Title: Europe and the Faith
       "Sine auctoritate nulla vita"

Author: Hilaire Belloc





Europe and the Faith

"Sine auctoritate nulla vita"

by

Hilaire Belloc




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION. THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY

I. WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

II. WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

III. WHAT WAS THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

IV. THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS

V. WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?

VI. THE DARK AGES

VII. THE MIDDLE AGES

VIII. WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION?

IX. THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN

X. CONCLUSION




INTRODUCTION

THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY


I say the Catholic "conscience" of history--I say "conscience"--that is,
an intimate knowledge through identity: the intuition of a thing which is
one with the knower--I do not say "The Catholic Aspect of History." This
talk of "aspects" is modern and therefore part of a decline: it is false,
and therefore ephemeral: I will not stoop to it. I will rather do homage
to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic "aspect"
of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish aspect, a
Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all of these look
on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from within. There is no
more a Catholic "aspect" of European history than there is a man's "aspect"
of himself.

Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is even a man's "aspect" of
himself. In nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. For
a man's way of perceiving himself (when he does so honestly and after a
cleansing examination of his mind) is in line with his Creator's, and
therefore with reality: he sees from within.

Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has in him conscience, which is the voice
of God. Not only does he know by this that the outer world is real, but
also that his own personality is real.

When a man, although flattered by the voice of another, yet says within
himself, "I am a mean fellow," he has hold of reality. When a man, though
maligned of the world, says to himself of himself, "My purpose was just,"
he has hold of reality. He knows himself, for he is himself. A man does not
know an infinite amount about himself. But the finite amount he does know
is all in the map; it is all part of what is really there. What he does not
know about himself would, did he know it, fit in with what he does know
about himself. There are indeed "aspects" of a man for all others except
these two, himself and God Who made him. These two, when they regard him,
see him as he is; all other minds have their several views of him; and
these indeed are "aspects," each of which is false, while all differ. But
a man's view of himself is not an "aspect:" it is a comprehension.

Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of
Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from
without, he understands it from within. He cannot understand it altogether
because he is a finite being; but he is also that which he has to
understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.

The Catholic brings to history (when I say "history" in these pages I mean
the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional
accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what other people cannot
judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he
blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself
could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in his
blame, he is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive so
can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions
of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not
Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_
have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and
disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its centre in
its essence, and together.

I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The
Church.

The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience which begins with
the development of the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean. It
goes back much further than that. The Catholic understands the soil in
which that plant of the Faith arose. In a way that no other man can, he
understands the Roman military effort; why that effort clashed with the
gross Asiatic and merchant empire of Carthage; what we derived from the
light of Athens; what food we found in the Irish and the British, the
Gallic tribes, their dim but awful memories of immortality; what cousinship
we claim with the ritual of false but profound religions, and even how
ancient Israel (the little violent people, before they got poisoned,
while they were yet National in the mountains of Judea) was, in the old
dispensation at least, central and (as we Catholics say) sacred: devoted to
a peculiar mission.

For the Catholic the whole perspective falls into its proper order. The
picture is normal. Nothing is distorted to him. The procession of our great
story is easy, natural, and full. It is also final.

But the modern Catholic, especially if he is confined to the use of
the English tongue, suffers from a deplorable (and it is to be hoped),
a passing accident. No modern book in the English tongue gives him a
conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study violently hostile
authorities, North German (or English copying North German), whose
knowledge is never that of the true and balanced European.

He comes perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd,
either in their limitations or in the contradictions they connote. But
unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot put his finger
upon the precise mark of the absurdity. In the books he reads--if they
are in the English language at least--he finds things lacking which his
instinct for Europe tells him should be there; but he cannot supply their
place because the man who wrote those books was himself ignorant of such
things, or rather could not conceive them.

I will take two examples to show what I mean. The one is the present
battlefield of Europe: a large affair not yet cleared, concerning all
nations and concerning them apparently upon matters quite indifferent to
the Faith. It is a thing which any stranger might analyze (one would think)
and which yet no historian explains.

The second I deliberately choose as an example particular and narrow: an
especially doctrinal story. I mean the story of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
of which the modern historian makes nothing but an incomprehensible
contradiction; but which is to a Catholic a sharp revelation of the
half-way house between the Empire and modern nationalities.

As to the first of these two examples: Here is at last the Great War in
Europe: clearly an issue--things come to a head. How came it? Why these two
camps? What was this curious grouping of the West holding out in desperate
Alliance against the hordes that Prussia drove to a victory apparently
inevitable after the breakdown of the Orthodox Russian shell? Where lay the
roots of so singular a contempt for our old order, chivalry and morals, as
Berlin then displayed? Who shall explain the position of the Papacy, the
question of Ireland, the aloofness of old Spain?

It is all a welter if we try to order it by modern, external--especially
by any materialist or even skeptical--analysis. It was not climate against
climate--that facile materialist contrast of "environment," which is the
crudest and stupidest explanation of human affairs. It was not race--if
indeed any races can still be distinguished in European blood save broad
and confused appearances, such as Easterner and Westerner, short and tall,
dark and fair. It was not--as another foolish academic theory (popular some
years ago) would pretend--an economic affair. There was here no revolt of
rich against poor, no pressure of undeveloped barbarians against developed
lands, no plan of exploitation, nor of men organized, attempting to seize
the soil of less fruitful owners.

How came these two opponents into being, the potential antagonism of which
was so strong that millions willingly suffered their utmost for the sake of
a decision?

That man who would explain the tremendous judgment on the superficial test
of religious differences among modern "sects" must be bewildered indeed!
I have seen the attempt made in more than one journal and book, enemy and
Allied. The results are lamentable!

Prussia indeed, the protagonist, was atheist. But her subject provinces
supported her exultantly, Catholic Cologne and the Rhine and tamely
Catholic Bavaria. Her main support--without which she could not have
challenged Europe--was that very power whose sole reason for being was
Catholicism: the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine which, from Vienna, controlled
and consolidated the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav: the House of
Hapsburg-Lorraine was the champion of Catholic organization in Eastern
Europe.

The Catholic Irish largely stood apart.

Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those
things are foreign, was more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the
unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was notoriously divided within
herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious
analysis such as men draw up who think of religion as Opinion will
make anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who
talk of "Democracy" as the issue of the Great War may be neglected:
Democracy--one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous, form of human
government--was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The essentially
aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy, the despotism
of Russia and Prussia, the immense complex of all other great modern
states gives such nonsense the lie.

