The possession of the people was no longer subject to the same rules.
Allowing that the kings still held the people from God, it was the pope's duty to register the donation once for all, without ever intervening, whatever the circumstances, in the government of states.

Never was Rome farther away from the realisation of its ancient dream of universal dominion.

And when the French Revolution burst forth, it may well have been imagined that the proclamation of the rights of man would kill that papacy to which the exercise of divine right over the nations had been committed.

And so how great at first was the anxiety, the anger, the desperate resistance with which the Vatican opposed the idea of freedom, the new _credo_ of liberated reason, of humanity regaining self-possession and control.

It was the apparent _denouement_ of the long struggle between the pope and the emperor for possession of the people: the emperor vanished, and the people, henceforward free to dispose of itself, claimed to escape from the pope--an unforeseen solution, in which it seemed as though all the ancient scaffolding of the Catholic world must fall to the very ground.
At this point Pierre concluded the first part of his book by contrasting primitive Christianity with present-day Catholicism, which is the triumph of the rich and the powerful.