The final supremacy of the pope in the body politic, and over all sovereigns, meant the absorption of the laic community in the religious, and the abolition of the State's independence, not in favor of the national Church, but to the advantage of the foreign head of the universal Church.

The defenders of the French kingship formed a better estimate than was formed at Rome of the effect which would be produced by such doctrine on France, in the existing condition of the French mind; they entered upon no theological and abstract polemics; they confined themselves entirely to setting in a vivid light the pope's pretensions and their consequences, feeling sure that, by confining themselves to this question, they would enlist in their opposition not only all laymen, nobles, and commoners, but the greater part of the French ecclesiastics themselves, who were no strangers to the feeling of national patriotism, and to whom the pope's absolute power in the body politic was scarcely more agreeable than the king's.

In order to make a strong impression upon the public mind, there was published at Paris, as the actual text of the pope's bull, a very short summary of his long bull, "Hearken, most dear Son," in the following terms: "Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of the French.

Fear thou God, and keep His commandments.

We would have thee to know that thou art subject unto us in things spiritual and temporal.