People who talk of "A struggle for supremacy between the two Teutonic
champions Germany and England" are less respectable still. England is not
Teutonic, and was not protagonist. The English Cabinet decided by but
the smallest possible majority (a majority of one) to enter the war. The
Prussian Government never dreamt it would have to meet England at all.
There is no question of so single an issue. The world was at war. Why? No
man is an historian who cannot answer from the past. All who can answer
from the past, and are historians, see that it is the historical depth of
the European faith, not its present surface, which explains all.

The struggle was against Prussia.

Why did Prussia arise? Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization of
the Eastern Slavonic Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia, the
western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was an
hiatus. In that small neglected area neither half cultivated from the
Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman West rose a strong garden of weeds.
And weeds sow themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of weeds, could not
extend until the West weakened through schism. It had to wait till the
battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited. And at last, when there
was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed patch over-ran first Poland
and the Germanies, then half Europe. When it challenged all civilization at
last it was master of a hundred and fifty million souls.

What are the tests of this war? In their vastly different fashions they
are Poland and Ireland--the extreme islands of tenacious tradition: the
conservators of the Past through a national passion for the Faith.

The Great War was a clash between an uneasy New Thing which desired to live
its own distorted life anew and separate from Europe, and the old Christian
rock. This New Thing is, in its morals, in the morals spread upon it by
Prussia, the effect of that great storm wherein three hundred years ago
Europe made shipwreck and was split into two. This war was the largest, yet
no more than the recurrent, example of that unceasing wrestle: the outer,
the unstable, the untraditional--which is barbarism--pressing blindly
upon the inner, the traditional, the strong--which is Ourselves: which is
Christendom: which is Europe.

Small wonder that the Cabinet at Westminster hesitated!

We used to say during the war that if Prussia conquered civilization
failed, but that if the Allies conquered civilization was
reestablished--What did we mean? We meant, not that the New Barbarians
could not handle a machine: They can. But we meant that they had learnt all
from us. We meant that they cannot _continue of themselves_; and that we
can. We meant that they have no roots.

When we say that Vienna was the tool of Berlin, that Madrid should be
ashamed, what do we mean? It has no meaning save that civilization is
one and we its family: That which challenged us, though it controlled
so much which should have aided us and was really our own, was external
to civilization and did not lose that character by the momentary use of
civilized Allies.

When we said that "the Slav" failed us, what did we mean? It was not a
statement of race. Poland is Slav, so is Serbia: they were two vastly
differing states and yet both with us. It meant that the Byzantine
influence was never sufficient to inform a true European state or to teach
Russia a national discipline; because the Byzantine Empire, the tutor of
Russia, was cut off from us, the Europeans, the Catholics, the heirs, who
are the conservators of the world.

The Catholic Conscience of Europe grasped this war--with apologies where
it was in the train of Prussia, with affirmation where it was free. It
saw what was toward. It weighed, judged, decided upon the future--the two
alternative futures which lie before the world.

All other judgments of the war made nonsense: You had, on the Allied side,
the most vulgar professional politicians and their rich paymasters shouting
for "Democracy;" pedants mumbling about "Race." On the side of Prussia (the
negation of nationality) you have the use of some vague national mission of
conquest divinely given to the very various Germans and the least competent
to govern. You would come at last (if you listened to such varied cries)
to see the Great War as a mere folly, a thing without motive, such as the
emptiest internationals conceive the thing to have been.

So much for the example of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to the
tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The Catholic
alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone can see and
judge in this matter.

From so recent and universal an example I turn to one local, distant,
precise, in which this same Catholic Conscience of European history may be
tested.

Consider the particular (and clerical) example of Thomas ŕ Becket: the
story of St. Thomas of Canterbury. I defy any man to read the story of
Thomas a Becket in Stubbs, or in Green, or in Bright, or in any other of
our provincial Protestant handbooks, and to make head or tail of it.

Here is a well-defined and limited subject of study. It concerns only a
few years. A great deal is known about it, for there are many contemporary
accounts. Its comprehension is of vast interest to history. The Catholic
may well ask: "How it is I cannot understand the story as told by these
Protestant writers? Why does it not make sense?"

The story is briefly this: A certain prelate, the Primate of England at the
time, was asked to admit certain changes in the status of the clergy. The
chief of these changes was that men attached to the Church in any way even
by minor orders (not necessarily priests) should, if they committed a crime
amenable to temporal jurisdiction, be brought before the ordinary courts of
the country instead of left, as they had been for centuries, to their own
courts. The claim was, at the time, a novel one. The Primate of England
resisted that claim. In connection with his resistance he was subjected to
many indignities, many things outrageous to custom were done against him;
but the Pope doubted whether his resistance was justified, and he was
finally reconciled with the civil authority. On returning to his See at
Canterbury he became at once the author of further action and the subject
of further outrage, and within a short time he was murdered by his
exasperated enemies.

His death raised a vast public outcry. His monarch did penance for it.
But _all the points on which he had resisted_ were in practice waived by
the Church at last. The civil state's original claim was _in practice_
recognized at last. Today it appears to be plain justice. The chief of St.
Thomas' contentions, for instance, that men in orders should be exempt from
the ordinary courts, seems as remote as chain armors.

So far, so good. The opponent of the Faith will say, and has said in a
hundred studies--that this resistance was nothing more than that always
offered by an old organization to a new development.

Of course it was! It is equally true to say of a man who objects to an
aëroplane smashing in the top of his studio that it is the resistance of an
old organization to a new development. But such a phrase in no way explains
the business; and when the Catholic begins to examine the particular case
of St. Thomas, he finds a great many things to wonder at and to think
about, upon which his less European opponents are helpless and silent.

I say "helpless" because in their attitude they give up trying to explain.
They record these things, but they are bewildered by them. They can explain
St. Thomas' particular action simply enough: too simply. He was (they
say) a man living in the past. But when they are asked to explain the
vast consequences that followed his martyrdom, they have to fall back
upon the most inhuman and impossible hypotheses; that "the masses were
ignorant"--that is as compared with other periods in human history (what,
more ignorant than today?) that "the Papacy engineered an outburst of
popular enthusiasm." As though the Papacy were a secret society like modern
Freemasonry, with some hidden machinery for "engineering" such things. As
though the type of enthusiasm produced by the martyrdom was the wretched
mechanical thing produced now by caucus or newspaper "engineering!" As
though nothing _besides_ such interferences was there to arouse the whole
populace of Europe to such a pitch!

