THE CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Other books by Hilaire Billot

The Hedce and the Horse

Conversations with a Cat

Charles the First : King of England

Joan of Arc

Cranuer

Cromwell

Napoleon

Wolsey

Milton

Richelieu

The County of Sussex The Battle Ground The Crusade

THE

CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

By

HILAIRE BELLOC

CASSELL AND COMPANY LTD. London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney

First Published - ijjy

Prmttd in Gnat Bntam Tbt Cbaptl Rn*r Pnss, And**-. Hants

CONTENTS

PACT

Introduction ...... i

I The Foundation of Christendom . . 7

II Christendom Established

(A) The Siege of Christendom : A.D.500

to a.d. 1000 . . . -57

(B) The High Middle Ages . . .78

(C) The Decline of the Middle Ages . 93

[II The Reformation and its Immediate Con- sequences 109

[V The Ultimate Consequences of the Refor- mation

(A) Growth of the Proletariat and hence

of Capitalism . . . . 135

(B) Communism . . . .164

V Restoration . . . . . .191

Index . ..... 243

INTRODUCTION

This work contains the matter of the lec- tures I delivered at Fordham University between February 16 and May 18, 1937. To put the matter in book form I have arranged it not by single lectures but by groups into which my thesis naturally falls. That thesis may be discovered in the title I have given to the whole, The Cnsis of our Civilization.

THIS book is an historical presentation to the follow- ing effect :

That our civilization, that is, the civilization of Christendom, today occupying Europe, especially West- ern Europe, and radiating thence over the New World, acting also as a leader or instructor of the other cultures in Asia and Northern Africa, has arrived at a crisis where it is in peril of death.

I propose therefore to describe how that civilization arose, upon what main lines it developed, what institu- tions it produced and depended upon. I next propose to show how it became disunited and thereby spiritually enfeebled while materially progressing, until at last, witn the destruction of the moral tradition by which it had existed and was precariously maintained, it lost its very principle of life and may therefore, unless we return to that principle, dissolve.

My thesis in other words is this :

That the culture and civilization of Christendom — what was called for centuries in general terms “ Europe ” — was made by the Catholic Church gathering up the social traditions of the Graeco-Roman Empire, inspiring them and giving the whole of that great body a new life. It was the Catholic Church which made us, gave us our unity and our whole philosophy of life, and formed the nature of the white world. That world — Christendom — went through the peril of the barbaric pagan assault from without as also, from within, the victorious pressure of a great heresy — which soon became a new religion-^-Mohammedanism.

These perils it survived, though shorn of much of its territory ; it re-arose after the pressure was past and entered the high life of the Middle Ages, which in the Xlth, Xllth, and especially the XHIth centuries reached a climax or summit wherein we were most ourselves and 3

4 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

our civilization most assured. But from various causes (of which perhaps old age was the chief) that great period showed signs of decline at the beginning of the XlVth century ; a decline which hastened rapidly throughout the XVth century. The Faith by whicn we live was increasingly doubted ; and the moral authority upon which all depended was more and more contested. The society of Christendom thus underwent a heavy strain threatening disruption ; it became more and more unstable, until at last in the early XVIth century came the explosion which had been feared and awaited for so long. That disaster is called in general usage “ The Reformation.”

From that moment onwards throughout the XVIth and XVIIth centuries and the XVIIIth, on through the XIXth, the unity of Christendom having disappeared and the vital principle on which its life depended having become weak or distracted, our culture became a house divided against itself, and therefore increasingly im- perilled. This evil fortune was accompanied by a rapid increase in external knowledge, that is, in science and the command of man over material things, even as he lost his grasp of spiritual truths. It was the converse of what had happened in the beginning of our civilization. Then our religion had saved the ancient world just as it was perishing and formed a new culture, though burdened by a decline in science and the arts and material things.

Our increase in knowledge of the externals and in our power over nature did nothing to appease the rapidly growing internal strains of our world. The conflict between rich and poor, the conflict between opposing national idolatries, the lack of common standards and of the fixed doctrines upon which they used to depend had led up by the beginning of the XXth century to the brink of chaos ; and threatened such dissention between mep as to destroy Society. In this crisis the only alternatives are recovery through the restoration of the Catholic Faith or the extinction of our culture.

INTRODUCTION 5

Such is the scheme of this book.

I have divided it according to certain groups, five in number.

The first group deals with the Foundation of Christen- dom. by the conversion of the Graeco-Roman Empire just before it failed from despair, but not in time to save it from material decline. That process covers, roughly, the first five centuries of our era, that is, up to a.d. 500.

The next group deals with the great ordeal wherein civilization was tested and with difficulty emerged restored in the high moment of the True Middle Ages, to be followed by their decline. It is a period of, roughly, a thousand years, from the VTth to the XVth century inclusive — a.d. 500 to a.d. 1500. It falls naturally into three subdivisions : the Siege of Christen- dom, the High Middle Ages and their Decline.

The third group concerns the Reformation, that is, the disruption of our society, and the sowing of those seeds which were later to threaten our very existence ; the independence of each separate province of Christendom from the rest, the denial of any common moral authority over them, the affirmation of the Sovereign State owing allegiance to none and free to destroy any of its fellows, and itself open to a similar fate without appeal ; the destruction of co-operative social life and the growing tyranny of wealth.

The fourth group is concerned with the process whereby these moral and social evils following on the disruption of Christendom, coupled with a rapidly increasing knowledge of nature and a consequent develop- ment of communications and all external aptitudes, led at last to the opposition throughout what had once been the Christian world, of the rich against the poor ; the partial enslavement of the latter, their destitution, their dependence upon a minority of pay-masters— the reaction against such inhuman conditions of insufficiency and insecurity and the formulating of this reaction first in the vague terms of what used to be called Socialism, later the precise, doctrinal and intense form of what is

6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

now universally known as Communism. Communism and its opponent, the Catholic Church — the traditions by which Christendom had been formed and lived and the proposal to destroy those traditions altogether, par- ticularly the religion upon which everything depends — now stand face to face.

The fifth group concerns the suggested remedies for a situation so desperate ; for if Communism be accepted as an apparent solution it is the end of our culture, of all by which we have lived.

There only remains as an alternative to apply the fruits which the Catholic culture had produced when it was in full vigour, the restriction of monopoly, the curbing of the money power, the establishment of co-operative work, and the wide distribution of private property, the main principle of the Guild and the

Jealous restriction of usury and competition, which >etween them have come so near to destroying us.

But these better conditions are themselves the fruit of the Catholic Church, they can neither be created nor maintained in an atmosphere deprived of Catholic philosophy. The conclusion of the series is therefore that in the reconversion of our world to the Catholic standpoint lies the only hope for the future.

I

THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM (a.d. 27-33 TO A*D- 5°°)

I WOULD la y it down at the beginning that the present crisis in our civilization is the gravest affecting that civilization since first it took on its essential char- acter, between 1,900 and 1,600 years ago.

During the whole of that very long period of time there has been present upon this earth and in that district of the world which seems to have been set apart for the leadership thereof a well-defined, clearly recognizable culture, to which our forefathers gave the appropriate name — ^Christendom. It arose upon a certain founda- tion, the pagan Grasco-Roman Empire of antiquity ; it developed through the impact and influence upon this of the Catholic Church ; it grew in spiritual character and energy throughout some 500 years in the midst of which Catholicism had already become the accepted philosophy, morals and religion of our blood. It even expanded beyond the boundaries of that highly civilized antique state wherein it had arisen, it transformed the heathen beyond the boundaries of that state, spreading to include outer parts of it which the original Roman polity had not directly ruled ; it suffered attack from without and grave material decline from within, but it survived.

Not only did Christendom survive ; it flowered after its long ordeal of the Dark Ages, and was perhaps at its highest in the centuries immediately following (the Xlth, Xllth, XHIth, XIVth and XVth), which we call the Middle Ages.

Having so expanded, withstood its first perils and grown established, it suffered, 400 years ago, a peril of disruption. It was nearly destroyed by internal faction ; dispute upon its primary and creative doctrines wrecked in part at least its main institutions. But so much of of it yet again survived as to maintain the continuity of 9

10 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

culture. Christendom, though at war within itself during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, was still Christendom ; the primary doctrines and their con- sequent social habits (whereby Europe and her expansion overseas lived) still stood in the general mind of men. But the struggle had been heavy, the loss of unity and therefore of personality in that great body was in- creasingly apparent.

At first only a minority lost the full Christian traditions : then, till the late XVIIIth century, the mass of Europe itself and the colonies which Europe had planted beyond the ocean, still lived by the rules, if not of the Faith, at any rate of accepted conduct which they had inherited from so great a past.

But the process of dissolution continued. During the XIXth century the core of the affair was diluted and grew weaker; certain prime established things which had formed the structure of Christendom were shaken. Within two generations they were tottering. The characteristic unity of Christendom was already more than half forgotten ; each of its parts, now wholly separate, had already long arrogated to itself complete sovereignty, and therefore implicitly denied the corporate life of the whole : while within the structure institutions which were bound into the common heritage, cementing it and giving it unity, were dissolving.

Marriage was beginning to be challenged. Family and Property still stood, but their moral bases began to be questioned. Civil authority had gone the way of spiritual, its basis also was disputed and its security was therefore failing. The ancient canon of morals, the chief characteristic of Christendom, in sexual and

Sersonal as in general and civil relations, was challenged, oubted and confused. It was losing its vigour, changing from an unquestioned fixity to a debated mass of fluid opinion. All this process has reached its climax in our own time.

Meanwhile there has necessarily proceeded side by ride with the general decay of the ancient and once apparently

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM u

permanent moral structure, a social and economic change springing from the same roots but of more immediate consequence, because it directly affects the lives of men in a fashion that each can appreciate and with which all are directly and vividly concerned.

The livelihood of men had become insecure. Over wide departments of many nations there had arisen in the most part of society insecurity and destitution on such a scale that existence threatened to be soon in- tolerable for its victims. Even as this awful challenge to human society approached its climax, all hope of dealing with it by a commonly accepted philosophy seemed to have been lost.

In other words, that by which the leaders of mankind had lived, that by which the white civilization had been what it was, that from which what had been for so long most properly called Christendom, had drawn its per- sonality, its will, its honour, its very self, was and is melting away.

It is with justice, then, that we speak of the Crisis of Our Civihzation. It is with justice that we apply that very grave term to the moment in which we have the misfortune or the combative glory to live.

So emphatic a description of the menace under which we lie may seem exaggerated to those who have not considered the contrast between our day and the long centuries of accepted morals preceding it. It is not exaggerated. It is in due proportion and true. We are in peril, here and now, of losing all that by which and for which our fathers lived, and which we still know to be, though in apparently active dissolution, our in- heritance.

In the presence of any great crisis the task in hand is the solution thereof ; and as this crisis is the greatest of all historically known to us, the task before us is also the greatest and the arrival at a solution the most practical end which men of our blood have ever had set before them.

Throughout the world, European and Transoceanic,

iz CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

uncertain efforts inspired by the necessity of arriving at some solution are beginning in a confused fashion to be attempted. They differ in character. The two main schools in those who pursue these efforts are opposed and in mortal conflict — yet at some solution we must arrive and arrive in common.

It is the business of this book to examine the nature of the problem and discover, if it be possible, the policy to be applied which may successfully dissipate the mortal threat overhanging us.

The Sphinx has asked us its final and weightiest riddle ; we must find an answer to it or die.

A crisis is of its nature a strain ; it connotes unstable equilibrium. The settling of a crisis, the recovery of fixed and acceptable conditions, is the resolution of that strain. The strain arises from unstable equilibrium between the component parts and circumstances of anything : the unstable equilibrium must be reduced again to stability under pain of destruction. Thus in the nervous system of a human being there may arise a strain under which the faculties of intelligence and of will, the judgment of the senses, the whole balanced affair, falls into disarray. The strain will be resolved by the restoration of the co-ordinated faculties ; that is, by the cure of the sufferer and his re-establishment in sanity ; or it will be resolved by a breakdown which we call madness. A chemical combination when it is un- stable must either be resolved by the separation of its component parts or the rearrangement of them in a stable form ; or letting the instability resolve itself by the disaster of an explosion.

Or take a building, a tall tower for example, which becomes unstable, leaning over at a perilous angle. We may pull it down in time and rebuild it or shore it up sufficiently to permit of strengthening its structure until it shall be fully established again ; or we may act too late or unwisely, so that through our delay or blunder

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 13

the mass will fall to the ground, cease to be what it was and be lost. Under any crisis (that is under any special strain), in order to act wisely and prevent the threatened disaster, we must discover two things. First, how serious it is, for only when we know that can we say whether this or that perhaps drastic and painful effort is worth while. Next, what are the canses at work which have produced the increasing tension, because, unless we know the cause, we cannot devise a remedy.

Now in the case of the modem strain, in the case of this “ final crisis of our civilization,” wherein the quarrel between the dispossessed and the possessed, the exploited and the exploiter, the sufferer from injustice and the beneficiary therefrom threatens to pull down our world, there can be no question as to the seriousness of the issue. It is of maximum seriousness. It is as serious as it can be. What is more it is immediate. It is upon us.

But as to its cause, that is another matter : it is because men dispute so much upon its cause that they differ so much as to the remedy. Yet unless we are right upon the cause and can choose the applicable remedy, we perish. Now how shall we make up our minds upon the cause f How shall we judge the inmost character of the thing with which we have to deal ?

There is but one main method of approach, and that method is to follow and appreciate the history of the thing now in danger of death — our Society. To under- stand how Christendom came to be and what is indeed the inmost principle whereby it was for so long that which it was, and only at this long last has come to sudden failure, we must follow its growth and maintenance. The problem is organic ; we must appreciate the nature of the living thing in order to cure it, now that it is in mortal sickness. That nature we can only know by seeing how it was bom, and grew, and lived.

What, then, was the story of Christendom, and why has that story now come to be threatened with an end ? History upon all this is our guide ; the history of what we were explains what we are.

i4 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

In approaching an y historical statement, especially one concerned with a long historical process, there are certain rules to be observed lest national and religious bias even more than the inevitable limitations of the individual student should warp the truth. We can get as near an approximation of the truth as is reasonable to expect by keeping in mind certain postulates from which these rules of right historical judgment are to be drawn. Whether in the question I am now under- taking I have duly observed these rules it will be for those who read to judge ; but I have attempted to observe them and I desire to state them thus at the outset, because they seem to me of the first importance.

We are about to answer the main question, “ What happened in the making of Europe ? ” We are about to attempt the drawing of a large outline which shall be true : which corresponds to reality.

But can that be done f Can true history be written even in broad outline ? I think it can ; and I will beg leave to digress for a discussion of this before beginning the account of Christendom.

There are four main postulates to be granted before we can proceed to our enquiry on the past.

The first postulate is this : “ Truth Lies in Proportion ” You do not tell an historical truth by merely stating a known fact ; nor even by stating a number of facts in a certain and true order. You can only tell it justly by stating the known things in the order of their value.

It has been objected by unthinking men that history is necessarily uncertain because it necessarily consists in the facts selected by the narrator, and since he can leave out what he chooses the result may be almost anything. But this is to presuppose that the man who is telling the story is not desirous of presenting the truth. Suppose he be so desirous, he will only achieve his object by a just selection : that is by selection according to the order of value, giving chief weight to what is most important in connection with his narrative, less weight to what is less important, and omitting, as he is bound

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM

15

to omit within some limits, however large, what is least important. This is especially clear in the case of general statement on so large a matter as the establishment of a civilization, its origin, character and development. But how and why it is proportion that determines history may be seen by a particular example.

Suppose a man who knows nothing of English literature say to you, “ Who is William Shakespeare ? I see his name continually ; who and what was he ? ” If you answer, “ He was a man of the middle class of society bom near Stratford-on-Avon some three centuries and a half ago. He proceeded to London as a young man and there became an actor” — you are stating troths, but you are not stating the truth. You are not putting in your statement the main fact first. The true answer of course is, “ William Shakespeare is the greatest writer of English, the greatest English poet, and among the very first poets of ancient and modem times.” If your limits allow you to expand this statement you can next give his date, after that go into the nature of his work, then deal with his social position, with the amount of his known writing, and so forth. You can fill in the outline in as much detail as your space permits — but you must put the first things first ana the second things second. If from ignorance or, as is more probable, from affection for this or that you give wrong values, emphasizing the lesser at the expense of the greater, you are not writing true history. You must of course in the process of your narration admit some word at least to show why such and such an element is more important than another ; in other words, you must help to convince those whom you address of your good faith and competence ; but anyhow, the mam point is that historical truth lies (as does all judgment, that is, a right appreciation of anything) upon a due grasp of proportion.

The second postulate will be less easily accepted than my first : It is this : — “ Religion is the Main Determining Element in the Formation of Any Civilization.”

Some would use the word “ philosophy ” rather than

1 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

religion. But a social philosophy, that is, an attitude with regard to the universe held by great numbers of men in common for long spaces of time and throughout a whole society, is inevitably and necessarily clothed with forms ; it will always and necessarily have some liturgy of its own, some ritual, some symbols, even though it does not consciously affirm any transcendental doctrines.

For example, the modem worship of the nation, the modem philosophy whereby our prime duty is regarded as being our duty to the State of which we are members — the general modem conception that affection for and loyalty towards our country is the chief political duty of man — is indeed a philosophy. But it is also in practice a religion. Modem State-worship has its symbols, its revered officers, its regular sequence of public ritual and all the rest of it. And if this is true of a mere philosophy, a mere mundane attitude towards visible and ephemeral things, it is quite certainly true of any positive strongly- held conviction upon the Divine element in the arrangements of mankind.

A group of human beings which believes, in general and firmly, that good- or evil-doing in this life are followed by corresponding consequences after death, that the individual soul is immortal, that God is one and the common omnipotent Father of all, will behave in one way. A group which denies all reality to such ideas will behave in another. A group which concentrates its spiritual vision upon the image of terrifying and maleficent powers will behave thus and thus ; another group which upon the whole contemplates more genial powers friendly to man and in tune with beauty will act otherwise. The whole of a human group is given its savour and character by the spirit which thus inhabits it ; and that spirit may justly be called in nearly every case a religion — although if the term be preferred it may (in cases where the sense of mystery is weak) be termed a philosophy.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 17

philosophy the character of those who hold it in common will be founded as will the character of their culture as a whole. If such and such things are held in awe, others in abhorrence, and others again presumed indifferent, such and such is the result upon Society as a whole. Change the elements, regard with abhorrence what was formerly thought of with indifference, with indifference what was formerly sacred, and the whole character of your polity is transformed.

