested Portugal with the right to subjugate all peoples on the Atlantic coast; or Julius II. when he threatened to transfer the kingdom of France to England; or the conduct of those later pontiffs who condemned the treaties of Westphalia, the Austrian constitution of 1867 and the establishment of the kingdom of Italy. The theory and practice of papal absolutism was successfully promulgated by Gratian in his Decretum, completed at Bologna about 1142. This was supplemented by later collections composed mainly of papal decretals. (See CANON LAW and DECRETALS, FALSE.) As every fully equipped university had its faculty of canon law in which the Corpus juris canonici was studied, Rashdall is hardly guilty of exaggeration when he says: "By means of the happy thought of the Bolognese monk the popes were enabled to convert the new-born universities-the offspring of that intellectual new birth of Europe which might have been so formidable an enemy to the papal pretensions-into so many engines for the propagation of Ultramontane ideas." Thomas Aquinas was the first theologian to describe the Church as a divinely organized absolute monarchy, whose head concentrated in his person the entire authority of the Church, and was the source of all the ecclesiastical law (conditor juris), issuing the decrees of general councils in his own name, and claiming the right to revoke or modify the decrees of former councils-indeed, to make exceptions or to set aside altogether anything which did not rest upon the dictates of divine or natural law. In practice the whole of western Europe was subject to the jurisdiction of one tribunal of last resort, the Roman Curia. The pope claimed the right to tax church property throughout Christendom. He was able to exact an oath of fidelity from the archbishops, named many of the bishops, and asserted the right to transfer and dispose them. The organs of this vast monarchy were the papal Curia, which first appears distinctly in the 11th century (see CURIA ROMANA), and the legates, who visited the courts of 1 See further, Innocent III.

Europe as haughty representatives of the central government of Christendom.

ecclesias

civil

gov.

It should always be remembered that the law of the Church was regarded by all lawyers in the later middle ages as the law common to all Europe (jus commune). The laws of Relations the Carolingian empire provided that one excom- of the municated by the Church who did not make his peace ecclesing within a year and a day should be outlawed, and this general principle was not lost sight of. It was a capital ernments. offence in the eyes of the State to disagree with the teachings of the Church, and these, it must be remembered, included a recognition of the papal supremacy. The civil authorities burnt an obstinate heretic, condemned by the Church, without a thought of a new trial. The emperor Frederick II.'s edicts and the so-called établissements of St Louis provide that the civil officers should search out suspected heretics and deliver them to the ecclesiastical judges. The civil government recognized monastic vows by regarding a professed monk as civilly dead and by pursuing him and returning him to his monastery if he violated his pledges of obedience and ran away. The State recognized the ecclesiastical tribunals and accorded them a wide jurisdiction that we should now deem essentially secular in its nature. The State also admitted that large classes of its citizens-the clergy, students, crusaders, widows and the miserable and helpless in general-were justiceable only by Church tribunals. By the middle of the 13th century many lawyers took the degree of doctor of both laws (J.U.D.), civil and canon, and practised both. As is well known, temporal rulers constantly selected clergymen as their most trusted advisers. The existence of this theocratic international state was of course conditioned by the weakness of the civil government. So long as feudal monarchy continued, the Church supplied to some extent the deficiencies of the turbulent and ignorant princes by endeavouring to maintain order, administer justice, protect the weak and encourage learning. So soon as the modern national state began to gain strength, the issue between secular rulers and the bishops of Rome took a new form. The clergy naturally stoutly defended the powers which they had long enjoyed and believed to be rightly theirs. On the other hand, the State, which could count upon the support of an ever-increasing number of prosperous and loyal subjects, sought to protect its own interests and showed itself less and less inclined to tolerate the extreme claims of the pope. Moreover, owing to the spread of education, the king was no longer obliged to rely mainly upon the assistance of the clergy in conducting his government.

The chief sources of friction between Church and State were four in number. First, the growth of the practice of “reservation" and "provision," by which the popes assumed the right to appoint their own nominees to vacant sees and other benefices, in defiance of the claims of the crown, the chapters and private patrons. In the case of wealthy bishoprics or abbacies this involved a serious menace to the secular authority. Both pope and king were naturally anxious to place their own friends and supporters in these influential positions. The pope, moreover, had come to depend to a considerable extent for his revenue upon the payments made by his nominees, which represented a corresponding drain on the resources of the secular states. Secondly, there was the great question, how far the lands and other property of the clergy should be subject to taxation. Was this vast amount of property to increase indefinitely without contribution to the maintenance of the secular government? A decretal of Innocent III. permitted the clergy to make voluntary contributions to the king when there was urgent necessity, and the resources of the laity had proved inadequate. But the pope maintained that, except in the most critical cases, his consent must be obtained for such grants. Thirdly, there was the inevitable jealousy between the secular and ecclesiastical courts and the serious problem of the exact extent of the original and appellate jurisdiction of the Roman Curia. Fourthly, and lastly, there was the most fundamental difficulty of all, the extent to which the pope, as the universally acknowledged head