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As the Reformation was primarily a religious movement, some account of the church in the later Middle Ages must be given.

How Christianity was immaculately conceived in the heart of the Galilean carpenter and born with words of beauty and power such as no other man ever spoke; how it inherited from him its background of Jewish monotheism and Hebrew Scripture; how it was enriched, or sophisticated, by Paul, who assimilated it to the current mysteries with their myth of a dying and rising god and of salvation by sacramental rite; how it decked itself in the white robes of Greek philosophy and with many a gewgaw of ceremony and custom snatched from the flamen's vestry; how it created a pantheon of saints to take the place of the old polytheism; how it became first the chaplain and then the heir of the Roman Empire, building its church on the immovable rock of the Eternal City, asserting like her a dominion without bounds of space or time; how it conquered and tamed the barbarians;--all this lies outside the scope of the present work to describe.

But of its later fortunes some brief account must be given.
[Sidenote: Innocent III 1198-1216] By the year 1200 the popes, having emerged triumphant from their long strife with the German emperors, successfully asserted their claim to the {14} suzerainty of all Western Europe.