Efforts have been made to give some other element than this element of religion (or philosophy) the determin- ing character in a civilization. Thus, many seek that determining character in race or blood : it is one of the most fashionable theories of the moment in which we live. Others propose economic circumstances as the determining element and say that a polity is what it is through the way in which wealth is produced and distributed therein. But these and all other explanations are really no more than the re-statement of a philosophy or religion. The man who makes race everything (as do many Germans today) is merely preaching a religion of race. The man who makes economic circumstance everything is merely preaching the religion of materialism. Indeed, to do them justice, both unconsciously proclaim this truth : that a culture is formed by its religion. The German Nazi enthusiast for Germanic excellence, one might almost say for Germanic divinity, proclaims his confidence in a doctrine. The Marxian Communist in proclaiming economic circumstance to be everything does not disguise his open and emphatic materialism.

This second postulate, that religion is the making of a culture, will upon a sufficient examination, I think, be granted ; and if it is at first unfamiliar and therefore doubted, that is because we are accustomed to think of religion as a private matter, whereas, in social fact, it is a public one. Things really held to be sacred are held sacred throughout the society which is affected by them.

The third postulate is this : “ The Evidence on Which

18 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

We Base Our Historical Conclusion Must Include Much More Than Documents ; Much More Than Recorded Statements.” We must use also tradition and common sense.

Tradition as a foundation for history possesses the advantage of sincerity and generality. One man or a clique may get a falsehood accepted, but what a whole community of witnesses affirms is above board. Time warps the picture but it is not intentionally false as a document may be.

Memories passed on from one generation to another tend of course to be distorted, and if they are written down very late will often contain false elements of mere legend. But, on the other hand, tradition is sincere (which the written evidence of one witness very often is not) and it is broad-based. Over and over again a tradition which the learned, depending upon documents alone, have ridiculed turns out upon the discovery of further corroboration to be true.

Thus after all the guess-work and various readings of the Homeric poems, lately discovered papyri in general confirm the traditional readings. Or again, there remained for centuries in the popular speech of Paris the term “ araines ” (variously and later spelled — “ arenes ”), attaching to a particular quarter of the town. Learned guesswork did its best with that term and could make little of it ; what was at any rate generally agreed upon was that it could have nothing to do with the Roman word “ arena,” because there was no trace of a Roman amphitheatre in Paris. Well, in quite modem times during the construction of the Rue Monge, the foundations of the first tiers of such an amphitheatre were laid bare ; and popular tradition was thus confirmed.

These are only two instances where a hundred could be cited by any widely-read man from memory alone ; and a thousand or more could soon be established by research.

This postulate, warning us against the now happily decreasing tendency to base all history upon document

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM

l9

alone, is especially confirmed by tbe growth in importance of archaeology in recent years.

Then there is the evidence of common sense, that is, the nature of things. No matter how strong the tradition or how emphatic and well-supported the documentary evidence, one must weigh against it the mere material possibility of this or that — for instance, the population which can possibly have inhabited a given area, the number of combatants that can possibly have occupied a particular line of battle, the time in which a sailing boat — however fiercely driven — can have covered a particular distance. History swarms with examples of particular statements, traditional and docu- mentary, which are not indeed to be denied entirely, but to be modified thus by the use of mere reason and common experience.

Lastly there is a fourth postulate against the neglect or denials of which a modem audience must be specially warned. “ True History is Objective.” It does not depend on the mood of the narrator.

Such and such an historical truth remains true whether the man appreciating it is in sympathy with the event or not. The Pagan who deplores the advance of the Church in the IVth century — the biographer of Julian the Apostate, for instance — and his contemporary who exults in the triumph of the Church and the defeat of Paganism are both stating a plain historical fact, that Paganism receded and the Catholic Church advanced between the years 300 and 400. An indifferent observer who cared for neither Paganism nor the Church would equally acknowledge that established truth.

The worthy writer of history is he who can so detach himself as to say, “ This happened, and it happened thus. I will describe it as though I cared nothing one way or the other.” He may indeed care passionately ; he may deplore as an awful tragedy or applaud as a glorious triumph the same event : history as such should care nothing for his applause or his grief, it is concerned only with the establishment of what was.

zo CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Armed with such principles let us begin our study of that great affair : “What we of Christendom are and how we came to be so.”

We are studying an organism, to wit our civilization, Christendom. We are occupied in appreciating its nature, the spirit by which it lived and was maintained for so many centuries ; we are doing this in order further to understand its breakdown today and the consequent mortal peril in which we he.

Now in studying an organism it is essential to begin by appreciating its origins. It is both a truth and a commonplace that to understand a human character you must know the influences that came upon it in very early youth, during the “ formative period.” The same is true of a State, a polity, a nation, a general culture ; and it is profoundly true of Christendom. Christendom arose upon a certain foundation which, becoming alive, changed from a foundation to a root. Our origin appears in a certain arrangement of human Society whence we all descend ; a great united State to which all that we do and think of any consequence refers as a beginning.

That vast State was called historically the “ Roman Empire ; ” a more accurate term and one now increasingly used is the “ Graeco-Roman ” Empire ; for the language, local religion and literature of the educated classes and officials and even in actual numbers of the bulk of the people was the Roman speech (that is, Latin) in the West, and the Greek speech in the East. The influences connected with those two idioms, Roman law, Greek philosophy and letters, were closely intermixed throughout the whole. Every Latin-speaking man of high social position was trained in the use of the Greek tongue, which for the more cultivated was as familiar as his own. It is not equally true that the Greek-speaking part of the Empire was intimately familiar with Latin, for Greek was regarded by both parties as the superior medium of culture and every administrator within the Greek-speaking half of the Empire had come to take

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 21

Roman law and the Roman discipline as a matter of course.

This great united State within which there were no customs, boundaries nor national frontiers, but which was all one political thing, covered the districts we now call Belgium and most of Holland, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, all North Africa lying between the desert and the Mediterranean, what we now call Greece and the Balkan States, most of Austria, Turkey and Asia Minor, most of Syria. All these became in political life one nation, the area of which measured well over 2,000 miles from east to west and at its broadest part between the mouths of the Rhine and the Sahara over a thousand. The thing had taken on this shape and unity in final form a lifetime before the Incarnation of Our Lord ; but it had not settled down so early into an accepted general base. Rival claimants for power, each using armed forces at their disposal and rival factions within the central power of Rome, kept it fluctuating within and its fate uncertain until nineteen years before the beginning of our era.

The Eastern, which was also roughly the Greek, half of this immense territory was the more thickly populated and the wealthiest ; the Western half had on the whole the greater dignity because it contained, and was especially moulded by, the City of Rome, whence the government of the whole from east to west and north to south had spread in the course of the preceding three or four centuries.

The dividing lines between the Western and Eastern halves ran up the Adriatic Sea and through the tangle of mountains between the head of that sea and the Danube. The only land frontiers of the great thing on the Continent were two rivers, the Rhine and the Danube ; the boundary was the Rhine on the east following the river up the first two-thirds of its length, then cutting across the upper part of the Danube, thence running down the Danube to the Black Sea. Beyond this line were tribes and clans who spoke various Germanic

22 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

dialects largely and increasingly affected by the Greek and Latin of their more civilized neighbours. Beyond these again were tribes even still more barbaric, speaking Slavonic dialects. Neither those of Teutonic nor those of Slav speech had any political cohesion ; they fell naturally more and more under the influence of the civilized, imperial society according as they lived nearer to the Rhine and the Danube, and had more intercourse with the soldiers and citizens and merchants of the Empire. There was no hostility or ill feeling between the organized and civilized society within the boundaries and the less and less organized, more and more barbaric outside. There was some pressure from outside which took the form of occasional raids, or even of large armed incursions. That was inevitable, because the outer men naturally desired to enjoy the greater amenities of life within the frontiers of civilization. There was also equally inevitably a drift of outer men seeking better fortune through recruitment in the Imperial Army or private services, or through a sort of colonization of the imperial lands where they were permitted to settle. There was also no small infiltration through commerce, including the trade in slaves ; but it is important for us to see the Grteco-Roman Empire of this period, just before our era, and on for generations, not as a sharply distinct civilized thing surrounded by mere barbarism, but as an influence which more and more affected the populations outside its political boundaries, and in its turn was affected by them through an admixture of external blood. From the beginning you find plenty of outer men as soldiers and slaves and even as settlers, let alone as visitors of consequence among the citizens of the Empire, whether in origin they were from Celtic or Slav or German clans outside the strictly defined frontier. Similarly you could find merchants travels ling from within the frontier to places as far as the Baltic.*

* There are trace! of a Roman road ru the north coast of the Germamei

Cologne

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 23

Although, as 1 have said, two main official languages dominated East and West of this single state, Greek and Latin, there was a considerable number of major language groups different from both, and innumerable lesser dialects spoken.

The State was not centralized in our modern sense ; its local arrangements were freer than ours today. Localities were subject (save in major matters) to local administration alone. Magistrates were often elected and always in tune with local feeling and usually native as well, though there were put over large districts, as governors, officials appointed by the main council of the Roman State — the Senate — and the chief of the Roman executive, the Emperor.

In what we call today Tunis the language most spoken by the people was Semitic of a sort called “ Punic,” from its Phoenician origins. Further west along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, up to and including Morocco and the town of Tangier, the local dialects were probably Berber. Within what is now Spain and Portugal, Iberian idioms were spoken. In what is today France and most of Belgium, Celtic idioms survived, though these were to die out rapidly under the influence of Rome, a sort of popular Latin taking their place. All along the Rhine in a broad belt the citizens of the Empire spoke various Teutonic (that is, Germanic) tongues, as they did presumably along the Danube, and certainly within the frontiers between the upper courses of those two rivers. In Asia Minor there were many idioms spoken, including a relic of Gaulish Celtic, remaining like a fossil from earlier Gallic invasions which had reached thus far east- ward. The Delta and the Valley of the Nile were, as far as the population went, Coptic in speech, that is, using an idiom drawn from the ancient Egyptian tongue, though the riding families spoke Greek. Similarly along the Syrian sea coast, including Palestine and all the belt between Syria and the Mediterranean, varieties of local languages (nearly all of them Semitic in character) were the habituid speech of the people. There is one par-

24 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

ticularly important to the story of our civilization — Hebrew, in its later form Aramaic — which was talked in Jerusalem, Galilee and all that we later came to call the Holy Land. It was probably the tongue in which Our Lord Himself and His Apostles spoke, though they must certainly have been acquainted with Greek also and have used it when a wide audience was being appealed to, for Greek was the cultivated and written language of Palestine.

It should be noted that though there was no political hostility, no conscious feeling of national or racial enmity along the enormously long frontiers of the Empire, there was one sector where such enmity and permanent political conflict could be found ; that was the fluctuating frontier between the Roman Empire and the Asiatic and Persian power. Rome occasionally pushed as far as the Euphrates and even to the Tigris ; the Persian power representing Asia and its hostility to the European would thrust back the Roman power at intervals to the Syrian desert and even later make incursions as far as the Mediterranean seaboard. It was upon this frontier alone that Rome feared invasion and influences destructive of all Greek and Latin culture. For the rest, there was either peace (and peace endured for long periods and was for genera- tions the normal product of that united government which protected by its army all that lay within the frontiers), or, where there were raids across the frontiers and the menace of raids, such fighting as took place was police work rather than war.

This enormous Graeco-Roman State and culture had been built up by the coalescence of a number of diverse city-states and lesser kingdoms rather than by conquest. We must not imagine Roman armies proceeding from the City of Rome and gradually subduing all Western humanity by force until all obeyed the master of those armies resident in the central town of Rome itself. That is a way in which the thing is often regarded and it is thoroughly unhistorical. The Graeco-Roman Empire had grown. It had not been artificially or mechanically

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 25

made , although in step after step of this growth military action had come in to consolidate the results of sucn growth or secure it from disorder.

In Italy the thing had been begun by the town of Rome, a large central market fixed at an essential nodal point in the communications of the peninsula ; the point where the first bridge crossed the main river of the eastern Italian seaboard. The inhabitants of that district had petty skirmishes with their neighbours and also alliances with them. These feuds and treaties and commercial arrangements resulted in a sort of small central State occupying the fertile land between the Apennines and the sea. The principle of coalescence, including the further recruitment of the expanding citizenry into any army which had originally been but a militia of Romans, continued until all Italy south of the Po was directly or indirectly involved in it. Greek colonies to the south joined the union or fought against it and were subdued.

The irreductable foe of the whole movement was the very wealthy Semitic society of Carthage, replaced today by the neighbouring capital of Tunis in North Africa. Carthage depended upon sea power and upon its in- calculable wealth, that of a mercantile aristocratic trading and banking state. All its morals and ideas were in acute antagonism to those of our race : and Rome entered into a struggle with Carthage wherein the latter was destroyed. Meanwhile the Greek civilization had also coalesced, its unity springing from original efforts which had repelled the Orientals and their attempted invasion of the European mainland. The Greek culture was gathered under the rule of an outer province thereof, Macedonia, to the north. A young King of Macedonia with a small Greek expeditionary force had swept through the near East and suddenly planted the Greek language and influence and ideas upon all the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and far inland as well. His armies even reached the river Indus, and when he died as quite a young man (little more than thirty), though his empire

26 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

was divided among his generals, its spiritual unity as a Greek thing survived.

Rome in eliminating Carthage had come into possession of the islands of the western Mediterranean and ultimately most of what is today Spain and North Africa ; her armies were superior to the Greek-speaking armies now orientalized and therefore recruited from inferior material. Rome entered into the inheritance of Alex- ander and his successors. She entered into it, however, not as an enemy but respectfully, as a spiritual ally and even as a pupil — of such prestige was the philosophy and spiritual tradition of Hellas.

Thus it was that the universal Mediterranean State, the Graeco-Roman Empire, expanded, consolidated and was fixed, until, as I have said, half a lifetime before the birth of Our Lord, universal peace and a consolidated State lay over all the known Western World, from Mesopotamia to the Atlantic and from the Channel to the Sahara.

The framework of all that society was, from the nature of its expansion, the army. The idea of a State dependent on its army is unfamiliar to us today, but one that seemed to the men of the time the most natural in the world. The Roman army, which was, of course, no longer com- posed of Romans or even of Italians for the most part, but recruited from the whole territory, was the cement of the whole structure. Its engineers planned the great roads which bound the Empire together ; it was the principle of order and discipline which informed the whole. Its commander-in-chief was the head of the State. It is from that title “Commander-in-Chief” that we get the word “Emperor,” which is but our modern derivative of the Latin name for a commander- in-chief: “Imperator.”

We have noted that this universal government of the West exerted but little or no pressure upon private life. There was none of that detailed interference with men’s daily actions which the modem State has so strictly developed. All that the State was concerned to do was

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 27

to impose major rules for the guidance of the Courts of Law, especially in matters of property and contract, and to prevent private war and brigandage. As for opinion, even in the form of intense religious feeling, that was free so long as it did not challenge the State. Only certain practices abhorrent to the conscience of our race and the high civilization of Greece and Rome — such as human sacrifice, the vilest product of the Semitic Cartha- ginian religion — were put down.

For the rest, the philosophy or general religion which ran through the whole political body was a complex of myths, varying liturgies and worships, secret societies professing to receive spiritual aid lay initiation, and therefore perform mysteries.

Various powerful schools of thought upon the nature of the universe, most of them Greek in origin, formed cross sections in all this. There was the Epicurean school, very nearly what we call today Materialists ; the Platonic, which was conscious of and relied upon spiritual reality ; even the sceptics, who gave up all certitude as hopeless of achievement. All these and any other opinions had free course. The worship of the local gods in each city-state was carried on under the protection of the local government ; the strange rites of Egypt, the special ceremonies of the Syrian cities, and even the recalcitrant, assertive, special religious organization of the Jews.

These last were at their most vital in their original homeland, the limestone bills of Judea with the national temple at Jerusalem ; but they were also dispersed far and wide, and when the story of Christendom opens one could find Jewish merchants and money-dealers all over the Empire, with their synagogues in most of the main cities. They were very numerous in Rome itself, most numerous of all in the main Mediterranean port of Alexandria. All were tolerated ; and the Jews were given a specially privileged position because the intensity of their racial feeling might endanger the peace if it were thwarted, c

28 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

The influence both of Greek philosophy and Roman law made for the acceptation throughout this wide political body, the Empire, of what is called in our theology “ natural religion ” ; the institution of the family with its loyalties and disciplines, therefore of marriage, of property whereby the freedom and secure existence of the family is maintained ; the duty of maintaining social order — all that makes up, apart from revelation, the duty of man, as the instincts of our race see that duty. Of worship common to all society there was none, save a very vague and formal recognition of something divine about public authority as centred in the Emperor, and a kind of divine mission attached to the town of Rome itself. All this did not intimately afFect the lives of men, which in so far as they were touched by religion at all were touched only by decaying ancestral myths ; more vigorous (because more recent) philo- sophies ; popular, domestic and local idolatries.

It is natural for us after generations and centuries of Christian formation to ask, “ Had Pagans no sense of immortality ; did they not look to rewards and punish- ments in a future life to compensate for the inequalities and injustices of this world f ” The answer to that question is that there was some such sentiment abroad, but nowhere very vital or active, until the Gauls, who alone were vividly conscious of immortality, began to permeate the Empire a lifetime before the Incarnation.

The Egyptians seem to have had from of old (for their wealthier classes at least and in the custody of their strict priesthood) an elaborate ritual recognizing the survival of the soul. In Etruria the tombs — of the governing class at least — bear witness to the same. One section, and one section only, of Greek philosophy inclined to similar ideas ; but nowhere was immortality, least of all in the form of vivid and certain expectation, a part -of the popular mind, save among the Gauls. In so far as that mind contemplated the fate of the dead at all, it thought of their continuation as something tenuous, ex-sanguine, weak and most pitiable, presumably evanescent.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 29

When we turn from the general philosophy (which is the determining element in every Society) to the social state accompanying it, we discover one most character- istic difference between that ancient world and our own ; that difference is the universal presence of slavery as the economic basis of Society. Slavery was not peculiar to the Graeco-Roman world. It was present among the less civilized clans and tribes outside as well. It was everywhere. At first, no doubt, as in the case of our own wage-system in its origins, it was mainly a domestic, familiar and tolerable thing ; but it became, as Society grew, both more united and more complex : slavery became a mechanical and oppressive burden weighing upon the human spirit and giving its tone to all, for all Society is affected by the spirit of any large part thereof.

Politically the organization of all that world was a general monarchy, lie rules of whose civil service were upon a model mainly taken from the immensely older, highly organized, very wealthy state of Egypt. For all local affairs the spirit was rather that of oligarchy, administration in the hands of local magnates for lesser affairs, for the small communities a spirit almost what we should call today democratic. But the structure, the stuff of Society (which, in importance, over-rides mere political arrangement) was based upon and rooted in slavery. The harder work of the world was done under compulsion ; not under indirect compulsion as it is in our wage-system, but under direct compulsion of physical pain and death for the slave who did not accomplish his task.