As to the miracles which undoubtedly took place at St. Thomas' tomb, the
historian who hates or ignores the Faith had (and has) three ways of
denying them. The first is to say nothing about them. It is the easiest way
of telling a lie. The second is to say that they were the result of a vast
conspiracy which the priests directed and the feeble acquiescence of the
maim, the halt and the blind supported. The third (and for the moment most
popular) is to give them modern journalistic names, sham Latin and Greek
confused, which, it is hoped, will get rid of the miraculous character;
notably do such people talk of "auto-suggestion."

Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful story, when he has read all the
original documents, understands it easily enough from within.

He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas was not very important in
its special claims, and was probably (taken as an isolated action)
unreasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads and as he notes the
rapid and profound transformation of all civilization which was taking
place in that generation, that St. Thomas was standing out for a
principle, ill clothed in his particular plea, but absolute in its general
appreciation: the freedom of the Church. He stood out in particular for
what _had_ been the concrete symbols of the Church's liberty in the past.
The direction of his actions was everything, whether his symbol was well
or ill chosen. The particular customs might go. But to challenge the new
claims of civil power at that moment was to save the Church. A movement
was afoot which might have then everywhere accomplished what was only
accomplished in parts of Europe four hundred years later, to wit, a
dissolution of the unity and the discipline of Christendom.

St. Thomas had to fight on ground chosen by the enemy; he fought and he
resisted in the spirit dictated by the Church. He fought for no dogmatic
point, he fought for no point to which the Church of five hundred years
earlier or five hundred years later would have attached importance. He
fought for things which were purely temporal arrangements; which had indeed
until quite recently been the guarantee of the Church's liberty, but which
were in his time upon the turn of becoming negligible. _But the spirit
in which he fought was a determination that the Church should never be
controlled by the civil power_, and the spirit against which he fought
was the spirit which either openly or secretly believes the Church to be
an institution merely human, and therefore naturally subjected, as an
inferior, to the processes of the monarch's (or, worse, the politician's)
law.

A Catholic sees, as he reads the story, that St. Thomas was obviously and
necessarily to lose, in the long run, every concrete point on which he had
stood out, and yet he saved throughout Europe the ideal thing for which he
was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the enthusiasm of the
populace rose: the guarantee of the plain man's healthy and moral existence
against the threat of the wealthy, and the power of the State--the
self-government of the general Church, had been defended by a champion
up to the point of death. For the morals enforced by the Church are the
guarantee of freedom.

Further the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non-Catholic, with a
blind, irrational assertion that the miracles _could_ not take place. He is
not wholly possessed of a firm, and lasting faith that no marvelous events
ever take place. He reads the evidence. He cannot believe that there was
a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all proof of such conspiracy).
He is moved to a conviction that events so minutely recorded and so amply
testified, happened. Here again is the European, the chiefly reasonable
man, the Catholic, pitted against the barbarian skeptic with his empty,
unproved, mechanical dogmas of material sequence.

And these miracles, for a Catholic reader, are but the extreme points
fitting in with the whole scheme. He knows what European civilization
was before the twelfth century. He knows what it was to become after the
sixteenth. He knows why and how the Church would stand out against a
certain itch for change. He appreciates why and how a character like that
of St. Thomas would resist. He is in no way perplexed to find that the
resistance failed on its technical side. He sees that it succeeded so
thoroughly in its spirit as to prevent, in a moment when its occurrence
would have been far more dangerous and general than in the sixteenth
century, the overturning of the connection between Church and State.

The enthusiasm of the populace he particularly comprehends. He grasps the
connection between that enthusiasm and the miracles which attended St.
Thomas' intercession; not because the miracles were fantasies, but because
a popular recognition of deserved sanctity is the later accompaniment and
the recipient of miraculous power.

It is the details of history which require the closest analysis. I have,
therefore, chosen a significant detail with which to exemplify my case.

Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character of the English
squires and of their position in the English countrysides would have to
explain at some length (and with difficulty) to a foreigner how and why the
evils of the English large estates were, though evils, national; just as
a particular landlord case of peculiar complexity or violent might afford
him a special test; so the martyrdom of St. Thomas makes, for the Catholic
who is viewing Europe, a very good example whereby he can show how well
he understands what is to other men not understandable, and how simple is
to him, and how human, a process which, to men not Catholic, can only be
explained by the most grotesque assumptions; as that universal contemporary
testimony must be ignored; that men are ready to die for things in which
they do not believe; that the philosophy of a society does not permeate
that society; or that a popular enthusiasm ubiquitous and unchallenged, is
mechanically produced to the order of some centre of government! All these
absurdities are connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great quarrel, nor
is there any but the Catholic conscience of Europe that explains it.

The Catholic sees that the whole of the ŕ Becket business was like the
struggle of a man who is fighting for his liberty and is compelled to
maintain it (such being the battleground chosen by his opponents) upon
a privilege inherited from the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot
understand it and does not pretend to understand it.

Now let us turn from this second example, highly definite and limited, to a
third quite different from either of the other two and the widest of all.
Let us turn to the general aspect of all European history. We can here make
a list of the great lines on which the Catholic can appreciate what other
men only puzzle at, and can determine and know those things upon which
other men make no more than a guess.

The Catholic Faith spreads over the Roman world, not because the Jews were
widely dispersed, but because the intellect of antiquity, and especially
the Roman intellect, accepted it in its maturity.

The material decline of the Empire is not co-relative with, nor parallel
to, the growth of the Catholic Church; it is the counterpart of that
growth. You have been told "Christianity (a word, by the way, quite
unhistorical) crept into Rome as she declined, and hastened that decline."
That is bad history. Rather accept this phrase and retain it: "The Faith is
that which Rome accepted in her maturity; nor was the Faith the cause of
her decline, but rather the conservator of all that could be conserved."

There was no strengthening of us by the advent of barbaric blood; there was
a serious imperilling of civilization in its old age by some small (and
mainly servile) infiltration of barbaric blood; if civilization so attacked
did not permanently fail through old age we owe that happy rescue to the
Catholic Faith.

In the next period--the Dark Ages--the Catholic proceeds to see Europe
saved against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the
Scandinavian: he notes that the fierceness of the attack was such that
anything save something divinely instituted would have broken down. The
Mohammedan came within three days' march of Tours, the Mongol was seen from
the walls of Tournus on the Sâone: right in France. The Scandinavian savage
poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul, and almost overwhelmed
the whole island of Britain. There was nothing left of Europe but a central
core.

