Preaching union to the cities and republics of Italy, causing the cry ITALIA! ITALIA! to resound like the shout of a trumpet, he was the natural representative of the national awakening, and appeared to be in some sort the suzerain of the emperor, as he was already that of other kings.

Finally, by his efforts to purify the Church, by his indomitable firmness in defending morality and law in the affair of Ingelburge and in many others, he was gaining a moral strength which in times so disquieted was all the more powerful for being so rare.
But this incomparable power had its hidden dangers.

Occupied with defending the prerogatives of the Holy See, Innocent came to forget that the Church does not exist for herself, that her supremacy is only a transitory means; and one part of his pontificate may be likened to wars, legitimate in the beginning, in which the conqueror keeps on with depredations and massacres for no reason, except that he is intoxicated with blood and success.
And so Rome, which canonized the petty Celestine V., refused this supreme consecration to the glorious Innocent III.

With exquisite tact she perceived that he was rather king than priest, rather pope than saint.
When he suppressed ecclesiastical disorders it was less for love of good than for hatred of evil; it was the judge who condemns or threatens, himself always supported by the law, not the father who weeps his son's offence.

This priest did not comprehend the great movement of his age--the awakening of love, of poetry, of liberty.