What was the major spiritual result of all these things combined ? A Universal Grasco-Roman society through which great numbers moved without restriction, plying their commerce, ordering the army in its marches, travelling from curiosity or for betterment, and every- where interchanging ideas and learning, produced a state of mind in which the universal problem of mortality imposed itself. A major note was heard at last running

30 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

throughout this high pagan world, with all its splendour and all its noble appreciation of beauty and order. What note was that ? It was despair.

The further that pagan civilization proceeds in its development — a rapid development changing it and ageing it within three centuries — the more this mood of despair penetrates it. You feel it in the growing lethargy of men’s action ; in the sterilization of their inventive power, and most of all in the continuous refrain of their highest letters. The greatest verse is filled with what a modem poet has excellently called in the English language “ the doubtful doom of human- kind,” irretrievable certitude that none return from the dead.

Of a thousand superb lines which might be chosen to illustrate the profundity of this abandonment, remember these from the most poignant of the Latin poets :

“ Soles occidere et redire possunt Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux Nox est perpetua una dormiunda.” *

Note the reading “ dormiunda ” with its mournful vowels : “ One perpetual night to be slept out.”

It is the cry of Catullus. Grasco-Roman society was dying. But to say that is only to say half and the less important half of the truth ; the other half of the truth is that it was dying of despair — when there arrived a force whereby it was transformed.

As we approach the conversion of the Roman Empire (a.d. 29-33 to a.d. 500), we come upon a moment of

* This hat been translated :

" Suns may set and tuns may rise. Our poor eyes,

When their little light is past. Droop and go to sleep at last.”

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 31

history so surpassing, in its value and effects, all others known to us that we must begin bv standing apart and contemplating its magnitude. That is the essential point apparent to anyone who cares for reality in history. The conversion of the Empire to the Faith was not one episode among the great episodes of our race ; it was not a chapter, the greatest chapter of many. It was The Determining Thing. It was not only in scale but in quality a new Creation.

This is true quite apart from the standing question, whether that revolution in the human mind were an illusion or a revelation of reality.

A man concerned with the story of his ancestry on this earth may judge the Conversion in either of two ways. He may condemn the great change as a false turning, a warping of values, a lamentable lessening of intelligence ; or he may acclaim it as a vision of reality whereby the world was and can be saved. Whether he passionately approve or hate the event, it remains an historical truth that no such reconstruction has to our knowledge appeared before or since.

Certainly unique in character, the Conversion is also unique in scale. For whether the momentous change of our Fathers from pagan to Christian were man-made, or given to man by Divine influence from above, it remains in either case unique : something quite by itself and producing effects not comparable to those of any other cause.

We must begin by laying it down, again as an historical fact, not to be removed by affection one way or the other, that the conversion of the Roman Empire was a con- version to what was called by all our ancestry and what is still called by those with any just historical sense, the Catholic Church.

The Empire was not converted to what modern men mean when they use the word “ Christianity.” That word is continually used and as continually corrupts the historical judgment of those who use it and those who hear it.

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To modem youth, especially in societies which have lost the Catholic culture, the word “ Christianity ” means vaguely, “ That which is common to the various sects, opinions and moods inherited in diluted form from the Reformation.” In England today for instance, “ Christi- anity ” means a general feeling of kindliness — particularly to animals. To some more precise in mind it may mean an appreciation of, and even an attempt at copying, a Character which seems to them portrayed in the four Gospels (four out of certainly more than fifty, which four they happen to have inherited from the Catholic Church — although they do not know it). To a much smaller number, with greater powers of definition and better historical instruction, the word “ Christianity ” may have even so precise a meaning as “ the acceptation of the doctrine that an historical Figure appeared in Palestine not quite two thousand years ago, and was in some way the Incarnation of God, and that the main precepts, at least, of an original society calling itself after His name should be our guide for moral conduct.”

But all these uses of the word “ Christianity ” from the vaguest to the most precise, do not apply to the tremendous business with which we are here concerned. The society of the ancient world was not changed from its antique attitude to that which it finally adopted in the IVth century (and continued thenceforward to spread throughout Europe) by any mood or opinion ; it was transformed by adherence to the doctrine and discipline as well as the spirit and character of a certain Institution ; and that Institution is historically known. It is the Church. The Church is a Personality which can be tested by certain indisputable attributes, practices and definitions. It claimed and claims Divine authority to teach, to include in its membership by a specific form of initiation those who approach it and are found worthy ; to exclude those who will not accept its unity and supremacy. It performed throughout the society of the Empire (and even beyond its boundaries) a certain liturgical act of sacrifice, the Eucharist. It affirmed its

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 33

foundation by a Divine figure who was at once Man, and a manifestation of God. It further affirmed that its officers held their authority through appointment origin- ally by this Founder, who gathered a small group for that very purpose. It affirmed that from the members of this small original group, in unbroken succession, descended the spiritual powers which could be claimed by its officers and by them alone, in a particular manner, over the whole body of Christians, and, in general fashion, over the world at large.

In order to understand this very great Thing (not idea) which captured and transformed the old pagan world we must grasp its nature. We must be able to answer three questions. First we must discover what was that Thing which spread thus so rapidly and so trium- phantly throughout the Graeco-Roman world ? Secondly, we must appreciate the method, by which this revolution was accomplished. Lastly, in order to under- stand both the nature and the method of the Thing we must discover why it met with so intense a resistance , for that resistance explains both its character and its ways of propagation. It was victory over this intense resist- ance which established the Catholic Faith and practice so firmly over our race.

First then, as to the nature of the conquest.

The great change did not come because “ it met a need ” ; it did indeed meet needs that were universal. It filled up that aching void in the soul which was the prime malady of the dying ancient society ; also it relieved and dissipated despair, the capital burden imposed by that void.

Yet the meeting of the need was not the essential character of the new thing ; it was not the driving power behind the great change ; it was only a result incidental thereto.

It was not merely in order to assuage such a need of the spirit that men turned towards the Catholic Church. Had that been so we should have been able to trace the steps whereby from vague gropings and half-satisfied

34 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

longings there should have crystallized this and that myth, this and that fulfilment of desire by imagination, until the system should have come into being long after the inception of the first influences.

That such a gradual process did take place is commonly affirmed by those who have not a sufficient acquaintance, even on the largest lines, with the thing historically — but in fact nothing of the kind took place. You discover not a vague frame of mind, but a definite polity from the first ; no criticism of documents or of tradition can present any other conclusion. A Man appeared, gathered together a certain company and taught. And not only so soon as that company begins to act, but at the root of all memory with regard to its action, you have the

S:cific claim of Divine revelation in the Teacher, of s Human and Divine nature ; of His resurrection from the dead ; of His establishing a central rite of Sacrifice, which was called the Eucharist (the Act of Gratitude) ; the claim to Authority ; the Apostolic organization of the tradition ; the presence of a Hierarchy — and all the rest.

The Catholic Church visible was not an influence that

spread ; it was a fixed Corporation, a Club, if you will ; it was an organization with a form and members, with a defined outline, and a discipline.

Disputes arose within it, certain of its members would over-emphasize this or that among the doctrines for which it stood, and so warp the proportion of the whole. But no innovator, even during the first enthusiasm when so many debates surrounded so intellectually vigorous a thing, would ever pretend that there was not one body to be preserved. He might claim to be the true continuator of that body, and protest when he was excluded from it for dissent ; but never did any one of those at the origin propose that discord upon essentials could be permanent.

This new and strict Corporation had a name, a name associated in the minds of its contemporaries with the idea of a secret society possessed of Mysteries ; it called

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 35

itself the Ekklesia.* Now it is all-important to grasp this further fact, that this new Ekklesia with its mysteries, its initiation ceremonies (instruction in doctrine, solemn affirmation thereof, called a “ Confession ” — what today we call a creed — and Baptism) was not one of many religions. It did not happen to prove the winner in a sort of race. That is an error which one finds in many of the textbooks and which has almost passed into popular acceptance. Any number of our general outlines of history and the rest talk of the Early Church in this fashion.

They say, for instance, that the earlier mysteries such as the mysteries of Eleusis, the later mysteries of Mithras, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis, etc., were of this sort ; and what they call “ Christianity ” (for they usually avoid the title “ Catholic Church ”) was (they say) but one mystery religion out of many.

This is not true; and the test that it is not true is simple and should be conclusive. The Catholic Church alone and from its origins proclaimed the Divinity of a real historical Man and the objective truth of the doctrines which it affirmed Him to have revealed. It proclaimed from the beginning the Resurrection of that real historical Man from the dead ; and the popular nickname, “ Christian ” (which became like so many nicknames the general term) arose from that fact.

All the other popular worships with their mysteries and initiations and the rest of it were admittedly myths. They did not say, “ This happened ” ; what they said was, “ This is a parable, a symbol to explain to you the nature and possible fate of the human soul and its relation to the Divine.” Not one of them said, “ I was founded

* Thu Greek word meant literally * ■ an assembly ” But there were many Greek terms for an assembly , and tbu term EKKLESIA had long been used for an assembly closed and compact , especially a secret one for the celebration of mysteries. And it is from this word that we get the French "fghse,” the Welsh "eglwyt,” the Italian "chiesa,” etc. The word "church” or "kirk” came round through the missionaries who spread the Faith in the north. It is thought to be derived from the Greek "kynakon,” " the Lord’s house. "

3 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

by a real human being whom other men met and knew, who lived in a particular place and time ; one to whom there are ‘ a cloud of witnesses V* Not one of them said that it was the sole guardian of revealed truth and that its officials held a Divine commission to explain that truth throughout the world.

In all this there was a violent contrast between the Catholic Church and the whole of the pagan world around it. Neither the intellectuals following Greek traditions nor the Roman Empire with its administrative sense of unity persecuted the other associations. It was not the doctrine of the Resurrection, still less the doctrine of Immortality which was found repulsive. It was the affirmation that a criminal who had been put to death in a known place and time at Jerusalem, under the Emperor Tiberius, condemned to scourging and to ignominious death by Crucifixion (whereto no Roman citizen was liable) was Divine, spoke with Divine authority, founded a Divine Society, rose from the dead, and could promise to His faithful followers eternal beatitude. This was what shocked the intellectuals, but this also was what gave stuff and substance to that new society and so led to its persecution.

Now, as to this new Society’s method of expansion : how did it propagate itself ? What was the machinery which proved so successful that in less than four long lifetimes the whole of that hostile society was officially Catholic, and that within another two long lifetimes the mass of the population. West and East, of the known world between the Channel, the Rhine, the Danube and the desert was joined with the Catholic Church ?

It worked by the method which we have come to call “ Cells,” a word rendered familiar today through the universal Communist agitation. If, as some think, that Communist movement is the final assault upon Catholic tradition and the Faith, if it be, as many think, the modern anti-Christ, the parallel is indeed striking. All over the Grasco-Roman Empire there were founded rapidly a number of these small organizations, first

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 37

connected with, later separated from, local Jewish synagogues ; fixed first in the greater towns, but later scattered like seed throughout the lesser provincial centres, and then by missionary effort throughout the countrysides.

We know that this was the method by ample docu- mentary evidence ; we have also a vast mass of tradition, largely legendary, of course, after such length of time, but containing its nucleus of truth, which tells us how in this place and in that these “ Cells ” were founded and established.

Each was called individually a Church, just as the general organization was called the Church as a whole.

The Churches were governed by a Hierarchy. At the head of one church would be one presiding officer, the Episkopos, a word of which we have made the English word “ Bishop.”

He was nominated sometimes, apparently, by the local clergy ; sometimes by the acclamation of the community. But he held his title not from these but from Apostolical succession. He was made a Bishop by the laying on of hands. Someone of Episcopal rank ordained him, as he had been ordained. This and that ancient local Church boasted that it had been founded by an Apostle, and soon in drawing up lists of Bishops the chain was traced to that Apostle who had first begun it by the laying on of hands. Those thus ordained would lay on hands in their turn, and so the hierarchy or body of the clergy was formed. After some indeterminate time not the Bishop alone (who was the full priest) but subordinates bearing the titles of “ elders,” in the Greek “ pres- buteroi,” could function at the Holy Mysteries, having been ordained in their turn by the Bishops. These consecrated the elements of the Eucharist, and from them would commonly be drawn the Episcopate. Such was the original form of the Church. The Ekklesia.

The Ekklesia had a body of writing which it preserved for the instruction of its members and the continuity of its doctrine ; but it took a long time before these

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documents were sifted and before a certain proportion of them (a small portion of the whole) were affirmed to have special value as Scripture, that is, inspired and therefore authoritative. There were, for instance, in the way of records, or pretended records, of Our Lord’s life and teaching, as we said, some fifty such documents, for we have fragments of at least that number.

Only four such — now called in English “ Gospels ” — were after much delay admitted to the Canon, that is, the “ regular ” or “ official ” collection. In the same way letters were written by the missionaries of the Early Church ; but in the same way only a certain number, under the name of “Epistles,” were admitted to the Canon, and one record of early Apostolic action, the Acts of the Apostles ; also one work of prophetic visions, which we know as the Apocalypse.

This being the sequence whereby the Canon of what we call today the New Testament was gradually formed (by selection over a long space of time), it is exceedingly bad history to pretend that this collection of documents was the authority for the Faith. The authority for the Faith was the tradition of the Apostles ; the living agreement of the faithful, especially as represented by their heads in the Apostolic succession, the Bishops.*

* Although the word Epuhopo: means literally an overseer, and Presbuterot meant literally a senior, it is an error to think that this literal meaning was the original one Episkopos waB a word used with hieratic meaning m the mystery, Presbuteros the same The function of the Episkopos from the beginning, at we first find the word used by those who could remember the Apostles, was always that of a sacred ordained official m the Apostolic succes- sion. And the other word no more meant old in years than the French word "Seigneur,” the Spanish "Sefior,” the Italian "Signore,” mean an old man. These also all derive from the respectful term " senior.” It is thought by some scholars that in some early cases a college or group of ordained men governed a particular church rather than an individual. The thing is obscure and doubtful, but, in any case, clearly exceptional , perhaps an interim arrangement pending an individual election. Normally each local church has its own individual Bishop. St. Ignatius of Antioch writes no further from

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 39

Apart from this fundamental institution of the hierarchy, the sacred caste which alone had spiritual authority over the Church, there were other elements which strengthened the new society and helped it to grow : inter-connective letters, creeds or baptismal formulas : above all the common Eucharist. There was the permanent co-ordinating function of the inter- communication by travel and by correspondence, along the Imperial roads. All these Churches kept in touch and maintained a common doctrine alive. Councils of Bishops were held (at least, after the Emperors had accepted the Catholic Church, and it had become the official religion). They would be summoned to represent the Church throughout the whole world, whence they derived their title “ oecumenical.”

The first of these, under the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, was summoned at Nicaea, near Con- stantinople, because Constantinople had become the capital of the Empire. It met to discuss and define the full doctrine of Our Lord’s Divinity, and to reject heretical ideas connected with it.

The function of getting into communication by travel and by letter both supported, and was called into being by, the supreme principle of Unity : The idea that the Church was one , its doctrine one, its authority one, stood out vividly in the minds of all its members. From the beginning dissent was not tolerated ; unity was of the essence of the thing, and in connection with this there was present, at first more vaguely, later with greater definition, the conception of primacy. One of Our Lord’s Apostles, Peter, was head of the Apostolic College ; his See had a special, if at first less defined, position in Christendom ; and Rome, where Peter was last settled, where he and Paul were martyred, became the permanent seat of this Primacy as it developed.

The third activity which made for the growing strength of the Church was the use of what we now call Creeds (from the Latin word, “ Credo,” “ I believe ”). They were called in the East where Greek was spoken

4o CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION “ symbols,” from the Greek “ symbola,” which means things put together to be agreed on. They were origin- ally called in the Latin-speaking West, “ Confessiones.” They arose in order to make sure that a new candidate for admission to the Ekklesia was not tainted with heresy. He or she was required before admission to recite truths, which had been defined in order that such definition might combat false ideas. These brief recitals did not pretend to cover the Faith ; they were not a summary of all, nor even of the principal, beliefs ; for instance, the great creed of the IVth century made no mention of the most important and fundamental mystery of the new society, the Eucharist and the Real Presence of Christ therein. Of that doctrine there was ample evidence, going back to the beginning, but as it was not questioned its definition had never entered into these rebutting affirmations which the candidate was required to make. The Church was not and is not based upon its creeds. The creeds are but the affirmation by the Church of particular points.

The fourth function making for unity and strength and permanence and growth was, of course, that very Eucharist just mentioned. Bread and wine were con- secrated after a method, and with words, handed down traditionally as those of Our Lord himself at the Last Supper. This mystic ceremony was performed by the celebrant hierarch, or hierarchs ; on its performance the bread and wine over which the mystical formulae had been uttered were believed to be no longer bread and wine but the Body and Blood of Christ Himself.

As St. Justin himself wrote at a time which was to the Crucifixion as our time is to the Declaration of In- dependence, and writing as on a matter accepted and long established, writing moreover for the instruction of readers who were not Christian, the bread was no longer “ common bread ” but “ the flesh of Christ.”

All this gives us the external method and machinery whereby the Faith was established and spread with such astonishing success throughout a vast society, which had

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM

41

begun by knowing it ill, had proceeded to hate it, and had at last accepted it for a universal religion.

But what was the internal force ? How were men convinced ? Why did they join this Society in spite of the terrible risks communion with it involved ? It always meant unpopularity. Often it meant ruin of fortune and thrusting out from the society of one’s fellows. Sometimes it meant torture and death. What drove men to it f

The answer is that the Church was a Person which men came to trust as they come to trust it today by experience : and having trusted, to love, as they love it today. A man became a Christian because he found that the Church affirmed things which he recognized to be true in experience and holy in character. It was loved, witnessed to and defended to the death by those who thus felt it to be, when in contact with it, divine. The converts of that day, as of ours, discovered the Church to be the only fixed and certain divine authority in all their experience. As for doctrine, they took it from this Society of which they had thus become enamoured upon such firm grounds of experience. It was not the Society which proceeded from the doctrine, but the doctrine that came from the Society.

To understand this last point (which is fundamental to all comprehension of the Church’s triumph over and penetration throughout the old Roman world) we must also understand the character of the violent resistance which it excited.

That resistance is too often presented in a fashion which makes it incomprehensible. This is because it is repre- sented wrongly. People would not have been thrown to wild beasts, tortured to death, condemned to im- prisonment with hard labour in the mines, simply because they preached a general spirit of kindliness, or worshipped a particular ideal Character. Nothing could have been more tolerant of variety in opinion than the old Graeco-Roman Empire. Nor is it true that the Empire persecuted the Church because it was a secret

4 2 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

society. Mystery societies of various sorts flourished among the citizens ; why then did an angry instinct for killing this particular one arise ?

In some degree, no doubt, for that reason which we find hundreds of years before suggested by a Greek philosopher filled with vision. He wrote, that if humanity should come across a perfectly good man, his fellow men would tear him to pieces. Holiness is a reproach.