Nevertheless Europe survived. In the refloresence which followed that dark
time--in the Middle Ages--the Catholic notes not hypotheses but documents
and facts; he sees the Parliaments arising not from some imaginary
"Teutonic" root--a figment of the academies--but from the very real and
present great monastic orders, in Spain, in Britain, in Gaul--never outside
the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic architecture spring high,
spontaneous and autochthonic, first in the territory of Paris and thence
spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees
the new Universities, a product of the soul of Europe, re-awakened--he
sees the marvelous new civilization of the Middle Ages rising as a
transformation of the old Roman society, a transformation wholly from
within, and motived by the Faith.

The trouble, the religious terror, the madnesses of the fifteenth century,
are to him the diseases of one body--Europe--in need of medicine.

The medicine was too long delayed. There comes the disruption of the
European body at the Reformation.

It ought to be death; but since the Church is not subject to mortal law it
is not death. Of those populations which break away from religion and from
civilization none (he perceives) were of the ancient Roman stock--save
Britain. The Catholic, reading his history, watches in that struggle
_England_: not the effect of the struggle on the fringes of Europe, on
Holland, North Germany and the rest. He is anxious to see whether _Britain_
will fail the mass of civilization in its ordeal.

He notes the keenness of the fight in England and its long endurance; how
all the forces of wealth--especially the old families such as the Howards
and the merchants of the City of London--are enlisted upon the treasonable
side; how in spite of this a tenacious tradition prevents any sudden
transformation of the British polity or its sharp severance from the
continuity of Europe. He sees the whole of North England rising, cities in
the South standing siege. Ultimately he sees the great nobles and merchants
victorious, and the people cut off, apparently forever, from the life by
which they had lived, the food upon which they had fed.

Side by side with all this he notes that, next to Britain, one land only
that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or miraculous,
preserves the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side by side with
that loss the preservation of Ireland.

To the Catholic reader of history (though he has no Catholic history to
read) there is no danger of the foolish bias against civilization which
has haunted so many contemporary writers, and which has led them to frame
fantastic origins for institutions the growth of which are as plain as an
historical fact can be. He does not see in the pirate raids which desolated
the eastern and southeastern coasts of England in the sixth century the
origin of the English people. He perceives that the success of these small
eastern settlements upon the eastern shores, and the spread of their
language westward over the island dated from their acceptance of Roman
discipline, organization and law, from which the majority, the Welsh to
the West, were cut off. He sees that the ultimate hegemony of Winchester
over Britain all grew from this early picking up of communications with
the Continent and the cutting off of everything in this island save the
South and East from the common life of Europe. He knows that Christian
parliaments are not dimly and possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly
monastic in their origin; he is not surprised to learn that they arose
first in the Pyrenean valleys during the struggle against the Mohammedans;
he sees how probable or necessary was such an origin just when the chief
effort of Europe was at work in the _Reconquista_.

In general, the history of Europe and of England develops naturally before
the Catholic reader; he is not tempted to that succession of theories,
self-contradicting and often put forward for the sake of novelty, which
has confused and warped modern reconstructions of the past. Above all, he
does not commit the prime historical error of "reading history backwards."
He does not think of the past as a groping towards our own perfection of
today. He has in his own nature the nature of its career: he feels the fall
and the rise: the rhythm of a life which is his own.

The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse with the first century or
the fifteenth; shrines are not odd to him nor oracles; and if he is the
supplanter, he is also the heir of the gods.




EUROPE AND THE FAITH




I

WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


The history of European civilization is the history of a certain political
institution which united and expressed Europe, and was governed from Rome.
This institution was informed at its very origin by the growing influence
of a certain definite and organized religion: this religion it ultimately
accepted and, finally, was merged in.

The institution--having accepted the religion, having made of that religion
its official expression, and having breathed that religion in through
every part until it became the spirit of the whole--was slowly modified,
spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it did not die.
It was revived by the religion which had become its new soul. It re-arose
and still lives.

This institution was first known among men as _Republica_; we call it today
"The Roman Empire." The Religion which informed and saved it was then
called, still is called, and will always be called "The Catholic Church."

Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.

It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth whether
it be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or to a man
who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in distance,
in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to examine would
perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as would a man who
was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an intimate part
of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary atheist, some
supposed student in some remote future, reading history in some place from
which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly departed, and to which the
habits and traditions of our civilization will therefore be wholly alien,
would each, in proportion to his science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped
today by the Catholic student who is of European birth, the truth that
Europe and the Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who
do _not_ grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose
special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic Church,
or who have a traditional bias against it.

These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other
anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal
history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists are
innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still dogmatically taught
in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the world.

Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is
anti-Catholic--that concerns another sphere of thought--but that it is
unhistorical.

To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and its
spirit was the sole origin of European civilization; to forget or to
diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a certain
religion; to conceal the fact that this religion was not a vague mood, but
a determinate and highly organized corporation; to present in the first
centuries some non-existant "Christianity" in place of the existant Church;
to suggest that the Faith was a vague agreement among individual holders
of opinions instead of what it historically _was_, the doctrine of a fixed
authoritative institution; to fail to identify that institution with the
institution still here today and still called the Catholic Church; to
exaggerate the insignificant barbaric influences which came from outside
the Empire and did nothing to modify its spirit; to pretend that the Empire
or its religion have at any time ceased to be--that is, to pretend that
there has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the
present of Europe--all these pretensions are parts of one historical
falsehood.

In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is
_nothing_ which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire, or is not
demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it.

In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic, our building
materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut-stone, our cooking, our staple food
and drink; in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower, the well,
the road, the canal; in expression, the alphabet, the very words of most of
our numerous dialects and polite languages, the order of still more, the
logical sequence of our thought--all spring from that one source. So with
implements: the saw, the hammer, the plane, the chisel, the file, the
spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the ladder; all these we have from
that same origin. Of our institutions it is the same story. The divisions
and the sub-divisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province,
the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the emplacement of
the great European cities, the routes of communication between them, the
universities, the Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence,
all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.

It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations
of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of it, is to
limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.

