This parallel progress of the kingship and the papacy had its critics and its supporters.

Learned lawyers, on the authority of the maxims and precedents of the Roman empire, proclaimed the king's sovereignty in the State; and profound theologians, on the authority of the divine origin of Christianity, laid down as a principle the right divine of the papacy in the Church and in the dealings of the Church with the State.
Thus, at the end of the thirteenth century, there were found face to face two systems, one laic and the other ecclesiastical, of absolute power.
But the teachers of the doctrine of the right divine do not expunge from human affairs the passions, errors, and vices of the individuals who put their systems in practice; and absolute power, which is the greatest of all demoralizers, entails before long upon communities, whether civil or religious, the disorders, abuses, faults, and evils which it is the special province of governments to prevent or keep under.

The French kingship and the papacy, the representatives of which had but lately been great and glorious princes, such as Philip Augustus and St.Louis, Gregory VII.

and Innocent III., were, at the end of the thirteenth century, vested in the persons of men of far less moral worth and less political wisdom, Philip the Handsome and Boniface VIII.

We have already had glimpses of Philip the Handsome's greedy, ruggedly obstinate, haughty and tyrannical character; and Boniface VIII.