It was also persecuted in some degree perhaps because its claims ana affirmations upon itself were novel. It said, as nothing else had yet said, “ I am the voice of God. You must accept what I say as truth. My code of morals is the path to eternal beatitude and neglect or denial of them is the path to eternal despair.” That was a challenge to all human custom ; a sort of challenge not easily to be borne.

Allied to this was the hard, the angular quality of the new thing, with its strict definitions, its Hierarchy, its highly disciplined organization, standing thus as an alien body in the midst of a soft diliquescence : solid and with edges, in the midst of a society that was dissolving. The Church was an alien thing, and, as it were, indigestible ; or rather it was something which had to be accepted altogether or crushed altogether, if there were to be any peace.

But there was a last political reason and a strong one for the resistance. As this highly organized, definite, enthusiastic body spread, it became more and more a State within the State ; it was a society with its own authorities, its own discipline and spirit in the midst of that Imperial World which was inspired by a political desire for general peace and unity. The Government of the Empire reacted inevitably and violently against the presence of such an opponent and challenger. It has been noted by many that the Emperors best at government were often the worst persecutors.

This resistance to the spread of the Faith, this com- pulsion laid upon the Catholic body to fight for its life.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 43

was a chief element in its final triumph. Permanent work is done in hard material. “ Great sculpture is not fashioned in butter,” as a just critic said of a minor poet’s verses. The best carving is done in the closest- grained wood, and against the grain.

This great united state which included the whole of the known civilized world, the Graeco-Roman Empire, fell at first gradually then more rapidly into a material decline.

All the first century and a half of our era, that is, more than a century and a half after the pacification and consolidation of the whole Empire under Augustus, its first monarch, the material decline was not apparent. In the earlier part of that period all civilization was at its height. The influence of Greek art perfected all that met the outward eye, and literature still inherited the very high traditions of the Augustan period. The greatest pagan names in Latin letters and thought are found before or during the earlier part of those hundred and odd years.

The outward character of civilization in letters, as in everything else, in order, policing, law, road-making and building, remained at a summit. In general, peace reigned ; although there was occasional fighting between sections of the regular troops to decide who should be Commander-in-Chief, and therefore master of the State. Even on through the second century this order and peace continued, as did the excellence of material civilization ; though in some departments, for instance in sculpture and decoration, there were signs of a baser and more mechanical spirit appearing. But after about three generations an appreciable decline appeared ; a manifest worsening of those things which mark a high civilization. Literary style fell to a much lower level and continued to fall ; architecture coarsened ; advance in physical knowledge halted or went backward.

So long as what are known as the “ Antonine

44 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Emperors ” held power things were well administered and though civilization was clearly on the downward grade no one felt the peril and it was not apparent. Many have said that this “ Antonine Period ” (from a.d. 98 to a.d. 180) was the most secure and prosperous Europe had hitherto known, although the arts were certainly already failing.

But after the Antonines things began to break down. The last but one of those Emperors, the scholarly but weak Emperor-philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, the dupe of his wife, nominated his own son to succeed him. Hitherto it had been the rule of the Antonine period for each Emperor to nominate his successor, chosen for his ability to command soldiers and to govern the State on its civil side as well. That rule was now broken. Marcus Aurelius’s son was quite unworthy of his position and his reign was the approach of a welter in which authority was weakened. The middle of the third century was a time in which all manner of upstart soldiers took over government, each in his own region and over his own troops ; there was a sort of moral anarchy in which the prestige of the Imperial Roman Government sank low.

Meanwhile there were recurrent and increasing econ- omic crises ; money was debased, all the machinery for trade and production got out of gear. It was clear to every observer that our civilization had gone down a great step to a lower level and threatened to sink further still. The main function of the Army, the saving of the civilized and wealthy part of Europe from raids by the half-civilized people beyond the frontiers, was ill con- ducted; the security of the frontier regions grew less, the anxiety for their future grew greater.

Order was restored by a Commander-in-Chief called Aurelian, who might be named the second founder of the Imperial scheme. But it was most noticeable that even as he and his immediate successors pursued their task of setting things to rights again the whole of Society appeared transformed and transformed for the worse. Art had quite palpably declined, and literature with it.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 45

The Empire during the worst of its trouble had shown great powers of survival; Europe remained coherent, the Graeco-Roman culture, though it had been degraded, did not perish. The raids of pirates upon the coast and of marauding bands over the frontiers were not allowed to inflict damage beyond a certain measure ; our civiliza- tion, lowered though it was in intellectual and aesthetic tone, still seemed secure and immutable.

None the less decline continued. At the end of the third century a very remarkable soldier and administrator, the Emperor Diocletian, attempted a reorganization of the whole State and many of the divisions he laid down lasted for centuries. The provinces which he defined remained marked by the same limits right on until the Middle Ages and many of them much later still. In a number of cases our ecclesiastical dioceses corresponded for centuries to these divisions.

The framework of the Empire stood ; its coinage, its laws, all its life moved on without a break. There was no “ Fall of the Roman Empire ” — the phrase is rhetorical and false ; but there was a slow Social Revolution ; a profound change transforming the texture of Society. The half-civilized tribes on the fringes of the Empire filtered more and more into Graeco-Roman society, acquired more power and introduced elements of dis- order ; the ruling class changed and largely lost its culture.

On the material side of life all seemed to be sinking slowly, even while on the spiritual side there was rising to triumph the mighty force of the Catholic Church.

Now since the rise of the one spiritual thing and the fall of the other material thing were coincident, may not they be related as cause and effect ?

This is the capital question which we have to deal with on approaching the decline of the Roman Empire in material things.

The answer was given without hesitation by the scholars of the Renaissance who rediscovered the glories of pagan antiquity and themselves became half pagan in

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spirit. They often said, they always implied, that what ruined the material civilization of the old Graeco-Roman Empire, that glorious pagan civilization of the statues and the colonnades, the high verse and the high philosophy, was the spread of a superstition, of something degrading : the spread, I repeat, of that which those who do not know the Faith call “ Christianity,” but which those who know the Faith call by its right name, the Catholic Church.

While the Empire was changing under the growing influence of the Church, contemporary witnesses said exactly the same thing. The chronicler of the pagan reaction under Julian the Apostate, half a lifetime after the victory of Constantine, wrote, “ The Christians, to whom we owe all our misfortunes. ...”

That the enemies of the Church or those who knew the Church imperfectly or those who, like the scholars of the Renaissance, were in reaction against the Church, should have spoken thus, is comprehensible. Much more remarkable is the fact that the defenders of the Church, in the last four hundred years, have re-echoed that same complaint though in a different form.

“ Yes,” they say, “ material civilization did decline as the Empire turned Christian ; the Dark Ages did coincide with the triumph of the Faith. But why ? Because men’s minds were naturally turned, during the disasters of human society, to the consolation of Divine things. What matter if somewhat less attention were paid to art and letters and if the stuff of Society coarsened, so long as a spiritual advantage of supreme value was gaining ground all the time ? ”

That sort of attitude went on until past the middle of the XIXth century. The enemies of the Faith making certain that history proved this breakdown of civilization to be due to the spread of Oriental superstitions, especially the superstition of the “ Ekklesia.” The Catholics often reluctantly admitted the same thesis — they who should have known better. They excused the coincidence between the Catholic victory and decay in architecture.

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sculpture, history, verse and the rest, by saying that it did not matter since at last Divine things had come down to men. The price, they said, was worth the paying.

But the truth of the business, which people only began to recover within living memory (because only within living memory has history been fully examined and scientifically treated) is almost the opposite of what had been said so long. It was not the spread of the Faith which undermined the high civilization of pagan antiquity ; on the contrary, the Faith saved all that could be saved ; and, but for the conversion of the Roman Empire, nothing of our culture would have remained.

The truth had already been put in one sentence by St. Jerome when he said that if the Graeco-Roman world had accepted the Catholic Church in time the decay of civilization would never have taken place.

The dates are sufficient proof in this matter. The old pagan civilization was in active decay long before the new, small and struggling obscure group of Catholic congregations began to have any appreciable effect. The golden age of literature was passed, letters had become sterile, architecture coarsened, long before the Ekklesia was felt to be a menacing force to the natural Paganism of the Old World. Already old age, corruption, greed, the preponderance of slaves and “ Freed-men ”* side by side with the growth of vast fortunes overshadowing Society and throwing it out of balance, had long been at work when the Catholic Church was still so insignificant that it is hardly mentioned by the mass of contemporary writers. There are one or two allusions here and there which have reference to this body, but no more. Only when the Empire was already almost broken down, in the Illrd century, does the Church begin to make a strong appeal ; and even then its members were as yet but a small minority even in the East. They were a still smaller minority in the West.

* A" Freed-man ” was a slave whom his master had emancipated, but who still owed devotion and service.

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Constantinople and the East still stood), wide districts came to be governed by local Generals, who commanded soldiers recruited from the less civilized border clans. The authority of the Emperor was still recognized, though actual administrative power in Gaul and Italy and Spain and North Africa passed into the hands of the focal troops and their chieftains, few in number, and for the most part Slav and Germanic. But be it remembered that these also were mainly Christians and that for all of them the Empire represented the only civilization they knew, the only possible civilization, though they had unwittingly degraded it.

This change in the Army, this breakdown of Imperial local government in the West and the taking of it over by the commanders of garrisons often half-barbaric was a contributory cause to the sliding down of our civilization into the Dark Ages ; but it was not the main cause. The main cause was that despair and senility into which the old pagan civilization had fallen long before. In such a pass the Church alone had power to revivify and in part to preserve.

Lastly, let it be remembered that though we must for the purpose? of right history admit the continual material decline going on through those first five centuries during which the Empire turned from Pagan to Christian, the new religion brought with it invaluable compensations for evils which it had not caused but at the advance of which it had been present.

The Catholic Church brought back to the old ruined, dying, despairing Graeco-Roman world the quality of vision. It brought back a motive for living and thence there came to it, sustaining all that could be sustained of that grievously weakened world, the seeds of what were to become saner and more stable social arrangements.

The Catholic Church having become the religion of Graeco-Roman society did, among other things, two capital things for the settlement of Europe on its political side, and for arresting the descent into chaos. It humanized slavery and it strengthened permanent

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marriage. Very slowly through the centuries those two influences were to produce the stable civilization of the Middle Ages, wherein the slave was no longer a slave but a peasant ; and everywhere the family was the well-rooted and established unit of Society.

The old pagan world had reposed as we have seen upon slavery ; the great bulk of its human material was made up of slaves — perhaps two-thirds, perhaps more. The Catholic Church had grown up in that state of affairs ; its members in the early centuries could conceive no other.

The Church never denied the right to own slaves, but it was the spirit of the Church which gradually trans- formed their condition. It became difficult, often impossible, to deal with a baptized Christian man as a chattel ; emancipation was fostered as a high act of charity. Under the first Christian Emperors the laws regulating the relations between slave and master grew continually more human.

Nevertheless, slavery continued throughout these first five centuries, wherein Christendom was founded, to be the accepted basis of all Society. The typical social unit was the village estate belonging to one man, containing a certain number of free men and recently emancipated men, but dependent for its field work on slave labour. A class of proprietors, some of them immensely wealthy, continued to direct society and their incomes came from the difference between the costs of maintaining the slaves and the value of the food and clothing, etc. which the slaves produced.

There were indeed free craftsmen also, especially in the towns, and all the rapidly growing clerical body, priests, and the several orders of lesser clergy, later the monks, were necessarily free men. So, of course, were the officials, the tax-collectors, the surveyors, the people about the courts of justice, the retired soldiers, and the bodies of regular troops and auxiliary troops as well. But the bulk of society, now Christian, was built up of slaves : slaves married, slaves mainly agricultural and living in

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fixed homes from one generation to another, but none the less slaves.

Meanwhile the political machinery of society went through no apparent revolution, though it got more and more inefficient.

Taxes were still gathered on the age-long established territorial assessments and in the immemorial way, though decreasing revenues resulted. The sums paid on arable and pasture and forests, on bridge-tolls and market dues, and the rest, were paid in largely to the local govern- ments and largely ceased in the West to reach the central Imperial Treasury by the end of the Vth century. The law courts continued to function, the coinage was still struck in the Emperor’s name and effigy, men still thought of themselves as Roman citizens. The monarch at Constantinople was the admitted head of all Christendom, his direct rule was felt everywhere east of the Adriatic and intermittently in North Africa, Spain and Gaul, though his direct rule there weakened and ceased. It was rapidly replaced by the local chieftains who commanded the garrisons, mainly of what were called “ federated troops,” that is, men of barbarian origin incorporated with the Roman service.

Of such were the tribal chieftains of the Burgundians, of the Gothic bodies, of the Vandals and of the various Frankish groups. Of these last, one small body was commanded from Tournai and at the end of the Vth century the young General commanding it, Clovis, became Catholic, whereas the other Generals remained heretical. His conversion made him much the most powerful ruler in the West, head of nearly all Gaul.

Nor is it true that intellectual activity failed as, towards a.d. 500, we entered the Dark Ages. What happened was that it changed its interests. There was a vast mass of writing, of eager disputation, but such discussion no longer turned on doubtful, insoluble problems, an end to which was not expected or desired — it dealt with certitude, with an ardent establishment of what it held to be the all-satisfying truth, the Faith, the

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salvation of mankind and the defence of that truth against attack from without and from within.

It has been till lately the fashion to deride the writings of the Fathers and theological interest of the IVth and Vth centuries as foolish. In the English language this fashion is identified with the name of Gibbon, who drew all his inspiration and copied all his data from the anti- Catholic French writers of his day. But the Fathers, and indeed all those who took part in the vivid theological discussion which runs for generations through Europe, were at once conservative and creative ; their intellectual energy saved us ; their powers of definition and of appre- ciation are at the root of the culture which nourished Europe through the difficulties of the coming time — those centuries to which we shall next turn under the title of the “ Siege of Christendom.”

To sum up, then, by the end of that long period, the first five centuries, extending from the Incarnation to the conversion of Clovis and the establishment of Catholic Gaul, the end of the five centuries during which all our ancestry turned from Paganism to Catholicism and during which the Empire was baptized, were centuries in which we suffered grave damage : disorder, the fall of the arts, of great verse and of high unified administration, the worsening of roads, much loss of the knowledge inherited from the past (Greek, for instance was dying out in the West and legend was more and more intermixed with real history). But Europe in that period became spiritually consolidated so that it proved able to meet and overcome the strain to which it was about to be subjected.

The conversion of the Graeco-Roman world to Catho- licism gave that world a unity which it had never had before and which preserved it.

That strain would have come anyhow, the violent attack under which Europe nearly broke down, “ The Siege of Christendom,” was inevitable. But we survived it. Had it not been for the Conversion of our world we should have gone under.

II

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w

THE SIEGE OF CHRISTENDOM : A.D. 50O TO A.D. IOOO

IN the formation of Christendom, its economic and social structure, under the influence of the Catholic Church, the next period after the first foundational one (of five hundred years) is another, also roughly of five hundred years : from approximately the year 500 to about the year 1000.

It is a period of five centuries — the Vlth, Vllth, VUIth, IXth and Xth — which have commonly been called the “ Dari Ages,” but which may more properly be called “ The Siege of Christendom.” It was the period during which the Graeco-Roman Empire, already transformed by Catholicism, fell into peril of destruction at the hands of exterior enemies. This vast and pro- longed attack was quite different from the earlier period of what are wrongly called “ the Barbarian invasions.” The Goths and Franks and Vandals were not distinct from the Empire. They were federated troops of the Empire and belonged to the Imperial religion. They were Christians. They did not enter as enemies from without, but lived within the boundaries. But these later attacks were of another sort altogether. The sea rovers came over the water from the north-east determined only on loot and eager to pull down the Roman world : Asiatics also came in through the great plains and attacked on the east — all these true barbaric invasions in the heart of the Dark Ages which rose to their worst in the IXth century attempted to trample our inheritance, burn our shrines, destroy the Mass and extirpate the Christian name.

We were assaulted from the north, from the east, and from the south-east in two separate fashions. Hordes of 57

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wholly pagan barbarians, some issuing from Scandinavia, many Mongols, many Slavs, fiercely thrust at the boundaries of Christendom with the hope of looting it as their prey and therefore ruining it. These between them formed the eastern attach, coming from the districts we call today Sweden and Norway and Denmark, Poland and the Russian plains, Hungary and the Danube valley.

Our struggle against these enemies of the Christian name and culture, who so nearly overwhelmed us, was at last successful. The siege was raised. We carried the influence of civilization outward among those who had been our savage opponents, and we ended by taming them all until they were incorporated into a new and expanded Christian civilization. That was the work of the Christian Church in the West, the Church under the direct authority of the Western Patriarch at Rome (who is also universal primate) and of the Latin liturgy.

What happened on the south-east was a separate and distinct thing.

There , that is, against the Greek-speaking part of the Empire, directly ruled from Constantinople, the peril took the strange form of a sudden enthusiastic movement, which was both religious and military. It took the form of a swarm of light desert cavalry riding out from the sands of Arabia and swooping down on Greek-speaking and Greek-administered civilizations, Syria (including Palestine) and Mesopotamia, Egypt, and then from Egypt, following up all along the southern shores of the Mediterranean between the sea and the Sahara. It reached the Atlantic itself in Morocco, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and passed northward, overran Spain and even crossed the Pyrenees. To these mountains it was beaten back after its first northern extreme had been reached in the middle of France. This attack from the south-east was the Mohammedan attack, not pagan as was the other to the north, not savage, but, from the beginning, incorporating in its conquest all the elements of civilization, developing a high literature of its own, and turning at last from a heresy, which it was in its

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beginnings, to what was virtually a new religion and a new type of society — Islam.

This south-eastern attach upon Christendom not only held its own but progressed with the centuries. It was indeed somewhat thrust back in Spain after many generations had passed, but it continued fixed and strong all over North Africa and Syria ; it ultimately swamped Constantinople itself, and, in quite modern times. Islam threatened the capture of Vienna and therewith the overwhelming of Christian Germany.

Let us look at this “ Siege of Christendom ” in some- what more detail.

First, as to the northern and eastern attack : it was an attack from Scandinavia and the Baltic. It was essentially an attack by pirates few in number but very dangerous on account of their mobility and their fierce onslaught upon a decaying society ; a society moreover, wherein the most of men were in servitude and could not be mobilized to defend the State, and where local govern- ments were ill able to support each other on account of decay in the general organization, and central forces, of society. These pirate attacks had had a preliminary sort of rehearsal in the shape of what are loosely called the Saxon invasions of Britain, but what are really mixed pirate raids proceeding from the North Sea coast immediately upon the north-eastern limits of the Empire : the mouths of the Ems, the Weser, and the Elbe, and the shores of the Bight of Heligoland — that is, the Frisian western shores of what we call today Schleswig-Holstein.

The story that they overran Britain, drove out the original British inhabitants, and resettled the island, is nonsense ; but what is true is that, in the general break- down of Roman administration, local heads of pirate bands took over local government along a narrow belt by the eastern and south-eastern shores of what is today called England. It was this group that was known by

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the general term “ Saxon,” and that raided the shores around Calais and Boulogne and south-eastern Belgium as well as the island of Britain. It is interesting to note that one portion of the pirate groups were called “ Angles ” or “ Engles,” from which we get our modem words “ English ” and “ England.” The word pre- sumably arose from the Latin word “ angulus,” which meant, among other things, a Bight, and would apply to the Bight of Heligoland. As so often happens, the savages took on their name from an appellation which civilization had given them.

These preliminary attacks from oversea by pirates began very early, indeed they began long before the breakdown of Roman administration. They were already recurrent and fairly severe in the century before Constantine, and kept on getting worse and worse up to the year 500. They had the effect of cutting off what was still Christian Britain from the Continent and therefore causing society in the island to sink yet lower.

When the energy of these first pirate raids that crossed the North Sea was exhausted, the Pope of the day sent out missionaries to convert the eastern belt of Britain where civilization had largely disappeared with the Christian religion upon whidi it depended. The Pope’s emissary, St. Augustine, and his companions, came over from fully Christian France just before the year 600, and before the end of the following century they had re- established the Mass, and writing, and proper building, and civilization in general throughout that eastern belt of Britain which the raids had half ruined.

To this success of theirs attached a very interesting consequence : they had sought, for the conversion of the barbaric eastern strip of Britain, the aid of the still Christian, though impoverished and degraded, west of Britain ; but the Christian kinglets and Bishops of west Britain refused to help the Italian missionaries, perhaps because they feared foreign domination. The result was that the Church, which was then altogether the most important, indeed the only, large organization of the

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day, with all the strength that modem Capitalism has in half-developed countries of our own time, threw its weight in favour of the little chieftains on the east coast of Britain against those of the west.

Ireland was already Catholic through a process of conversion which had begun from the Christian side of Britain two hundred years before. Irish missionaries did, indeed, precede the Roman effort at converting the barbarized strip of Eastern Britain, but they did not agree with the general customs of the Latin Church, especially in the observance of Easter. In a council held at Whitby on the coast of Yorkshire, the arguments for conformity with the Roman usages prevailed, and the full union of the Church in Britain with the Latin or Western Church on the Continent was ultimately accomplished.

It was the language, therefore, of the petty courts in York and in Bamburgh on the coast of the North Sea and in Norfolk and in Suffolk, Essex and Kent, that was spread through the missionary schools and through the Church’s effort, as civilization was slowly re-established westward throughout the middle of the island. That is why England and its expansion speaks English today, a language half Latin and half Teutonic, instead of speaking a language half Latin and half Celtic.

With Britain thus recovered for the imperilled Catholic civilization of Western Europe, there was a lull lasting about a hundred years so far as pirate expeditions over- seas against Christendom were concerned. The heavy fighting of the day was done against the savage Germans of the continent and the Mongols coming up the Danube valley and the plains to the north of it. That was the moment when Western civilization was gathered into one state under the chief ruler of Gaul, King Charles, who was crowned Emperor of the West at Rome in the year 800 and is called in history Charlemagne.

There were indeed bad raids by Scandinavian pirates, though no actual invasion until after Charlemagne’s death in 814. But during the succeeding century and

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more, the pirate attacks increased in vigour and the pirates began to make settlements in the island of Britain and on the coasts of northern and western France and on the banks of the rivers in both countries. This second wave of murderous piracy came from the southern part of what we call today Norway and Sweden and the peninsula of Denmark. The pirates were known in England as Danes and on the continent as the “ men from the north,” or Northmen, which was contracted into Normans. As with the first wave of pirates, they were not numerous — a boat held on the average not more than fifty fighting men and all their vessels combined came only to a few.*

These pirates who came across and down the North Sea raided England continuously and northern France as well. In northern France their chief, a certain Rollo, was accepted by the Christian Empire, as so many of his kind had been in the past. He was allowed to take over local government, his fighting men and their followers intermarried with the land-owning families and their freemen on the lower Seine, and a new local chief took over the government of the province then called the Second Lyonnese, but now called Normandy. He ruled from Rouen, and, of course, the few thousand Scandinavians soon melted into the general Gallo-Roman population, spoke the same language, northern French, the ancestor of modern French. These few invaders were rapidly digested into the mass of civilization.!

The pirate invasions of northern Gaul thus ceased a long lifetime before the year 1000. They went on against England much longer, and England as a province of Roman civilization was almost overwhelmed by their

* The largest single attack was that made on the new Christian settlements at the mouth of the Elbe, where Charlemagne had forced the German pagans to become civilized, baptizing them under pam of death. It is to be remembered that this great attack on Hamburg failed

t We often come across in modern books written m the English tongue the term " Norman French ” There never was an y such tongue as Norman French. The Duke of Normandy and his nobles and squires and all the people of the province spoke the same French as was spoken from the Loire to the Channel and from the Ardennes to the boundaries of Breton speech.

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destructive efforts. But the Christian people of the island rallied under Alfred and his successors and even while they suffered the blows of the pirates, succeeded in converting them and half civilizing them. At last, just after the year 1000, the raids of the Scandinavian pirate kings against England turned into a dynastic movement. They were already half Christian at home as well as abroad. But they kept up a foreign, half-pagan pressure against the English, which did not end until the Duke of Normandy with a large French-speaking army and many mercenaries from northern France came over and founded medieval England in 1066.

One may say that on this sector, the north-eastern sector, the siege of Christendom was definitely raised. So it was on the mid-eastern sector. Pagan Mongol raids of light cavalry, even more murderous and de- structive than the Scandinavian pirates, were checked by the now Christian Germans of the Rhine and the lower Elbe and the upper Danube. The furthest outpost of the Mongol raiders had gone as far west as the river Saone in France. They reached the town of Tournus, today on the main railway line between Paris and Marseilles. But long before the year 1000 they had ebbed back to the plains of Hungary, a country which takes its name and its language from Mongol sources.

So much for the pagan raiders from Scandinavia. Further east were the Slavonic raiders.

The Slavs came down in confused, unco-ordinated tribes called by various names, and thrusting from the great northern plains down into the Balkans. There they harried the Greek Empire, but Constantinople always stood up to them and retained fluctuating power in the highlands of what we call today Jugoslavia and Bulgaria. The Slavs also were converted, but converted by Greek influence.

In this mass conversion of the Slavs by Byzantine missionaries, one exception arose : that northern group of them who later were called Poles received the western influence coming from Germany; they dropped the

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Greek liturgy and adopted the Latin. When the separation between the Eastern and Western Churches became more distinct, the Poles represented the Western or Latin civilization in the Slav world.

We have seen that the siege of Christendom on its south-eastern sector, that is, from Asia Minor to Syria, and Egypt, was of a quite different character from what it was in the north and centre of Europe. We have seen that in the north and centre it was an attack of savages by sea and land, without culture, letters or any system of government worthy of the name. The pressure was very heavy and lasted a long time, but the siege was raised, the attack was beaten back and Christendom itself triumphantly advanced over the populations and into the territories which had been those of the enemy.

To the south, however, on the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the siege of Christendom by its enemies was successful. It was never raised.

It was undertaken at first by very small numbers but under the inspiration of a religious zeal — Mohammedan- ism— and with the exceptional opportunity they had, the attackers took over that part of Christendom, the Greek part, which they attacked. They took over its culture, its arts, its building, its general social structure, its land survey (on which the taxes were based) and all the rest of it. But the attackers imposed their new heresy which gradually became a new religion and which held power over government and society wherever the attack broke our eastern siege-line and occupied Christian territory. The result was a complete transformation of society which rapidly grew into a violent contrast between the Orient and Europe. Mohammedanism planted itself firmly not only throughout Syria but all along North Africa and even into Spain, and overflowed vigorously into Asia eastward.

The opportunity for the attack on this sector was exceptional. The high Greek civilization centralized in Constantinople and its wealthy Imperial Court defended

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by a highly trained professional army, possessing great revenues as well, might have seemed, at first sight, far better able to resist assaults than was Western Europe, with its conditions already half barbaric through the long material decline, with its lack of regular armies and its division into half independent local groups. But as a fact the blow delivered against the Greeks, the Christen- dom of the south-east, cracked the shell and had more immediate and more profound consequences than the mere hordes of the east and north.

The opportunities given for the attack from the south- east were fourfold. First, debt to moneylenders was universal (as it is with us today) ; secondly, taxes were very heavy ; thirdly, a large proportion of the population were slaves ; fourthly, both law and theology, that is, both social practice and religious rules, had become more complex than the masses could follow.

A new reforming enthusiasm invading the Empire could take advantage of all these four weaknesses : it could promise the indebted farmer, the indebted municipal authority, the wiping out of their debts ; it could promise the heavily burdened small taxpayer relief from his burdens ; it could promise freedom to the slave and it could promise a simple — a far too simple — new set of rules for Society and new set of practices in religion. It was this fourth appeal, the appeal to simplification, especially to simplification of religion and morals, which had the greatest force. It worked in Syria and Egypt at that moment just as it worked nine centuries later in the West during the Reformation.

This intense enthusiasm for reform arose almost wholly from the personal driving-power of one man, an Arab camel driver called Mohammed. Like all the Arabs around him in that desert region outside the jurisdiction of the Christian Empire under Constantinople, he was bom a pagan. But having wandered far afield he was deeply stirred by the religious systems, Christian and Jewish, which he came across in the civilized world. Certain main tenets appealed to him intensely; he

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summed them up in a body of doctrine which remained his own. He became passionately attached to the Catholic doctrine of a personal omnipotent God, the creator of all things, to His justice and His mercy, to the corresponding double fate of mankind, Heaven or Hell, to the reality of a world of good, as well as of evil, spirits, to the resurrection and immortality of human beings. All this group of simple fundamental Catholic doctrine he not only accepted but was permeated by. He was struck with awe at the contemplation of Christ and regarded Our Lord as the very first of moral teachers and renovators of the spiritual life. And he paid deep veneration to Our Lady.

But a priesthood (which to his mind was a useless social complexity), the whole sacramental system which went with a priesthood, and that central essential pillar of Christendom, the Mass, he rejected altogether. He also rejected baptism, retaining or accepting circumcision not only as a Jewish rite, but as common among his own people. He allowed a relaxed sexual morality, con- cubinage and a plurality of legitimate wives, as also very easy divorce.

We must presume that this powerful zealot was sincere, that he felt vouchsafed within him a divine revelation and a mission to spread it by his burning enthusiasm. He felt himself to be in the line of the greater prophets, the last and the greatest of them all. There may have been an element of the charlatan and deceiver about him, as his enemies believed and as many modem scholars and historians still incline to believe in part. But for the main, for his sense of his mission and his claim to be the supreme prophet of God, we must believe that he was sincere. At any rate the band of men whom he con- vinced and gathered around him, established the new heresy (for it was essentially a Christian heresy at first, though arising just outside the boundaries of Christen- dom) ; fiercely propagated it by arms — a method which strongly appealed to the Arab temper. The seed took vigorous root and shortly after Mohammed’s death the

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band of mounted warriors, burning to spread the intense doctrine he had framed for them, burst through the confines of civilization where the desert meets the cultivated land east of Jordan.

Their success was amazing. They took Damascus, which is the key of all the Near East, and in the valley of the Yarmuk they defeated the regular Christian Byzantine Army sent against them, though it vastly exceeded them in numbers. They swept over Syria and Mesopotamia, organizing their new power everywhere, offering freedom to the slaves and the debtors, and relief to the taxpayer wherever these would accept the religion of Mohammed. And the simplicity of that religion powerfully aided their effort. Men desiring freedom from thraldom and from debt and from the weight of the taxes, joined them everywhere in great numbers. There arose a governing Mohammedan nucleus which alone had armed power and which vastly exceeded in numbers the original cavalcade that had set out from the Arabian sands. The great majority of the population remained, of course, still attached more or less directly to their Catholic traditions or those of their local heresies ; their practices in liturgy were tolerated by their new masters, but they no longer had any political power and all the armament was in the hands of those who were now their superiors.

This system of Mohammedan government over great regions of Christian culture spread with startling rapidity ; it swamped Egypt, using henceforward the revenues of its great wealth in the Delta and the Valley of the Nile. It passed over and dominated the Greek-speaking, Punic- speaking and Latin-speaking cities of the North African shore lying between the Mediterranean and the desert. The triumphant invasion did not cease even when it had reached the Atlantic. It crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, it overran the Spanish peninsula, it crossed the Pyrenees and attempted to do to Western Christendom what it had done to Eastern.

The great wave broke when its crest had reached the

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centre of Gaul. In a vast battle fought half-way between Tours and Poitiers the Christians, under the leadership of one of the wealthiest and greatest of the Gallo-Roman families mixed with German blood — the family from which Charlemagne was to come — threw back the in- vasion to the Pyrenees. But beyond the Pyrenees this strange new Arabian thing, though but a minority in numbers, was supreme over government and arms.

The pace of that expansion was so astonishing as to be still claimed by the Mohammedans as miraculous and as the proof of their prophet’s divine mission. The original battle of the Yarmuk when the first Byzantine army had been astonished into sudden defeat at the hands of quite unexpected foes, took place in 634. The battle between Toms and Poitiers in the heart of France was fought in 732. Not a hundred years, little more than one long lifetime, had sufficed for this prodigious ex- pansion.

The siege of Christendom on this side, to the south- east and the south, had indeed succeeded : save in Spain itself, it was never raised. On the contrary, the pressure against Christendom in the east was to remain continuous and at last to threaten all our civilization again. The Mohammedan was at the gates of Vienna less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Had he taken Vienna he would have reached the Rhine.

Such had been what I have called “ The Siege of Christendom ” ; the VUIth, IXth and Xth centuries to which more properly than any other — but especially to the mid-IXth and the greater part of the Xth — may be applied to the term “ Dark Ages.”

These generations of peril, continual fighting against external enemies and uninterrupted struggle had upon our mortally-threatened civilization an effect of the greatest import for our future. That effect may be called by metaphor “ annealing.” The pressure and heat of the struggle confirmed Christian Europe in the

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mould wherein it had been cast. It consolidated our society, and gave it that form which was to prove vigorous and enduring and provide the “ taking-off place ” for the great expansion of the true Middle Ages about to follow.

What had the social structure of Christendom become during those three centuries of unceasing defensive combat ? In the first place the internal social structure of the West had consolidated and taken on a new and enduring character.

Slavery properly so-called, the buying and selling of men and women and exploitation of their labour by mere force, had ceased to be the foundation of Society. In its place there had developed a state of affairs in which the former slave had become the Serf. The descendants of the slaves were no longer working at the arbitrary will of masters here and there upon the great landed estates ; they were fixed in village communities over which the former owner remained master, but a master with rights now strictly limited by custom.

The serf was the half-way house between the Slave of pagan antiquity and the Free Peasant of the later Christian centuries. The great bulk — at least nine-tenths — of Christian men in the West were agricultural. In the German-speaking belt of the Rhine valleys and its margin immediately to the east, in the equally German districts of the upper Danube, in Gaul (or France), Britain, Italy and that part of Spain towards the north which had been recovered by Christian armies from the Mohammedan, at least nine families out of ten were tilling the earth, and of these some large majority, perhaps two-thirds, were serfs attaching to the soil, still compelled to work, as their slave forefathers had been, for other men, acting as bondsmen to lords, but their work strictly limited by what had become immemorial custom. So many days a week the serf had to give to the lord’s own farmland, but the rest of his time was his own. Of the produce of his own land, so much he had to give in dues to the Church and the local lord ; but the rest

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was, in practice, at his own disposal. In other words, the isolation of the villages during the long wars of the siege of Christendom, the very fact that intercommunica- tion had become difficult, produced a self-sufficing and fully organized village community.

Now there was one force which had thus already half emancipated the old slave class, and given it gradually throughout the centuries the higher position it had achieved : and that force was the religion common to lord and slave alike. All men felt themselves, under the challenge of the outer barbarism, to be of one Christian stuff : one united and superior civilization which had to remain alive through its own energy.

It has often been said that the gradual evolution during the Dark Ages of the slave into the half-free serf, his progress on the way to becoming a free peasant, was a blind economic development. It was the fashion of the XIXth century to talk in this way, because the funda- mental XIXth century error was materialism, and materialistic philosophy, being false, led men into false history.

There was no economic reason for the decay of the old servitude and the increase of personal position and free- dom in what had become the mass of the unfree. It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man — a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom. It was small property subject to servitudes, paying heavy dues to others ; but it was small property just the same, and it had struck permanent root.

Corresponding to this development in the agricultural world which formed nine-tenths of that society, was the development in the world of craftsmen and artisans and the life of the towns. There the Guild, binding groups

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of craftsmen together, limiting competition, fostering a corporate life, mirrored the arrangements of the village. The rules of the Christian Guild, and still more of its spirit, forbade the accumulation of wealth in a few hands — the eating up of the small man by the great. The work of the apprentice was indeed subject to exploitation by his master, but the apprentice became of right a master in his turn, and the carpenters, masons, clothiers and the rest at the end of the Dark Ages were thus organized throughout Christendom in self-sufficing and self- governing bodies, bound together by traditions not yet explicit as they later became, not yet generally codified as they later were, but of living force to preserve the proper livelihood of Christian men.*

Such was the effect of that process of “ annealing ” upon the agricultural mass of Society, which included, be it remembered, not only the descendants of the old slaves but the smaller free farmers as well. And such was its effect upon the craftsmen of the towns, and all those of the common people who lived otherwise than by tillage. There remained patches of actual servile condition ; there were cases still of men bought and sold, but they were highly exceptional and the exceptions soon died out.

The dues paid and the services rendered according to a fixed custom by the village communities to their lords supported those village lords in a class of their own ; and sundry other dues also supported another caste of Society — the clergy. The mass of feudal lords were small lords of one village or two or three at the most ; and an intermediate class had acquired through marriage and inheritance groups of villages, rendering them more wealthy, whale well above these were the few great regional fortunes which took dues from and governed whole districts.

* The aeedi of the European Guild were sown much earlier. The Guild ii Roman and there are parallels to it, of course, all over the world and m all ages. Nevertheless m its strongest and best form it is essentially an institution of the Middle Ages.

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These districts again were grouped loosely and by personal ties into kingships. The feudal class of lords, from the small village lord to the largest holders, had become now for generations since the siege of Christen- dom, not only politically the governing class but the fighting class of Society. Theirs was the business of defence and of expanding the territory of Christendom.

The society of Christendom undergoing its slow transformation during the pressure of this great “ siege,” as I have called it, developed three characteristics which stamped themselves upon the European nature till long after the siege-conaitions had disappeared. They remained stamped upon the form of Europe till the Renaissance and beyond. We still have relics of them today.