The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in history
we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but with a
sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave the
province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is equally
baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men must have its
human circumstance of place and time. The Church might have risen under
Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact, spring up in the high
_Greek_ tide of the Levant and carries to this day the noble Hellenic
garb. It might have risen at any time: it did, as a fact, rise just at
the inception of that united Imperial Roman system which we are about to
examine. It might have carried for its ornaments and have had for its
sacred language the accoutrements and the speech of any one of the other
great civilizations, living or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of
China, of the Indies. As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so
circumstanced in its origin and development that its external accoutrement
and its language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and
Rome: of the Empire.

Now those who would falsify history from a conscious or unconscious bias
against the Catholic Church, will do so in many ways, some of which
will always prove contradictory of some others. For truth is one, error
disparate and many.

The attack upon the Catholic Church may be compared to the violent,
continual, but inchoate attack of barbarians upon some civilized fortress;
such an attack will proceed now from this direction, now from that, along
any one of the infinite number of directions from which a single point
may be approached. Today there is attack from the North, tomorrow an
attack from the South. Their directions are flatly contradictory, but the
contradiction is explained by the fact that each is directed against a
central and fixed opponent.

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Empire as a pagan
institution; they will pretend that the Catholic Church was something
alien to that pagan thing; that the Empire was great and admirable before
Catholicism came, weak and despicable upon its acceptation of the Creed.
They will represent the Faith as creeping like an Oriental disease into
the body of a firm Western society which it did not so much transform as
liquefy and dissolve.

Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable
Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous
barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of splendid pagan
qualities--which usually turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant
qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased Catholic body of the
Roman Empire which they are pictured as attacking.

Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat the Empire and its institutions
as dead after a certain date, and discuss the rise of a new society without
considering its Catholic and Imperial origins. Nothing is commoner, for
instance (in English schools), than for boys to be taught that the pirate
raids and settlements of the fifth century in this Island were the "coming
of the English," and the complicated history of Britain is simplified for
them into a story of how certain bold seafaring pagans (full of all the
virtues we ascribe to ourselves today) first devastated, then occupied, and
at last, of their sole genius, developed a land which Roman civilization
had proved inadequate to hold.

There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious or
unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, according to the degree of learning in
him who propagates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe as
though it were something quite apart from the general development of our
civilization.

There are innumerable text-books in which a man may read the whole history
of his own, a European, country, from, say, the fifth to the sixteenth
century, and never hear of the Blessed Sacrament: which is as though a man
were to write of England in the nineteenth century without daring to speak
of newspapers and limited companies. Warped by such historical enormities,
the reader is at a loss to understand the ordinary motives of his
ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the history of the Church
obviously escape him, but much more do the great crises in civil history
escape him.

To set right, then, our general view of history it is necessary to be ready
with a sound answer to the prime question of all, which is this: "What was
the Roman Empire?"

If you took an immigrant coming fresh into the United States today and let
him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil War: if
you gave him of the Civil War itself a partial, confused and very summary
account: if of all that went before it, right away back to the first
colonists, you were to leave him either wholly ignorant or ludicrously
misinformed (and slightly informed at that), what then could he make of the
problems in American Society, or how would he be equipped to understand the
nation of which he was to be a citizen? To give such a man the elements of
civic training you must let him know what the Colonies were, what the War
of Independence, and what the main institutions preceding that event and
created by it. He would have further to know soundly the struggle between
North and South, and the principles underlying that struggle. Lastly,
and most important of all, he would have to see all this in a correct
perspective.

So it is with us in the larger question of that general civilization which
is common to both Americans and Europeans, and which in its vigor has
extended garrisons, as it were, into Asia and Africa. We cannot understand
it today unless we understand what it developed from. What was the origin
from which we sprang? What was the Roman Empire?

The Roman Empire was a united civilization, the prime characteristic of
which was the acceptation, absolute and unconditional, of one common mode
of life by all those who dwelt within its boundaries. It is an idea very
difficult for the modern man to seize, accustomed as he is to a number
of sovereign countries more or less sharply differentiated, and each
separately colored, as it were, by different customs, a different language,
and often a different religion. Thus the modern man sees France, French
speaking, with an architecture, manners, laws of its own, etc.; he saw
(till yesterday) North Germany under the Prussian hegemony, German
speaking, with yet another set of institutions, and so forth. When
he thinks, therefore, of any great conflict of opinion, such as the
discussion between aristocracy and democracy today, he thinks in terms of
different countries. Ireland, for instance, is Democratic, England is
Aristocratic--and so forth.

Again, the modern man thinks of a community, however united, as something
bounded by, and in contrast with, other communities. When he writes or
thinks of France he does not think of France only, but of the points in
which France contrasts with England, North Germany, South Germany, Italy,
etc.

Now the men living in the Roman Empire regarded civic life in a totally
different way. All conceivable antagonisms (and they were violent) were
antagonisms _within one State_. No differentiation of State against State
was conceivable or was attempted.

From the Euphrates to the Scottish Highlands, from the North Sea to the
Sahara and the Middle Nile, all was one State.

The world outside the Roman Empire was, in the eyes of the Imperial
citizen, a sort of waste. It was not thickly populated, it had no
appreciable arts or sciences, it was _barbaric_. That outside waste
of sparse and very inferior tribes was something of a menace upon the
frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irritation. But
that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of the
menace of a foreign power. It was merely the trouble of preventing a
fringe of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric communities outside the
boundaries from doing harm to a vast, rich, thickly populated, and highly
organized State within.

The members of these communities (principally the Dutch, Frisian, Rhenish
and other Germanic peoples, but also on the other frontiers, the nomads
of the desert, and in the West, islanders and mountaineers, Irish and
Caledonian) were all tinged with the great Empire on which they bordered.
Its trade permeated them. We find its coins everywhere. Its names for most
things became part of their speech. They thought in terms of it. They had
a sort of grievance when they were not admitted to it. They perpetually
begged for admittance.

They wanted to deal with the Empire, to enjoy its luxury, now and then to
raid little portions of its frontier wealth.

They never dreamt of "conquest." On the other hand the Roman administrator
was concerned with getting barbarians to settle in an orderly manner on the
frontier fields, so that he could exploit their labor, with coaxing them
to serve as mercenaries in the Roman armies, or (when there was any local
conflict) with defeating them in local battles, taking them prisoners and
making them slaves.

I have said that the mere number of these exterior men (German, Caledonian,
Irish, Slav, Moorish, Arab, etc.) was small compared with the numbers of
civilization, and, I repeat, in the eyes of the citizens of the Empire,
their lack of culture made them more insignificant still.

At only one place did the Roman Empire have a common frontier with another
civilization, properly so called. It was a very short frontier, not
one-twentieth of the total boundaries of the Empire. It was the Eastern
or Persian frontier, guarded by spaces largely desert. And though a true
civilization lay beyond, that civilization was never of great extent nor
really powerful. This frontier was variously drawn at various times, but
corresponded roughly to the Plains of Mesopotamia. The Mediterranean
peoples of the Levant, from Antioch to Judea, were always within that
frontier. They were Roman. The mountain peoples of Persia were always
beyond it. Nowhere else was there any real rivalry or contact with the
foreigner, and even this rivalry and contact (though "The Persian War" is
the only serious _foreign_ or equal war in the eyes of all the rulers from
Julius Cćsar to the sixth century) counted for little in the general life
of Rome.

The point cannot be too much insisted upon, nor too often repeated,
so strange is it to our modern modes of thought, and so essentially
characteristic of the first centuries of the Christian era and the
formative period during which Christian civilization took its shape. _Men
lived as citizens of one State which they took for granted and which they
even regarded as eternal_. There would be much grumbling against the taxes
and here and there revolts against them, but never a suggestion that the
taxes should be levied by any other than imperial authority, or imposed in
any other than the imperial manner. There was plenty of conflict between
armies and individuals as to who should have the advantage of ruling, but
never any doubt as to the type of function which the "Emperor" filled, nor
as to the type of universally despotic action which he exercised. There
were any number of little local liberties and customs which were the pride
of the separate places to which they attached, but there was no conception
of such local differences being antagonistic to the one life of the one
State. That State was, for the men of that time, the World.

The complete unity of this social system was the more striking from
the fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and
liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions, of religious
practices, and of dialects. There was not even one current official
language for the educated thought of the Empire: there were two, Greek and
Latin. And in every department of human life there co-existed this very
large liberty of individual and local expression, coupled with a complete,
and, as it were, necessary unity, binding the whole vast body together.
Emperor might succeed Emperor, in a series of civil wars. Several Emperors
might be reigning together. The office of Emperor might even be officially
and consciously held in commission among four or more men. But the power of
the Emperor was always one power, his office one office, and the system of
the Empire one system.

It is not the purpose of these few pages to attempt a full answer to the
question of how such a civic state of mind came to be, but the reader must
have some _sketch_ of its development if he is to grasp its nature.

The old Mediterranean world out of which the Empire grew had consisted
(before that Empire was complete--say, from an unknown most distant past
to 50 B.C.) in two types of society: there stood in it as rare exceptions
_States_, or nations in our modern sense, governed by a central Government,
which controlled a large area, and were peopled by the inhabitants of
many towns and villages. Of this sort was ancient Egypt. But there were
also, surrounding that inland sea, in such great numbers as to form the
predominant type of society, a series of _Cities_, some of them commercial
ports, most of them controlling a small area from which they drew their
agricultural subsistence, but all of them remarkable for this, that their
citizens drew their civic life from, felt patriotism for, were the
soldiers of, and paid their taxes to, not a nation in our sense but a
_municipality_.

These cities and the small surrounding territories which they controlled
(which, I repeat, were often no more than local agricultural areas
necessary for the sustenance of the town) were essentially the sovereign
Powers of the time. Community of language, culture, and religion might,
indeed, bind them in associations more or less strict. One could talk
of the Phoenician cities, of the Greek cities, and so forth. But the
individual City was always the unit. City made war on City. The City
decided its own customs, and was the nucleus of religion. The God was the
God of the city. A rim of such points encircled the eastern and central
Mediterranean wherever it was habitable by man. Even the little oasis of
the Cyrenćan land with sand on every side, but habitable, developed its
city formations. Even on the western coasts of the inland ocean, which
received their culture by sea from the East, such City States, though more
rare, dotted the littoral of Algeria, Provence and Spain.

Three hundred years before Our Lord was born this moral equilibrium was
disturbed by the huge and successful adventure of the Macedonian Alexander.

The Greek City States had just been swept under the hegemony of Macedon,
when, in the shape of small but invincible armies, the common Greek culture
under Alexander overwhelmed the East. Egypt, the Levant littoral and much
more, were turned into one Hellenized (that is, "Greecified") civilization.
The separate cities, of course, survived, and after Alexander's death unity
of control was lost in various and fluctuating dynasties derived from the
arrangements and quarrels of his generals. But the old moral equilibrium
was gone and the conception of a general civilization had appeared.
Henceforward the Syrian, the Jew, the Egyptian saw with Greek eyes and the
Greek tongue was the medium of all the East for a thousand years. Hence
are the very earliest names of Christian things, Bishop, Church, Priest,
Baptism, Christ, Greek names. Hence all our original documents and prayers
are Greek and shine with a Greek light: nor are any so essentially Greek in
idea as the four Catholic Gospels.

Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of accidents very difficult to
follow (since we have only later accounts--and they are drawn from the
city's point of view only), became the chief of the City States in the
Peninsula. Some few it had conquered in war and had subjected to taxation
and to the acceptation of its own laws; many it protected by a sort of
superior alliance; with many more its position was ill defined and perhaps
in origin had been a position of allied equality. But at any rate, a little
after the Alexandrian Hellenization of the East this city had in a slower
and less universal way begun to break down the moral equilibrium of the
City States in Italy, and had produced between the Apennines and the sea
(and in some places beyond the Apennines) a society in which the City
State, though of coarse surviving, was no longer isolated or sovereign, but
formed part of a larger and already definite scheme. The city which had
arrived at such a position, and which was now the manifest capital of the
Italian scheme, was ROME.

Contemporary with the last successes of this development in Italy went
a rival development very different in its nature, but bound to come into
conflict with the Roman because it also was extending. This was the
commercial development of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that is, a
Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life like all the rest. It had
shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had shown for conquest,
for alliances, and in general for a spread of its spirit and for the
domination of its laws and modes of thought. The business of Carthage was
to enrich itself: not indirectly as do soldiers (who achieve riches as but
one consequence of the pursuit of arms), but directly, as do merchants, by
using men indirectly, by commerce, and by the exploitation of contracts.

The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in Spain, and harbors wherever
he could find them, especially in the Western Mediterranean. He employed
mercenary troops. He made no attempt to radiate outward slowly step by
step, as does the military type, but true to the type of every commercial
empire, from his own time to our own, the Carthaginian built up a scattered
hotchpotch of dominion, bound together by what is today called the "Command
of the Sea."

That command was long absolute and Carthaginian power depended on it
wholly. But such a power could not co-exist with the growing strength of
martial Italy. Rome challenged Carthage; and after a prodigious struggle,
which lasted to within two hundred years of the birth of Our Lord, ruined
the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the town itself was destroyed by
the Romans, and its territory turned into a Roman province. So perished for
many hundred years the dangerous illusion that the merchant can master the
soldier. But never had that illusion seemed nearer to the truth than at
certain moments in the duel between Carthage and Rome.

The main consequence of this success was that, by the nature of the
struggle, the Western Mediterranean, with all its City States, with its
half-civilized Iberian peoples, lying on the plateau of Spain behind the
cities of the littoral, the corresponding belt of Southern France, and the
cultivated land of Northern Africa, fell into the Roman system, and became,
but in a more united way, what Italy had already long before become. The
Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, the Roman confederation, with
its ideas of law and government, was supreme in the Western Mediterranean
and was compelled by its geographical position to extend itself inland
further and further into Spain, and even (what was to be of prodigious
consequence to the world) into GAUL.

But before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul we must notice
that in the hundred years after the final fall of Carthage, the Eastern
Mediterranean had also begun to come into line. This Western power, the
Roman, thus finally established, occupied Corinth in the same decade as
that which saw the final destruction of Carthage, and what had once been
Greece became a Roman province. All the Alexandrian or Grecian East--Syria,
Egypt--followed. The Macedonian power in its provinces came to depend
upon the Roman system in a series of protectorates, annexations, and
occupations, which two generations or so before the foundation of the
Catholic Church had made Rome, though her system was not yet complete, the
centre of the whole Mediterranean world. The men whose sons lived to be
contemporary with the Nativity saw that the unity of that world was already
achieved. The World was now one, and was built up of the islands, the
peninsulas, and the littoral of the Inland Sea.

So the Empire might have remained, and so one would think it naturally
would have remained, a Mediterranean thing, but for that capital experiment
which has determined all future history--Julius Cćsar's conquest of
Gaul--Gaul, the mass of which lay North, Continental, exterior to the
Mediterranean: Gaul which linked up with the Atlantic and the North Sea:
Gaul which lived by the tides: Gaul which was to be the foundation of
things to come.

It was this experiment--the Roman Conquest of Gaul--and its success which
opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the
world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no
parallel. Something less than a hundred small Celtic States, partially
civilized (but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the
Mediterranean), were occupied, taught, and, as it were, "converted" into
citizens of this now united Roman civilization.

It was all done, so to speak, within the lifetime of a man. The link and
corner-stone of Western Europe, the quadrilateral which lies between the
Pyrenees and the Rhine, between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the
Channel, accepted civilization in a manner so final and so immediate that
no historian has ever quite been able to explain the phenomenon. Gaul
accepted almost at once the Roman language, the Roman food, the Roman
dress, and it formed the first--and a gigantic--extension of European
culture.

We shall later find Gaul providing the permanent and enduring example of
that culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay. Gaul led
to Britain. The Iberian Peninsula, after the hardest struggle which any
territory had presented, was also incorporated. By the close of the first
century after the Incarnation, when the Catholic Church had already been
obscurely founded in many a city, and the turn of the world's history had
come, the Roman Empire was finally established in its entirety. By that
time, from the Syrian Desert to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the Irish
Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine and the Danube, in one great ring
fence, there lay a secure and unquestioned method of living incorporated as
one great State.

This State was to be the soil in which the seed of the Church was to be
sown. As the religion of this State the Catholic Church was to develop.
This State is still present, underlying our apparently complex political
arrangements, as the main rocks of a country underlie the drift of the
surface. Its institutions of property and of marriage; its conceptions of
law; its literary roots of Rhetoric, of Poetry, of Logic, are still the
stuff of Europe. The religion which it made as universal as itself is
still, and perhaps more notably than ever, apparent to all.




II

WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


So far I have attempted to answer the question, "What Was the Roman
Empire?" We have seen that it was an institution of such and such a
character, but to this we had to add that it was an institution affected
from its origin, and at last permeated by, another institution. This other
institution had (and has) for its name "The Catholic Church."

My next task must, therefore, be an attempt to answer the question, "What
was the Church in the Roman Empire?" for that I have not yet touched.

In order to answer this question we shall do well to put ourselves in the
place of a man living in a particular period, from whose standpoint the
nature of the connection between the Church and the Empire can best be
observed. And that standpoint in time is the generation which lived through
the close of the second century and on into the latter half of the third
century: say from A.D. 190 to A.D. 270. It is the first moment in which we
can perceive the Church as a developed organism now apparent to all.

If we take an earlier date we find ourselves in a world where the growing
Church was still but slightly known and by most people unheard of. We can
get no earlier view of it as part of the society around it. It is from
about this time also that many documents survive. I shall show that the
appearance of the Church at this time, from one hundred and fifty to two
hundred and forty years after the Crucifixion, is ample evidence of her
original constitution.

A man born shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through the
violent civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines, surviving
to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and in extreme old age to
perceive the promise, though not the establishment, of an untrammelled
Catholicism (it had yet to pass through the last and most terrible of the
persecutions), would have been able to answer our question well. He would
have lived at the turn of the tide: a witness to the emergence, apparent to
all Society, of the Catholic Church.

Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial family in some great provincial
town such as Lyons. He would then find himself one of a comparatively small
class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the municipal government of
the city. Beneath him he would be accustomed to a large class of citizens,
free men but not senatorial; beneath these again his society reposed upon a
very large body of slaves.

In what proportion these three classes of society would have been found in
a town like Lyons in the second century we have no exact documents to tell
us, but we may infer from what we know of that society that the majority
would certainly have been of the servile class, free men less numerous,
while senators were certainly a very small body (they were the great
landowners of the neighborhood); and we must add to these three main
divisions two other classes which complicate our view of that society.
The first was that of the freed men, the second was made up of perpetual
tenants, nominally free, but economically (and already partly in legal
theory) bound to the wealthier classes.

The freed men had risen from the servile class by the sole act of their
masters. They were bound to these masters very strongly so far as social
atmosphere went, and to no small extent in legal theory as well. This
preponderance of a small wealthy class we must not look upon as a
stationary phenomenon: it was increasing. In another half-dozen generations
it was destined to form the outstanding feature of all imperial society.
In the fourth and fifth centuries when the Roman Empire became from Pagan,
Christian, the mark of the world was the possession of nearly all its soil
and capital (apart from public land) by one small body of immensely wealthy
men: the product of the pagan Empire.

