INVESTITURE. If any bishop or other clergyman have the cure of souls and also a stipend, two elements, the one sacred and the other civil, exist in his position; and as nearly every spiritual act carries civil consequences, and nearly every civil act connected with his bene fice has sacred effects, scarcely any prudence can avoid periodical collision between the ecclesiastical and the civil power. From the papal point of view, and indeed from that of all Church func tionaries, a great ecclesiastical end will be achieved if the State can be made an obedient handmaid of the Church. From the establishment of the Church under Constantine the Great, in the 4th cen tury, the Roman functionaries increas ingly interfered in ecclesiastical affairs, and by the llth lay patronage had been much abused, and simony largely pre vailed. The emperors, kings, and princes of Europe had been accustomed to confer the temporalities of the larger benefices and monasteries by the delivery of a ring and a staff, or crozier. When the
bishop or abbot elect had received these, he carried them to the metropolitan, who returned them, to indicate that the Church had conferred on him sacred office. Pope Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) considered that a ring and a crozier were insignia of spiritual office, and not of its temporal accompaniments, the crozier symbolizing the pastoral charge and the ring the celestial mysteries. He there fore wished the then reigning emperor, Henry IV., to desist from conferring in vestitures in such a form, and threatened excommunication on any one conferring investitures or receiving them. The pon tiff's legates and the emperor caine to an arrangement at the Diet of Worms, 1122, one article of the treaty being that the emperor should confer the temporalities of a see or abbacy by some other symbols than the sacred ones of the ring and the crozier.