The first of these characteristics was a profound underlying sense of Christian unity and particularly of Western Christian unity : the unity of all those bound together by the Latin Mass and by the Western Patriarchate, at the head of which was the Bishop of Rome, the Pope.

The military power of the pagan Roman Empire had never achieved a moral unity of this kind. It had imposed a political unity and a certain pride in citizen- ship, but it did not provide that spiritual bond without which a society can never be really one. Today we think of unity in terms of independent states and races. Some are even so superficial as to think of unity in terms of a common language. But the prime factor of unity in any society, large or small, is for all the members of that society to hold the same philosophy, to put human affairs in the same order of importance, and to be agreed on the prime matters of right and wrong and of public worship.

The second characteristic of the siege was the develop- ment of a noble caste. There arose in men’s minds the conception of “ blood ” : a sort of mystical distinction betweer one kind of descent and another.

Men nave debated the origins of this strong feeling and usually come to erroneous conclusions thereon.

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There has, of course, been the non-rational or mystical conception of caste in any number of human societies from the remotest past. Sometimes these may have arisen from conquest, but more commonly from venera- tion for superiors. At some date before recorded history a religious feeling led to the worship of a particular clan or section of the community. There were even among the outer Germans, who had on this, as in most things, ideas less precise than their neighbours to the south and west, feelings that this or that family was sacred, so that the chieftain of the tribe could be taken from that family and no other. Such an arrangement can be found in others of the half-civilized outer fringe beyond the strict boundaries of the old Roman Empire.

But the feeling of rank which developed in Christendom during the Dark Ages and took very firm root had another source. It proceeded from leadership in war. The leaders of the loosely organized Christian forces which withstood the pressure of anti-Christian barbarism on the north and Mohammedan hatred on the south, were in the main the descendants of the old Roman land- owners, the possessors of the great country estates tilled by their slaves. These were the one wealthy and dominating class at the end of the direct government of the West from Rome. They became the natural chiefs of the bands drawn from their freemen and armed at their expense. These bands were levied either for local defence against the pagan invasions or for private war or for the formation of great hosts when such an agglomeration was necessary to meet a particular severe strain. Alfred of England, to give one example out of hundreds, levied a considerable force of this kind from the southern counties when he set out to prevent this part of Britain being wholly laid waste by the pagan pirates. He summoned, as we hear in the contempo- rary record, the men of the neighbouring counties, save those who, from one district, had fled oversea. This does not mean, of course, that Alfred summoned all the inhabitants of the counties near his standard when

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he had set it up in Penselwood, where Dorset and Somer- set meet. It means that he summoned what we call today the squires, the chief landholders, each followed by his small band of armed men.

The fighting class thus formed, grew, as the siege of Christendom proceeded, to regard itself as something special in Society. It was not only the richest class but it did the most arduous and perilous work for the com- munity, and there arose the conception of the armed mounted man as a being apart, superior of his nature to the rest of lay mankind. He was of the “ noblesse,” a man of “ race ” (which is the original meaning of the English word “ gentleman ”).

No doubt this half-religious feeling, this distinction of “ blood,” this separation of a leading class apart from the mass of the community, was reinforced by ancestral memories. The Gauls had a very strong feeling of the distinction between a nobility and the mass of the clan, as they also had a very strong feeling of the distinction between the man consecrated to religion and the layman. Gaul remained the centre and main area of Christendom during the Great Siege. The Gallic spirit and the Gallic race gave its tone to the society of all Western Europe in those days when Western Europe was only kept alive by the perpetual movements of armed forces mainly recruited from the area of what is today called France. But whatever other elements entered into the business, the main element was this : the prestige of the principal fighting men. That fighting class received dues from the villages, of which its families were the lords, and organized itself in a rough hierarchy, which we call feudalism.

That hierarchy was, as to its steps or ranks, principally distinguished by income. Your lord of one manor or village might receive in dues what we should call today £500 to £1,000 in a year. His wealthier neighbour, receiving aues from several manors, would be on the scale of anything from £5,000 to £20,000 a year. Then above these would come the great overlords, each of whom not only possessed many villages himself, making

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him richer than anyone else in the district, but also rights over public land which had formerly been the Treasury Land of the Roman emperors — all that lay outside the manorial system. The very highest of these great landed men, those who stood at the summit of the feudal pyramid, became in local power indistinguishable from monarchy. A Count of Flanders or of Anjou or a Duke of Normandy was supreme in his own district. He would owe feudal homage to the King of France. He would admit the titular sovereignty of the King of France, and on the very rare occasions when the King of France (himself chief feudal lord of the district around Paris) summoned a quasi-national effort under arms, the local ruler of Anjou and Normandy and the rest, was appealed to ; but he would only come of his own free will.

The third characteristic which the siege of Christendom produced during that annealment of Christian men was the almost imperceptibly slow emancipation of those who had been m the old pagan time, and remained for many generations afterwards, slaves. Of this gradual transformation whereby the slave who in the first centuries of Christian Europe could be bought and sold like any other chattel, turned later into the completely free peasant of modern times, there has already been mention. What we have to note here is the profundity of the social revolution thus effected. The old terms were used continuously for centuries. The very word “ serf ” which we write today with the special object of distinguishing a man who was not a slave, only constrained to certain fixed labour, possessed of property and of hereditary rights, and engaged for the most part upon labour the fruits of which he himself enjoyed, is merely the Latin word for slave , given a later form.

Nothing intentional was at work, no direct and explicit laws or edicts produced any one step in this very slow instinctive development of the pagan slave into the Christian peasant — a matter of a thousand years. Never- theless, the real agency at work is plain enough when one sees the thing on its largest lines. That agency was

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the religion which all men held in common, of whatever rank, whatever poverty, or whatever wealth. It had in the beginning of the process become more and more impossible morally to “ buy and sell Christian men.” The separation of families under the system of slavery was not consonant with the ethic to which converted Europe was bound. It was this, much more than any economic development, which effected the great change, and of all the changes which the Catholic spirit of Europe wrought during the pressure of the Great Siege, this was the most enduring.

It has so thoroughly recast the whole political and social conscience of Western European man that he has forgotten his servile origins. He is penetrated with the conception of citizenship spread over the whole com- munity. All his modem experiments take this for granted, from the sanest to the most extravagant.

But let this be noted : Even as we gradually trans- formed ourselves from slaves into freemen under the influence of the Catholic Faith, so in the loss of it we are beginning to tread the road downward again. With the decay of religion, that which none of the reformers dream of (as yet), but which is apparent by implication in all they do, the Servile State, Society based upon, and marked with the stamp of, slavery, is returning.

Let it be further noted that the long duration of this “ siege ” — during which Christendom, in its isolation and peril and suffering and pressure from without, had ceased to develop its already decayed material civilization, had lost the conception of universal codified law and lived by custom and tradition — produced by its very duration a certain spirit the opposite of that connected with our modem activities — but also with our modem unrest and danger of disruption.

It produced a spirit of Status, individuals and the classes of Society being bound one to another not by terminable contract as they are today, but by the conception that every man had his place and fixed duties which he had inherited and could hand on to his descendants. The

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serf paying his dues of labour and produce, the small free man who lived side by side with him in the village and was also bound by custom to certain dues, the lords of villages receiving their feudal incomes, the overlords above them, the craftsmen in the towns — all these took for granted each his position in an organized society which called from each man certain activities, but guaranteed subsistence and the family.

There was exploitation ; there was the institution of one man working for the profit of another ; but it worked by fixed rules and inheritance, not by com- petition ; the livelihood of those working was not in jeopardy, the revenues paid to superiors in that feudal society were known and fixed, the class distinctions were consecrated by the great length of time through which they had grown and by the fixity of the succession from generation to generation.

Christian society had become static — but static also means stable. It had become an organized thing the rules of whose life would remain a strong framework preserving the character of the whole and its shape through the coming expansion of energy and knowledge.

On account of this fixity, of this mass of traditional custom taken for granted in all men’s minds, but most of all on account of the universal accepted religion with its ubiquitous liturgy and philosophy explaining the nature and spiritual doom or beatitude of man, his immortality and his relation to the Divine — as to all these things at the end of the Dark Ages, the soul of Europe stood upon solid ground.

We are about to see it passing into a new phase of intense activity when it flowered into the true Middle Ages and established what was perhaps the highest point in the history of our race.

(B)

THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

We are discussing a civilization the highest and the best of which history has any record ; the civilization of Christendom. We have followed its strange birth, its rapid growth and strong organization, its triumph over the whole world, that is, its capture of the pagan Graeco- Roman Empire in which are rooted all the traditions of our culture and from which we all descend. For Christendom indeed, is no more than “ the Empire baptized ” — but that “ no more ” is of such prodigious magnitude that it is beyond all hyperbole. The conversion of the Empire and the consequences thereof form the capital event in the history of the world.

Since we are so discussing a particular civilization, how it was formed and established by its united philosophy of religion, and since we must regard that civilization as the supreme thing it was and is, we approach the climax of its manifestation with a certain awe. That climax followed on the great siege which Christendom had stood during the Dark Ages and had so successfully beaten off so far as the West, at least, was concerned. In the first generation of the Xlth century — say about 1020 to 1030 — when, the siege having been successfully raised, Christendom began to go forward sure of itself, burgeon- ing and putting forth its fresh powers, then was the beginning of the period during which our people, our culture were most themselves, when the effect of the religion which made us was wholly mature, complete, and victorious. It may best be called “ The High Middle Ages ” and it covers the great 300 years of the Xlth, Xllth, and XHIth centuries : that is from a little after the date 1000 until a little after the date 1300.

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The term “ Middle Ages,” like the term “ Dark Ages,” has been used very loosely and generally. We do well, therefore, to define that term. We have already defined what may properly be called the Dark Ages — the time during which Christendom was constantly under peril and pressure, when so much of material civilization was lost and when at the cost of continual and mortal struggle our fathers survived the attack of barbarism. This succeeding and central phase in our story, the Middle Ages, may be said to last until the Renaissance, the fall of Constantinople, the revolution in the arts and general culture, and the disaster of the Reformation, when what had so long been our united common heritage was broken up.

The whole of such a period would cover 500 years, from somewhat after the year 1000 to somewhat after the year 1500, and it is, indeed, to this long stretch of 500 years that the term “ Middle Ages ” is commonly applied. But we understand the thing much better if we dis- tinguish between the earlier and the later part.

The first 300 years, which, I say, may properly be called the true Middle Ages, because the virtues of medieval civilization were at their highest and its charac- teristics at their strongest and best, came to an end with the early XIVth century. The remaining 200 years, from the beginning at least of the Papal exile until the wild, confused revolt of Luther and the much more important anti-Catholic edifice of Calvin, have a very different savour. The mass of the XIVth and all the XVth century is a period in which external civilization is rising, but in which the soul of Christendom pro- gressively suffers. With that lamentable spiritual decline we will deal later. Here we are engaged upon the flowering of Christendom, the summit reaching up to the full development of the XHIth century : from 1200 to 1300.

Let not any man’s admiration of this, the chief achieve- ment of our race, be lessened or warped by the inevitable contrast between the present and the past. Manifestly,

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one period will have advantages which another period lacks, the better period will be less fortunate in many things than the worse period which succeeds it. The elements of a culture are always in process of change. But those who cannot feel the call of the true Middle Ages and their correspondence to all that is strongest in our blood, those who complain that they lacked amenities we now possess, forgetting how much we have also lost, have a poor comprehension of history. Were the most devoted modem man and the greatest admirer of that time to find himself put down suddenly upon the peak of the true Middle Ages, say the year 1270, he would miss very much that is necessary to him. He would be in an atmosphere which, however congenial to him, would be foreign. But it is the part of wisdom to mark the difference in quality between what has been lost and what has been gained. An example in one sentence may suffice : There were no potatoes ; hut then , also , there were no suicides.

We start, then, with that first generation of the Xlth century. The Scandinavian pirates who had attacked us over the North Sea had been converted. Much of their barbarism remained, but they would never more threaten destruction. They had become part of our culture.

The hordes, a mixture of ill defined types (many of them Slavonic), who had attacked the centre of Europe, were defeated and tamed, even the Mongols. Hungary itself, where the Mongols had fixed themselves, was already baptized, and the West was secure. The Mohammedan attack, indeed, had succeeded ; it had captured and was holding all that part of Christendom which had lain along the southern and eastern Mediterranean, and later it was to go further still. But in the West, at any rate, we had begun to press back even that formidable foe. For in northern Spain the reconquest of the peninsula had begun. Navarre had proved itself in policy worthy of independence, Aragon was founded, the beginnings of Castile had appeared. “ The March of the Ebro,” the

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Catalan forework, challenging the Mohammedan power at Saragossa, was permanently held.

The advance had begun.

It is well to take the great period by its three centuries : from 1000 to 1300. It is not, of course, exactly divided by each term of 100 years, but falls into three main divisions which, with some overlap, do roughly correspond to such an arrangement.

There is, first, what may be called the Xlth century, from this first generation, say 1020-1030 to the opening generation beyond the year 1100, which saw the initial success of the first great crusade.

The next period, also about 100 years, the Xllth century, which overlaps into the XHIth, gives us the establishment of nearly all our great institutions, the Parliaments, the Universities and the rest. It is the moment of the Plantagenet power in England and its rival, the newly strengthened kingdom of France. It gives us also the characteristic architecture of the Middle Ages, generally called the Gothic — the pointed arch, the type of the great remaining cathedrals of the period.

The greatest century of all follows, the XHIth, which we may date from the Battle of Muret, or the decisive Christian victory of Navas in Spain, or, a minor matter, from Magna Charta* in England. This century is the century of the great medieval characters — of the Friars — that is of St. Dominic and St. Francis — the summit of medieval philosophy (the work of St. Thomas Aquinas), the summit of medieval literature, for, though the Divine Comedy appears after 1300, its supreme poet belongs to the last generation of that time.

To begin with the Xlth century.

We were still emerging from darkness. There was still much that was half barbaric about our society. Look at the imperfect sculpture, the crude ornament which still is attempted on the strong capitals of the Romanesque,

* " Magna CAarta ” 11 the age-long, traditional pronunciation of thii document, which, though corrupt, ihould be retained. The more correct " Magna Carta ” is a modern innovation.

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or read the splendid but unpolished epic, The Song of Roland, or mark the simplicity of strategy and tactics.

The first sign of the coming change was the further centralization of power in the Church and the beginning of a new challenge to the encroachments of lay govern- ment. The Church is not only centralized, but its discipline of celibacy is strengthened and perfected. The Papacy, which in the West was not only the symbol but, in a fashion, the cause of unity, took on such new vigour that its enemies have called it a change in character. This it was not. It was a strengthening and development without which we should never have had the high civilization that was to follow.

The spirit that presided over this change was that of a great Benedictine abbey, the abbey of Cluny. The Cluniac spirit informed the whole, and Cluny sent out that very great man with whose name the separation of the Papacy and the Church in general from lay control will always be bound up — Hildebrand of Tuscany.

Here a caution must be issued against a popular myth appearing in a host of textbooks, most typically, perhaps, in the monograph of Bryce on the Holy Roman Empire : the myth that the Saxon Emperors invading Italy from the Northern Germanies originated the regeneration of Papal power.

They did nothing of the kind. It is true that, at the end of the Dark Ages, the institution of the Papacy had gone through a bad period ; great families had captured it to their own profit ; immature members of them and unworthy members had occupied the central see, and reform was due. But the action of the Saxon Emperors had not for its main motive, reform ; it had for its main motive the thrusting back of Byzantine power. The Roman families who seized the Chair of Peter were concerned quite as much as the Saxon Emperors to keep out the East.

The Emperor of Constantinople, who had never really accepted the imperial title in the West, did what he could to maintain his hold upon Italy and still dreamed

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of being the civil head of all Christendom, with Popes to be in the long ran as subservient to him as were the metropolitans of New Rome on the Bosphorus. It was against this influence that the Saxon Emperors moved, and, had they succeeded, they would have made the Papacy a German thing. The successor of St. Peter would have been nominated by the German Kings, and the lay power would have reasserted itself more than ever. From that the great Hildebrandine Reform saved us. The thing was not done without violent struggle. Hildebrand himself, when, from being the chief adviser of the Papacy, he had become Pope (St. Gregory VII), died under the impression of defeat. Everyone knows the famous cry, “ I have loved justice and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile.” In reality, St. Gregory had won; for there came in to support the newly invigorated Papacy the strength of the Normans.

The coming of the Norman state and soldiery is a peculiar episode standing at the origins of the true Middle Ages and colouring them for three generations. Having had this strong effect, the special Norman character disappears.

What made this new “ Norman energy,” the second characteristic of the opening Xlth century and the founding of the true Middle Ages ? Why, having arisen, did it disappear so soon ?

It is in full activity before the middle of the century when the Duke of Normandy, Robert the Devil, left his throne to that illegitimate son of his who was to become so famous, William of Falaise. It was at its height when this same William of Falaise established his claim to the throne of England at Hastings ; it continued under Bohemond during all the first Crusade, then almost suddenly in the next lifetime it is gone.

The question of how this strange thing arose, why it was so limited in time, and the rest, certainly cannot be fully answered. One suggestion is that, just as a small proportion of carbon turns iron into steel, so some small proportion of Scandinavian northern blood mixing with

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the Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonnese accounts for the short-lived Norman race and power. It may be so.

We have seen how the Second Lyonnese had been given by the Emperor to the command of a Scandinavian pirate force which had harried it a century before during the Dark Ages, and the chief fighting men of that Scandinavian bodv had intermarried with the lords of the Cotentin and the lower Seine valley. That ad- mixture of blood may have had in the long run some effect.

At any rate, the thing happened. Men filled with the spirit of adventure, singularly constructive, astute organ- izers as well as great soldiers, came from Normandy for three generations. A small body of such, sprung from a family of middle nobles near the western coast of the Norman province, set out to try their fortunes in South Italy, which had been harried by the Mohammedans and which the Byzantines, who claimed to be the rightful government there, ill defended. These adventurers hired themselves out and took the risks of battle against the Mohammedans, as also against the dwindling Byzantine power. They married the local heiresses ; they recruited larger and larger forces from the local south Italian and Sicilian inhabitants as their successes increased ; they joined forces with the Papacy, supporting it against the Germans and against tne Greeks, They ended by holding from the Papacy as feudal kings Sicilian Naples and what had been the Greek cities and territories in Italy south of the Papal States. Their government became a model of precision, accuracy, and centralized power, and it was a younger son of that same now royal family who became the chief figure of the First Crusade.

While this vigorous thrust was going forward (the Norman occupation of power in South Italy and Sicily and the later establishment of a Norman dynasty in England), the local monarchies, long existing in name, were beginning to gather power. Those winch sprang from the valleys of the Pyrenees and the unconquered fringe of northern Spain grew powerful through gradual success over the Mohammedan. Provence exhibited a

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separate life, and the House that was the feudal head of all the great French districts, nominally superior to the local rulers of Normandy and Brittany, Flanders, Aquitaine and the rest, the House of Paris (it had long borne title “ Kings of France ”) gave signs of the strength which it was to increase so greatly in the next generation.

Yet another mark of the new energy was what has been finely called “ The Awakening of the Great Curiosity.” (The phrase is Michelet’s.) It was an intellectual move- ment not without peril. It engendered the Albigensian movement, the first of the great heresies which were to endanger our reinvigorated Christendom, but it was a mark of superabundant life. For the first time since the disastrous Mohammedan enthusiasm, the mysteries of religion were attacked, but this time from within.

The central rite, the vital liturgy of Christendom, the pivot, as it were, of all the Faith in action, the Blessed Sacrament, was challenged. The challenge is associated with the name of a bleric of north France, a native of Tours, one Berengarius. He first began to rationalize that which Mohammed in his violent simplification of religion had abandoned altogether. The new heretical effort did not abandon the Real Presence, but it attempted to modify the doctrine on rationalist lines.

The great and successful opponent of Berengarius, Lanfranc, the mighty Italian who was the right hand of William the Conqueror in England, was Archbishop of Canterbury and the champion of the Sacrament of the Altar. It was from this controversy that arose, it would seem, what has become one of the characteristic gestures in the liturgy of the Western Church and of the Latin Mass : the Elevation. Lanfranc originated a habit of pausing for a moment over the Host immediately after Consecration and raising it slightly before his face to adore it. From this, it is believed, the Elevation in its later form grew.

At the very end of this first division of our period, the Xlth century, came the most famous manifestation of its young, exuberant power, the Crusades. A new wave of

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Turkish barbarism had made itself master of the Near East, including the holy places. Pilgrimage thither, which, in spite of the Mohammedan power, had been continuous, grew difficult. A great Turkish victory had imperilled the Greek Christian culture and come to the gates of Constantinople itself. The reaction to all this had been the outpouring of crusaders by the hundred thousand at the call of the Pope, Urban II, who carried on the tradition and the work of Hildebrand. Several armies on the scale of 80,000 men each, were gathering. When the final strength was reached, something like a third of a million men accompanied by perhaps as many again of half-armed or unarmed pilgrims, crossed the ruined and deserted land of Asia Minor, took Antioch,

f ressed through Syria, and ultimately stormed Jerusalem, t was Gibbon’s “ World’s Debate ” : The Crusade.

It was in the last year of the century, July 15, 1099, that the Crusaders had mastered Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre and had established their Christian Latin Kingdom, almost cutting the Mohammedan world in two. All these outbursts, the new vigour, the reform of the Church, the Norman adventures, the Crusades, in- augurate the strength of the Middle Ages and fill the Xlth century with their strength and storm.

The Xllth century, the second stage of this rapid advance into the fullness of the high medieval culture, is the century of the main developments. Institutions of which the seeds had been sown generations before, and which had begun to pierce ground in the Xlth century, during the Xllth became vigorous plants, many of which have endured to this day.

It is the century of the Parliaments, that is, of assemblies representing every class of the community and gathering under the head of the community, the King, in order to arrange what voluntary aid could be given to him for public purposes under some special strain, usually of war. For it must be remembered that there were no taxes as yet in the medieval state. The king was supposed to administer out of the income with

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which the Crown was endowed, that is, out of his own income, out of the dues he got from his private pos- sessions and from the public land. When something more was exceptionally needed, he had to ask for it from his subjects as a favour and a grant. He could not impose it. Hence Parliaments.

The first of these bodies arose in the little Christian states of the Pyrenees, at that time the most vital provinces of Christendom, because they had borne the brunt of the battle against the Mohammedan. The earliest known and recorded Parliament of Europe is to be found right back in the Xlth century : the Parliament of Huesca, well before the Norman Conquest of England. From the Pyrenees the institution spread northward and even appears fully formed at last in England, usually the latest province of the West to receive any new institution. There was no full Parliament in England until the latter part of the XHIth century.

Another influence spreading with the Xllth century was vernacular literature. There had always been poems and pious writings in the tongue of the populace, side by- side with the main Latin language of the West in which all important records and dates were set down. These popular dialects, which we call today “ vernacular,” were especially lively in Britain, where there was a whole Anglo-Saxon literature that did not die out till a lifetime after the Norman Conquest. In the bulk of Christen- dom, the vernacular literature begins to mark in this Xllth century, having already appeared two lifetimes before in epic songs. The Xllth century also saw, as I have said, a revolution in architecture. It produced the pointed arch, the ogive, a feature characteristic of all Western Christendom henceforward. This arose in the district of Paris, spread thence throughout France and England, from the Valley of the Rhine to northern Spain, supplanting the ola round arch (Romanesque) of the Dark Ages.

It is with the Xllth century that you get a new en- thusiasm for the higher learning and its debates. The

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great schools begin to gather in Italy and in Gaul, and in Spain and in the Rhine valleys and in Europe. They become the universities of which Paris was perhaps the most famous. It is the leaders of thought therein and the great debates between them, such as the conflict between Abelard and St. Bernard, which give life to the foundation of this new thing. Then again the Xllth century shows the first beginnings, very vague and tentative, not yet fully conscious, of national units in Christendom following the ruling houses. It is the moment of the Plantagenets, the men who were not only independent kings of England, but virtually independent rulers of half France, rivals to the French lungs who were in feudal theory their overlords. No man in Europe as yet thought of himself in terms of nationality. A man thought of himself in terms of holding from this or that lord, ultimately from this or that great overlord. But that local spirit which was later on to make the nations of Europe, had already begun to arise in the greater part of united Christendom.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the Xllth century was the continued growth of the Papal power. It had challenged those lay encroachments which had marked the Dark Ages. It had, as we have seen, challenged the German tutelage of the Roman See, and now in the next lifetime, it was affirming with all its strength the doctrine of Church investiture.

In no field was the struggle more violent. The old right of the Church to govern itself, to consecrate its own officers, to form a completely free, self-governing cor- poration coincident with Christendom was offended by the claim to clerical power of local kings, and especially of the chief civil power, the Emperor, ultimate ruler over North Italy and the Germanies. The Papacy maintained that, though great bishops and abbots were feudal lords, the Church and the Church alone could decide upon their office. Only the Pope could invest the candidate bishop with his office. But, all society having become feudal, great bishoprics and abbacies

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were lords over masses of lay dues, and, what is more, were liable for armed forces when the king issued a summons for such. Therefore, it seemed essential that the king should invest the bishops also. In the end there was a compromise. The spiritual power invested the candidates with the spiritual revenues of their sees or abbeys ; the lay power invested them with their lay revenue. In practice, the appointment as well as the investiture of these powerful officials mainly fell to the lay government, but they were not and could not be appointed without the consent of the Papacy as well. And here as in everything else, the new tie made for the strengthening of the See of Rome.

With the institutions in the Middle Ages thus rapidly growing, the whole of its life becoming more and more secure, more confident of its own strength and order, we reach after the year 1 200 — that is, in the Xlllth century — the flowering time of our race.

The Xlllth century was that moment in which the high Middle Ages reached their summit. It was that moment in which the Catholic culture came, in the civic sense of the word “ culture,” to maturity. It was probably the supreme moment of our blood, at any rate one of the very greatest moments. Never had we had such a well- founded society before, never have we since had any society so well founded or so much concerned with justice. A proof, if proof were needed, of the greatness of that time is the scale of the chief public characters, already named : St. Louis the King, Ferdinand of Castile ; St. Dominic and St. Francis, with their new orders of friars ; Edward I of England ; and, in philosophy, which determines all, the towering name of St. Thomas Aquinas. He established during that great time a body of co- ordinated doctrine and philosophy which no one had yet possessed. The scale of his work is on a par with its cultural value. He seemed to have put his seal upon the civilization which he adorned, and, through his establishment of right reason in philosophy, his marriage of Catholicism with the Aristotelian wisdom, to have set

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up a structure that would endure for ever and give a norm to our civilization.

It was not destined to establish us in so much peace. We were fated to continue the perpetual changes of Europe. The XHIth century, which felt itself to be (as it was) the prime moment of our blood, suffered from our common mortality, and, in the first years of the XIVth century a decline had begun. Yet had we some right to boast of a spiritual and political security which was established apparently for ever, and of a Christian civilization which should endure indefinitely. The last great effort to destroy Christian society from within, the Albigensian movement, had been crushed and that power which was the main external enemy to the spirit of the Church in Europe, the genius of Frederick II, the Emperor, “ The Marvel of the World ” ( Stupor Mundt) was also defeated.

That century did, indeed, commit at its outset one grievous blunder, the consequences of which we still feel in the apparent impossibility of reconciling the Greek Church with the Latin and of achieving the unity of both under the Papacy. This heavy blunder was the expedition wrongly called the Fourth Crusade. It set out nominally in aid of Constantinople and for the recovery of the Holy Land, which had been lost to the Turks. From such a purpose, the true tradition of all the Crusades, it was deflected by the government of Venice, without which the Crusade could have had no transports. Constantinople owed money to the Venetian Repuolic, which was the banking state of the day. To recover that debt, Venice used the crusading army, bringing it up the Bosphorus against the Imperial City. The Western or Latin Christians won, they forced the Latin liturgy upon shrines of the Greek capital, saying a Latin Mass on the altar of St. Sophia itself, so threatening the Greek rite. But they had wounded the Greek-speaking and Greek-worshipping world of the Christian East as deeply as a wound could pierce. There is a traditional sentence in which that violently and justly

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roused animosity expressed itself : “ Better a devil on the altar of St. Sophia than a Roman Cardinal pontificating there.”

The so-called Fourth Crusade only imposed the Latin Mass and a Latin government precariously. The experi- ment did not last a lifetime. All had reverted to Greek usage and liturgy well before the end of the century ; but the injustice had been committed, hatred had been planted in a fiercer form than ever before between Constantinople and Europe, and the hopes of unity were destroyed, apparently for ever. There was, indeed, official effort at unity in the very last mortal crisis when the Imperial City on the Bosphorus was on the point of falling for ever to the Turk. That formal reconciliation between the Eastern and the Western churches is pompously recorded on the very stones of Florence as though it were immutable. But all that was really recorded was the epitaph of united Christendom.

In spite of that one great blunder, however, the XHIth century was what I have called it, a promise of permanent Christian order through justice. It founded a conception of the State which seemed unshakable : — All society arranged by status, every man in his place and knowing his place, wealth rendered less odious and even noble by stability and long succession, the well divided property of the now almost free peasantry and the fully free crafts- man of the towns guaranteed by guild and village custom, a hierarchy of functions strictly bound in one feudal scheme satisfactory to the political conscience of man, and all that ordered social body guaranteed by the vigorous faith whose officials, the clergy, came from every source in society, enjoyed a moral authority they were not later to know, and performed their mighty function adequately and in full order.

Great monuments of the time remain with us, testifying to its strength and solidity, but still more to that active sense of beauty which is one aspect of the divine. The XUIth century was the type of our society to which men in their later distresses turned, to which, after all our

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modern wrongheadedness, disasters are compelling ns to turn again today. It is, of course, a folly to see perfection in any human phase. The XHIth century suffered from the Fall of Man as does the XXth, and as will every other generation ; but it came nearer to the rule of justice on earth than anything effected before or since. It was doomed in the time that was coming, for, though its philosophy was immortal, its instruments being human were riddled with mortality. Even that shining spirit grew old and began to fall. With that failure we shall

(c)

THE DECLINE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

This summit of the medieval culture, the time when Europe was most herself, and when our race was probably at its happiest, was doomed to decline. The most glorious of those three centuries, the XHIth, was also the last. Shortly after the year 1300 the change begins. It was a tragic change in spite of the world in which it took place, for it was the loss of that which had been our joy and nearest our perfection . The decline lasts through two centuries, from the beginning of the XIVth to the beginning of the XVIth, and ends in the shipwreck of the Reformation.

As in the rise of Christendom there was a spiritual process going on side by side with the material one, so also in the decline of Christendom after the year 1300. But the two things were exactly contrasted ; in the rise of Christendom, as we have seen, there was a decline of material power ; the material side of civilization grew coarser and less efficient ; Europe slipped down into the Dark Ages in the generations preceding the end of the Vth century ; but meanwhile there was spiritual advance, the founding and consolidating of the Christian world, the conversion of the old Roman Empire and the appear- ance for the first time in the story of our people of a united, an enthusiastically accepted religion.

In the second, contrasted, period, the end of the Middle Ages, you have a material advance, an increasing knowledge of the world both by discovery and through the sciences (especially towards the end) ; you have an increase in the arts, painting especially takes on a new form altogether and enters a glory of its own which increases for generations ; architecture grows more 93

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refined, though at last more fantastic ; sculpture becomes more glorious and never did it reach a higher level than just when the Middle Ages were dying. But with all this went a spiritual decline which at last worked like a mortal disease in the heart of Christendom and led us to the chaos of the Reformation.

From that blow Christendom never fully recovered. Something was saved, as we know ; the Catholic Church, threatened with extinction, survived and maintained a great part of its jurisdiction over most of what had been unitea Christendom, but a full, unquestioned, general religious culture Europe was not to know again.

The sequence which this spiritual decline followed is marked by various characters, of which five are the most important.

(1) Unity, the very principle of life for Christendom — unity of doctrine and unity of discipline and organiza- tion in the field of religion — was shaken.

(2) The organic structure of the Catholic Church was weakened as a consequence, and at the same time begins, as it were, to “ ossify,” to grow stiff and dead.

(3) The old living restraints which preserved the body of Christendom from decay and dissolution become more and more mechanical ; authority finds itself depending more and more upon force and less and less upon agreement.

(4) Doubts and extravagances, two bad symptoms in any religious scheme, expand throughout the body of Christendom : doubts not only on doctrine, but also on the titles to authority; extravagances in legends and usages.

(5) The period is marked (especially towards the end) by two complementary evils, necessarily following upon the over-reliance of authority upon force. It is marked by the evil of unworthy officers to preside over and conduct the religion of Christendom, and it is marked by the evil of increasing efforts of Churchmen to cure by violence the bad consequences produced by their own insufficiency ; so that at last in the XVth century and

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early XVIth you get sometliing like a religious reign of terror which is bound to exhaust itself and to break down.

All this sounds evil enough, and evil indeed it was, but we must not exaggerate. The deterioration and worsen- ing of religion as the Middle Ages closed, has, since the Reformation, been much exaggerated by the permanent enemies of the Catholic Church, and even more by those who without a deliberate motive of hostility, are affected by ignorance and by separation from Catholic tradition.

There was plenty of holy living ; there was the full practice of the Faith even m the worst moments at the very death of the Middle Ages ; there was a large body of vital tradition which came at last to save our society after the great quarrel at the close of the Middle Ages had all but destroyed it. Moreover, while this spiritual decline was going on, Europe was filled with an increasing vitality. Men were not only perpetually learning new things and glorying in discovery, but were filled, especially towards the end of the period, with a zest for adventure. There was something creative about the air in which the Middle Ages came to an end ; but the forces at work produced nothing permanent. They did not create, as the last of the Pagan Empire had created, a Thing.

Christendom was shaken and almost dissolved, but so far from a new inheritance taking its place, divisions among men increased, until we reach the perilous extreme in which we stand today, when our civilization is possessed of greater powers over nature than ever it had before, and yet seems bent on its own destruction.

These five main processes of spiritual decline must be examined in a little more detail if we are to understand them.

I say that in the first place unity was shaken, and that was the underlying grievous thing from which all other evils proceeded. Paradoxically, unity was the more shaken because it had been the more thoroughly taken for granted throughout the world ; nor was it until disunion had done its full work that men woke up tardily to the vital necessity of union.

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The centre and sustenance of Christian unity was the authority of the Apostolic See, and the threat to unity appears precisely there.

In the high Middle Ages there had been that struggle between the Papacy and the lay power, culminating in the life-and-death conflict between Frederick II and the Pope, who gradually got the better of that great Italian’s * scepticism and usurpation of spiritual power.

From this conflict the Papacy emerged victorious. The danger of the Pope’s becoming a mere servant of the lay power and of the Emperor, with Germany and Italy behind him, overshadowing and rendering sub- servient the Christian body of the Latin West (as the Eastern Empire had overshadowed and rendered subservient the Greek East), was over. But there did not follow, as there promised to follow, a long period of equal balance between the central spiritual Papal power and the powers of the Western Princes — the Bangs of England, France, and the rising monarchs of Spain. What followed was the capture of the Papal See by the French monarchy. It had been rescued from becoming an Imperial thing; it became a French thing.

The Popes left Rome, they settled in the town of Avignon which, though not feudally subject to the French King at Paris, was fully in the French culture. For seventy years, that is, the full lifetime of a man, Rome was deserted. A new Papal court, developing a spirit of intricate finance, appeared upon the Rhone, and one after another the Popes at Avignon were chosen from men of French birth and speech.

That state of affairs, the central spiritual authority of Christendom captured by one province of Christendom, could not endure. Nor did it. Rival Popes were set up and the Princes of Europe divided their allegiance between one claimant and another.

When two national forces were at war, one would

* Part Italian in blood, wholly Italian in birth, upbringing, formation in youth, mam reudence in maturity and native language. One of the ear licit Italian poeti.

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follow the Pope at Avignon and the other would deny that Pope’s authority and accept the authority of an anti-Pope. The scandal was not only enormous, but profound. It went to the roots of Christendom ; for it must be remembered that all the while the Papal office was regarded as supreme, as being both the heart and the head of Christian society, although men were fighting as to who might properly claim it and although it seemed to have lost the principle of identity. This turmoil has been called “The Great Schism of the West.” When at last it was healed and one Pope, accepted by all Christendom, mounted that throne under the title of Martin V, the Papacy was re-established indeed in unity, but had most heavily lost in prestige. The Popes were again in Rome, but in peril of becoming mere Italian Princes. ✓

All this was the first shaking of unity ; the second was the growth of national consciousness.

This new element was not for generations to reach a level in which the ultimate unity of Christendom was forgotten, but it continued to rise, and with every step in the rise of national feeling from obscure half conscious origins to the fierce rivalries at the end of the Middle Ages, the unity of Christendom weakened. The Churches themselves took on a national colour ; the local hierarchies were not only the creatures of the Princes, but became bodies separate, not of course in doctrine and discipline, but in social habit, as indeed they have since remained, even where unity has been preserved.

I have said that in the second place the organic structure of religion weakened through a sort of ossifica- tion. By a simile taken from the decline of the human body one might compare the process to the hardening of the arteries : that arterio-sclerosis which is the characteristic mark of age in a living body. You see this in three of its two main effects ; in the growth of superstitions, in the warping of history through legends, and, much more serious, in the attitude taken towards the revenues and endowments of religion.

