The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

—GRANDEUR AND DOMINION OF THE POPEDOM. 85the Seven Hills, guided the progress of those destructivetempests which swept along the shores of Syria and theStraits of the Bosphorus. Constantinople fell before thecrusaders, and the kings of Bulgaria and Armenia acknowledgedthe supremacy of Innocent." His legs bestrid the ocean ; his reared armCrested the world ; his voice was propertiedAs all the tuned spheres, and that to friends ;And Avhen he meant to quail and shake the orb.He was as rattling thunderWalked crowns and crownets."In his liveryBut the mightiest efforts of Innocent were reserved fortheextirpation of heresy. He was the first to discover thedanger to the popedom which lurked in the Scriptural faith,and in the mental liberty of the Albigenses and Waldenses.On them, therefore, and not on eastern schismatics or recalcitratingsovereigns, fell the full storm of the pontificalire.Assembling his vassal kings, he pointed to the peacefuland thriving communities in the provinces of the Rhone,and inflamed the zeal and fury of the soldiers by holdingout the promise of immense booty and unbounded indulgence.For a forty days' service a man might earn paradise,not to speak of the worldly spoil withwhich he was certainto return laden home. The poor Albigenses were crushedbeneath an avalanche of murderous fanaticism and inappeasablerapacity. To Innocent history is indebted for oneof her bloodiest pages,—the European crusades ; and theworld owes him thanks for its most infernal institution,the Inquisition. He had for his grand object to bestow aneternity of empire upon the papal throne ; and, to accomplishthis, he strove to inflict an eternity of thraldom uponthe human mind. His darling aim was to make the chairof Peter equally stable and absolute with its fellow-seat inpandemonium.** Du Pin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. pp. 401-422 : Sismondi's Italian Republics,pp. 60-64 ; Loud. 1832 : Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman