330 AXNAXS OF ROGER DE nOYEDEX. A.D. 1170. toms by oath, you have not aroused yourselves to resume the shield of faith, in order that you might stand in the house of the Lord in the day of battle, but have laid your bodies on the ground, that there might be a way for him to pass over you ; and lest if we should be any longer silent, we might, together with you, be involved on the day of judgment in the same sentence of damnation, by the authority of the Eoman Church, of which with the aid of the Lord we are the servant, we do suspend you from all duties of the episcopal office, hoping that at least, under discipline and paternal correction, you will return to a sense of your duty, and, as you ought, apply yourselves to defending the liberties of the Church. But if not even then you resume the zeal that ought to belong to your ecclesiastical office, then shall we, by the Lord's assistance, have recourse to that which is now impending over you. Be it then your care that that is not said to you, which was said to one by the prophet : ' Because thou hast rejected what is holy, I will also reject thee, so that thou shalt be no priest to me.'9 3 For, as we, God so disposing, according to His good pleasure, are seen to occupy the place of him who could be withheld from preaching the word of God neither by stripes nor by bonds, we are bound, not under an ambiguous expectation of peace, to place the money of the Divine word which has been entrusted to us in a napkin, and so keep it tied up until the hour for getting in the profit thereof shall arrive, and the creditor coming shaB strictly demand of us an account thereof." In the meantime, Louis, king of the Franks, and the archbishops, bishops, and nobles of the kingdom of France, besought the Boman Pontiff in behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury, by the love which they bore him, and with protestations of implicit obedience, no longer to admit the excuses and delays which the king of England continually put forward, as he loved the kingdom of Franee and the honor of the Apostolic See. William, the bishop of Sens, also, being astonished at the desolate condition of the English church, repaired to the Apostolic See, and obtained of the Boman Church, that, an end being put to all appeals, the king of the English should be subjected to excommunication, and Ids kingdom to interdict, unless peace were restored to the church of Canterbury. Thus, at last, it pleased God, the dispenser of all things, to recompense the merits of His dearly 93 Hos. iv. 6, slightly varied.