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Superstition did not intrench on doctrine. Many write as though it had done so ; but those who thus write, write bad history. Doctrine remained clear and distinct and well founded throughout ; but the spirit of superstition overlay it. For instance, the doctrine of the Invocation of Saints is clear ; but towards the end of the Middle Ages you get men robbing one shrine in order to enrich another. The doctrine of the use of Masses is clear, and especially their use for the benefit of the souls in Purgatory ; but the superstition that a Mass in this place was efficacious, and in that was not — the superstition which confuses mechanical repetition with spiritual force grew as the Middle Ages declined.

The strongest example of the thing is also the best known, because it was the immediate occasion of the final catastrophe ; I mean the attitude towards Indulgences.

The defined doctrine is perfectly clear. The authorities of the Church can ascribe the spiritual advantages earned by holy men and women as a sort of fund or surplus for the benefit of others ; thus is an indulgence granted. Towards the end of the Middle Ages in popular practice the definition was forgotten, and indulgences, with too many people, turned into something like a mechanical service. Where they could be granted by the giving of alms or money for a pious purpose, such as church- building, too many men thought of them as spiritual benefits that could be bought as medicines can be bought.

Side by side with this went the parallel evil of false history.

A legend is essentially a parable : a story told not as a true historical thing, but as a symbol. Legends were of the utmost value through the beauty with which they were clothed, and even of value through their humour ; but they did harm instead of good when they began to be taken as historical realities. And men were often more attached to a local legend which gave them a false idea of their own past than to the general truths of religion. Neither a measure of superstition nor a measure of legend mistaken for truth is mortal, but an excess of either can

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be mortal ; because men reacting against such excesses will react against the whole body of religion. We know how, after the great quarrel against the Church as a whole had broken out, a vast mass of true history came to be treated as legendary, and a vast mass of essential doctrine and practice came to be treated as superstitions through reaction against the extravagances of an earlier time.

But, as I have said, the worst symptom of all was the way in which Church endowment came to be treated as the Middle Ages drew to a close. The religion of Christendom which had slowly made our civilization until it had culminated in the brilliant climax of the High Middle Ages, had been from the beginning endowed. Even when the Catholic Church was no more than an unpopular, though vigorous, half-concealed society within the old Pagan Empire it had had a regular organization of funds which, though the civil authorities did not then approve of the Church, were protected by law. It has always been an instinct of the Church to guard its life by economic independence.

When Catholicism became the accepted and universal religion, endowments were largely increased and estab- lished. There was a revenue for each diocese, of course, supporting the Bishop and his activities, and a revenue for the parishes as they were formed ; and these endow- ments were fixed in shape of rents from land. There were also dues payable, tithes of produce from the fields. The monasteries were endowed with land by pious foundation or the contributions of their original members.

As the Christian centuries proceeded this accumulation of landed wealth in the hands of the Church got greater and greater ; hospitals were endowed under Church patronage, so were all places of education — the local schools, and later the universities and their colleges. To every clerical function, direct or indirect — to a prebend, a canonry, a village presbytery, a monastery, a foundation for Masses, a hospital, a school, etc. — there was its own fixed revenue coming in from the dues paid upon land

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by those who held it of the lord of the land. The lord was in this case the clerical unit concerned, the see or prebend or college or monastery or what not. By the end of the Middle Ages through this perpetual accumula- tion (from which there was very little leakage) the totals had grown enormous.

It is commonly said that one-third of the wealth of Europe was thus clerical. The phrase is ambiguous, for the total wealth of a country includes the livelihood of everybody in it ; what was really meant was that one- third of the surplus values or rents and dues went to Church endowments of one kind and another (including education, hospitals, certain rest-houses on the great roads of travel, etc.) and that only the remaining two- thirds went as revenues to lay lords of all kinds. Possibly that popular estimate is exaggerated ; possibly even at the very end of the Middle Ages (say in the year 1500), the total surplus values in clerical hands was not more than a quarter of the whole. But even that was a formidable proportion to be set aside for the support of men who were but a small minority in the State, though a minority who during all their useful periods were carrying out vast and essential public functions, including half the legal work and all the education.

Now the characteristic corruption at the end of the Middle Ages was that these endowments came to be treated as mere sources of private income. They had been intended as means for the support of that active, useful and necessary soul of society, the Church. But the means came to be taken for the end, and they were more and more treated as we treat stocks and shares and bonds today.

Men invested in Church endowments. A man would buy a prebend for a child of his, and virtually buy an abbacy or the superiorship of a nunnery, which carried with it a large endowment, for his daughter. A Bishopric would be given by a king to a favourite or an official by way of providing him with an income.

Again, the man enjoying the revenues of, say, a

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Bishopric, would not be content with that, but would hold at the same time another Bishopric, or even perhaps two or three, keeping the revenues for himself and paying a much lesser sum to a subordinate : “ farming out ” the Church revenues in this fashion. Worse still, it became quite common for some great abbey to be given to a layman in commendam. This thoroughly irreligious system became in some countries (such as Scotland) almost universal. What had been in the past a great Benedictine abbey with, say, twenty thousand pounds a year of revenue, would be handed over to the bastard of a king or any other favourite who would put in a paid agent to act as abbot, while he himself kept the bulk of the revenue under the legal fiction that he was the “ guardian ” of the establishment. In general, all over Christendom men saw these vast sums which had been set aside for the proper conduct of the Church, for alms to the poor, for education, medicine, etc., used as private fortunes, and often so used not even by clerics, but by laymen.

Here again we must not exaggerate ; the evil was very- great and it was everywhere, but it was not universal. The great bulk of the Church’s income still continued to be used for the right purposes ; for the conduct of the liturgy, the upkeep of the churches, colleges, hospitals, schools, etc. But towards the end of the Middle Ages men had grown used to the scandal of religious or quasi- religious endowment being thought of as so much private revenue to be used indifferently for the right purposes or the wrong. It may be imagined how increasingly the mass of men (who are poor and to whom the Church should act as succour, guardian and guide) resented the abuse. Their resentment was a chief cause of the explosion that followed.

Another step in the process of disintegration was the growth of doubt ; disturbance and uncertainty on what had once been certainly held doctrines, believed in by all Society. New physical discovery had much to do with the spread of this spirit ; even geographical

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discovery, which began to expand as the Middle Ages declined, helped to disturb men’s minds on the nature of the universe, and therefore on doctrine ; while corrup- tion among the clergy disturbed men’s minds on the validity of the Sacraments. It began to be maintained that a Sacrament was not valid unless the Churchman administering it was in the state of grace. It was but a step from this to saying that the sacramental power of the clergy was an illusion. That was at the back of the movement with which in England the name of Wvcliffe is connected.

Especially did doubts upon the Real Presence grow, until they spread to great masses of the populace. A sort of universal tendency to heresy was “ in the air ” as the Middle Ages proceeded to their close ; and side by side with it there went what seems to be the universal accompaniment of doubt, illusion. We have mentioned the abuse of indulgences. The visiting and cultus of relics, coupled with payments of alms, perilously ap- proadied in the popular mind the conception of mere purchase : the buying and selling of spiritual power. A vast extension of Masses said for the dead got en- tangled with these extravagant ideas. Meanwhile the growth of scholarship and the critical spirit, exploding legends and superstitions on every side, continued to weaken the structure of religion.

An excellent example of this was the “ Donation of Constantine.” There is no doubt that Constantine in moving the capital of the Empire to Byzantium left in the West great political powers to the Bishop of Rome; but a document which purported to confirm special powers to the Pope under the hand of the Emperor and known as the “ Donation ” was quoted as genuine, though marked by fantastic fables. The “ Donation ” was not the foundation of the Papal temporal power, but it had been used in confirmation of it, so that when it was proved to be legendary the respect for the Papacy was shaken.

The last feature of the decline was that which has stood

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out vividly in the mind of posterity more than any other ; to this day the enemies of the Catholic Church em- phasize it more violently than anything else. It was this : As moral authority weakened, mechanical restraint strengthened.

It is always so. The use of force, punishment, threat and fear are necessary for the keeping of order and the maintenance of right laws in action. But in a healthy state of affairs much the greater part in the strength of authority is moral. Men obey because they think they ought to obey ; because they feel that the authority which governs them has a right to do so. As moral authority weakens, those who exercise authority tend to fall back upon physical restraint, punishment, and the irrational fear of consequences as a method of administra- tion. That is what happened towards the end of the Middle Ages. Force alone was used against heresy in every form, and not only against heresy but even against grumblings at the powers of the clergy.

We have said with little exaggeration that the end of the Middle Ages was a “ religious reign of terror.” In the older and simpler days capital punishment seemed a natural consequence of heresy because heresy was an attempt to break up that Christian society by which all men lived. It was at once a treason and a murder, and the people themselves were ready to impose capital punish- ment if the authorities were slack, just as today men will take the law into their own hands by lynching if they think that justice will not be done in a matter where they feel strongly. But later on, in the efforts to maintain spiritual authority, everywhere attacked and losing its moral sanctions, the officers of the Church fell back with increasing severity and frequency upon restraint by fear.

The burning of people alive as a punishment was a thing of very old establishment, dating back for more than a thousand years right into the Roman Empire.* It was a civil punishment only occasionally used, but none

* For instance • Julian the Apostate burnt alive officials who had refused to betray the legitimate emperor, his rival

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the less familiar to men’s minds. It was attached to certain heinous crimes quite apart from religion, for instance, coining — that is, the making of false money. But towards the end of the Middle Ages its use became extravagant and the spirit of it continued long after the Reformation, as for instance its use against witchcraft, and against those who in Spain were conspiring against the State. This evil, the association of violence and horrible punishment with the maintenance of orthodoxy, grew rapidlv throughout the end of the decline ; and nothing did more to provoke the violent outburst to follow, in which the unity of Christendom was broken asunder.

Let us end by considering, in a critical spirit applied to document and tradition, the probable causes of that general spiritual decline, accompanied as it was by steady advance in knowledge and mastery over the material world.

It is always very difficult to ferret out the causes of any great social movement ; because its roots lie deep and hidden, stretching far into the past ; and with all that, are invariably complicated and entangled. But it may fairly be said that the main cause of the decline was old age ; mortality. Any human institution being administered by mortals is in peril continually of that fate.

The Church itself was regarded (and will continue to be regarded by its adherents) as immortal, but its ad- ministration is subject to perpetual threat of mortality, that is, of corruption and weakness tending to extinction. In vigorous periods the tendency is as strong as in periods of weakness ; only, in vigorous periods, it is countered by perpetual watchfulness and readiness to reform, whereas when the soul of Society is sick the counteraction weakens. In the high Middle Ages the tendency to all that would weaken Christendom was vigorously coun- tered ; in the later Middle Ages it was allowed to grow and given greater and greater play, and was combated bjr mechanical means of repression, rather than by vigorous spiritual self-examination and self-discipline.

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i°S

Next we find as a cause the disintegrating effect of rapid discovery, especially towards the end of the process. When the spiritual life is vigorous it can deal with, absorb, digest, no matter what novel truth. Thus the coming of a restored Greek philosophy and some measure of Greek learning upon Western Christendom of the Xllth century was a disturbance due to discovery, to the expansion of what may be called in the largest sense of the word “ science.” It proffered an example of what we find successively throughout every period of human expansion, the conflict between religion and science ; that is, between spiritual concepts and the clothing thereof in particular forms which prove untenable under the light of further knowledge. The true Middle Ages dealt strongly with the new knowledge, digested it, incorporated it ; in the high climax of that civilization St. Thomas became the exponent of Aristotle and married his philosophy to the theology of the Church Universal. But with the later Middle Ages the power thus to digest declined.

As the voyages of discovery, begun with the XIVth century, expanded men’s knowledge of the world in which they lived, that expansion of knowledge disturbed their fixed habits of thought upon the universe ; so did each new invention as applied to travel and to the arts. There is no rational connection between the expansion of temporal knowledge and the loss of spiritual certitude ; but the expansion of knowledge interferes with fixed habits of mmd, and among these are the forms which spiritual certitude takes. The discovery that what had been thought historical truth was in reality a legend ; that what had been thought a genuine relic was false ; that what had been thought a genuine document was a romance or a forgery, did not invalidate the doctrine of relics, nor true documents, nor sound tradition ; but by an association of ideas the advance of such discoveries shook the ordinary mind in its grasp of truth.

Among the new instruments thus at work which proved of most violent effect was that of printing. The press

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created a sort of new false authority. It would present speculation in the form of affirmed facts and, what is more important, it would proclaim that fact to many minds at the same moment and in the same form. Printing diffused true knowledge, but it also diffused (and on a far greater scale) false knowledge and unproved irrational affirmation. Among other things it gave vastly added strength to the irrational concept that a document is alone important to the proof of anything in the past and that tradition may be neglected. From that error we suffer heavily today ; men forget that tradition, though it gets warped with time and tends to be diverse and vague, is commonly sincere ; whereas a document may be, and, if official, commonly is, deliberately false.

Another obvious cause of social and therefore spiritual decline in the end of the Middle Ages was the dragging out of the interminable raids called “ The Hundred Years’ War.” The French-speaking kings of England had a much better claim to the inheritance of the crown of France in the XIVth century than our textbooks usually allow. They pursued that claim with the idea of founding a great Western monarchy to include both France and England. The effort failed, but not until it had dragged on for a hundred years, bringing poverty and misery wherever the armies marched, from the first main conflict at Crecy just before the middle of the XIVth century, to the expulsion of the English garrisons in Normandy more than a hundred years later.

But what had more effect in weakening religious unity than these and twenty other possible causes that might be invoked, was the pestilence now known (it was not so called at the time) as the Black Death.

Pestilence was recurrent ; but the Black Death was, as it were, the extra drop that made the cup run over. It was a visitation upon a scale so enormous as to strike a blow at medieval society which might have dissolved it — and nearly did dissolve it. Certainly a third of Western Christendom died within two years in the middle of the XIVth century. In many places there is sufficient

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proof that half the population disappeared. In some places towns and villages sank never to rise again. It was a form of bubonic plague which had spread from the east and ran through the ports of the Mediterranean, so northward through France to England, even to the extremes of European colonization in Greenland ; and everywhere you may trace its effects even today in the half-finished buildings which were stopped dead and their completion never undertaken. Beauvais is one example of this, so is the cathedral of Narbonne, so is the parish church of Great Yarmouth in England ; and there are hundreds of similar examples scattered up and down the face of Western Europe.

The various divisions of Christendom were still further separated by this violent calamity. Through it the English language came into existence. The children of the French-speaking wealthier classes in England could no longer be trained on account of lack of teachers in the tradition of French speech. There came about, therefore, a fusion between what had been the language of the governing classes of centuries and the various mixed dialects (mainly Germanic) of the populace ; of the servants, that is, by whom the richer children were brought up, and of the village lads with whom the children of the wealthy played. Hitherto for centuries a Northern French idiom had been the governing tongue of France and England. But after 1350-1400 the Channel becomes more and more a language frontier. The Black Death not only thus cut off England from Europe, but also relaxed travel everywhere and alienated district from district. It struck Europe with a wound which might have been mortal, and from which, as a fact, its unity and moral health never fully recovered.

All these things combined accompanied or led to the breakdown of that high spiritual civilization whose crown had been the XHIth century. Beauty was better served on every side ; architecture, though it became somewhat fantastic and less strong was certainly more detailed and very lovely ; painting became an exquisite art ; the

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vernacular literatures began to take on a new power of their own : but even as the flower thus bloomed canker was at the root.

Such was the process, and such apparently were the causes of the process. As the result of that process there accumulated an element of instability ; a strain which clamoured for solution : a tension which became un- bearable. Everything grew ready for an explosion : and the explosion took place.

Ill

THE REFORMATION AND ITS IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES

"IT TE have seen how the Middle Ages declined on VV their spiritual side and how the clerical organiza- tion, that is, the temporal structure of the Church, was becoming ossified and ceasing to function properly, was raising opposition of every kind, was provoking the anger of those who felt they were not being spiritually fed ; the anger of those who contrasted the spiritual functions for which endowment had been made with the characters of those who received the incomes of those endowments. We have noted the spiritual starva- tion of great numbers of the laity, the absence of predica- tion, and so forth.

We have seen how it was inevitable that under such conditions specific heresies should arise, and that, since the growing quarrel was specially a quarrel with the clerical organization of the Church (that is, with the monasteries, with the parish endowments and those of the cathedral Sees and Bishoprics, with pluralities, or the holding of many endowments by one person, and so forth), the main heresies arose upon the point of hier- archical authority and the special claims and position of the whole Church organization. The rising flood was essentially an anti-clencal tide, and therefore the heresies took the form of attacking the powers and claims of the priesthood and of the Papacy, which was the summit and coping stone of the whole clerical body.

Hence the heresies growing strong in the XIVth century protested that the Sacraments could not be validly administered nor even the Host consecrated save by priests in the state of grace. There were heresies denying the right of the Church and its various organiza- tions— the monasteries, etc. — to hold property at all. There were heresies especially attacking once more, at hi

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first somewhat timidly, the doctrine of the Real Presence, for it was the power of the priest to consecrate this which was at the basis of his special sacred position — and against this was protest arising. In general, there was a spirit of anti-unity abroad, and it was exasperated by the dilatory policy of the authorities in the Church. There was a perpetual cry for a reform, for a thorough cleansing of the whole society, for a return to the great virtues which had marked the earlier Middle Ages. But nothing sufficient was done until it was too late.

It is nearly always so in the great catastrophes of mankind. There is nearly always ample warning. There are many and even violent preliminary shocks like the preliminary shocks of a great earthquake or volcanic eruption. They incommode and even frighten those whose position or privileges are threatened. But they hardly ever sufficiently incommode or frighten them to spur them into necessary action. Hence also that religious “ Reign of Terror.” The growing rebellion was met by lawyers’ tricks, by the use of force, by con- tinued and often fearful punishments, but not by that spiritual change, that repentance which the times demanded.

A special instance of what was going on will illustrate all this better than generalities :

One of the chief grievances which raised men’s anger against the organization of the Church was the payment of mortuaries — that is, dues payable upon death. When a man died, such and such a unit of the clerical organization had the right of burying him and of collecting the dues which followed upon his death. For instance, the parish would ordinarily have the right to bury him, and who- ever owned the parish dues (which in the course of time had become immensely complicated — various forms of tithes, etc., fees payable on particular occasions and all the rest of it) would collect funeral dues from the family after the funeral. But apart from that there were payments in kind at a death which varied with different places and with local customs. In some places

THE REFORMATION

”3

the mortuary took the form of appropriating the most valuable individual object discoverable in the dead man’s house, a jewel, for instance, or a good piece of furniture, or a good horse from his stable. In practice, of course, the thing was compounded for, since payment was made to redeem it, but the whole system was irritating and the exasperation was all the greater because it