It is next important to remember that such a man as we are conceiving would
never have regarded the legal distinctions between slave and free as a line
of cleavage between different kinds of men. It was a social arrangement and
no more. Most of the slaves were, indeed, still chattel, bought and sold;
many of them were incapable of any true family life. But there was nothing
uncommon in a slave being treated as a friend, in his being a member of the
liberal professions, in his acting as a tutor, as an administrator of his
master's fortune, or a doctor. Certain official things he could not be; he
could not hold any public office, of course; he could never plead; and he
could not be a soldier.

This last point is essential; because the Roman Empire, though it required
no large armed force in comparison with the total numbers of its vast
population (for it was not a system of mere repression--no such system
has ever endured), yet could only draw that armed force from a restricted
portion of the population. In the absence of foreign adventure or Civil
Wars, the armies were mainly used as frontier police. Yet, small as they
were, it was not easy to obtain the recruitment required. The wealthy
citizen we are considering would have been expected to "find" a certain
number of recruits for the service of the army. He found them among his
bound free tenants and enfranchised slaves; he was increasingly reluctant
to find them; and they were increasingly reluctant to serve. Later
recruitment was found more and more from the barbarians outside the Empire;
and we shall see on a subsequent page how this affected the transition from
the ancient world to that of the Dark Ages.

Let us imagine such a man going through the streets of Lyons of a morning
to attend a meeting of the Curia. He would salute, and be saluted, as he
passed, by many men of the various classes I have described. Some, though
slaves, he would greet familiarly; others, though nominally free and
belonging to his own following or to that of some friend, he would regard
with less attention. He would be accompanied, it may be presumed, by a
small retinue, some of whom might be freed men of his own, some slaves,
some of the tenant class, some in legal theory quite independent of
him, and yet by the economic necessities of the moment practically his
dependents.

As he passes through the streets he notes the temples dedicated to a
variety of services. No creed dominated the city; even the local gods were
now but a confused memory; a religious ritual of the official type was to
greet him upon his entry to the Assembly, but in the public life of the
city no fixed philosophy, no general faith, appeared.

Among the many buildings so dedicated, two perhaps would have struck his
attention: the one the great and showy synagogue where the local Jews met
upon their Sabbath, the other a small Christian Church. The first of these
he would look on as one looks today upon the mark of an alien colony in
some great modern city. He knew it to be the symbol of a small, reserved,
unsympathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout the Empire. The Empire
had had trouble with it in the past, but that trouble was long forgotten;
the little colonies of Jews had become negotiators, highly separate from
their fellow citizens, already unpopular, but nothing more.

With the Christian Church it would be otherwise. He would know as an
administrator (we will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was _endowed_;
that it was possessed of property more or less legally guaranteed. It had a
very definite position of its own among the congregations and corporations
of the city, peculiar, and yet well secured. He would further know as an
administrator (and this would more concern him--for the possession of
property by so important a body would seem natural enough), that to this
building and the corporation of which it was a symbol were attached an
appreciable number of his fellow citizens; a small minority, of course, in
any town of such a date (the first generation of the third century), but a
minority most appreciable and most worthy of his concern from three very
definite characteristics. In the first place it was certainly growing;
in the second place it was certainly, even after so many generations of
growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel; in the third place (and this was
the capital point) it represented a true political organism--_the only
subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the Empire_.

If the reader will retain no other one of the points I am making in this
description, let him retain this point: it is, from the historical point
of view, the explanation of all that was to follow. The Catholic Church in
Lyons would have been for that Senator a distinct organism; with its own
officers, its own peculiar spirit, its own type of vitality, which, if he
were a wise man, he would know was certain to endure and to grow, and which
even if he were but a superficial and unintelligent spectator, he would
recognize as unique.

Like a sort of little State the Catholic Church included all classes and
kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which it was growing, it
regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it within its own
sphere. The senator, the tenant, the freed man, the slave, the soldier,
in so far as they were members of this corporation, were equally bound to
certain observances. _Did they neglect these observances, the corporation
would expel them or subject them to penalties of its own_. He knew that
though misunderstandings and fables existed with regard to this body, there
was no social class in which its members had not propagated a knowledge
of its customs. He knew (and it would disturb him to know) that its
organization, though in no way admitted by law, and purely what we should
call "voluntary," was strict and very formidable.

Here in Lyons as elsewhere, it was under a monarchical head called by the
Greek name of _Episcopos_. Greek was a language which the cultured knew
and used throughout the western or Latin part of the Empire to which he
belonged; the title would not, therefore, seem to him alien any more than
would be the Greek title of _Presbyter_--the name of the official priests
acting under this monarchical head of the organization--or than would the
Greek title _Diaconos_, which title was attached to an order, just below
the priests, which was comprised of the inferior officials of the clerical
body.

He knew that this particular cult, like the innumerable others that were
represented by the various sacred buildings of the city, had its mysteries,
its solemn ritual, and so forth, in which these, the officials of its body,
might alone engage, and which the mass of the local "Christians"--for such
was their popular name--attended as a congregation. But he would further
know that this scheme of worship differed wholly from any other of the many
observances round it _by a certain fixity of definition_. The Catholic
Church was not an opinion, nor a fashion, nor a philosophy; it was not
a theory nor a habit; it was a _clearly delineated body corporate based
on numerous exact doctrines_, extremely jealous of its unity and of its
precise definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time,
with passionate conviction.

By this I do not mean that the Senator so walking to his official duties
could not have recalled from among his own friends more than one who was
attached to the Christian body in a negligent sort of way, perhaps by the
influence of his wife, perhaps by a tradition inherited from his father: he
would guess, and justly guess, that this rapidly growing body counted very
many members who were indifferent and some, perhaps, who were ignorant
of its full doctrine. But the body as a whole, in its general spirit,
and _especially in the disciplined organization of its hierarchy_, did
differ from everything round it in this double character of precision and
conviction. There was no certitude left and no definite spirit or mental
aim, no "dogma" (as we should say today) taken for granted in the Lyons of
his time, save among the Christians.

The pagan masses were attached, without definite religion, to a number
of customs. In social morals they were guided by certain institutions,
at the foundation of which were the Roman ideas of property in men, land
and goods; patriotism, the bond of smaller societies, had long ago merged
in the conception of a universal empire. This Christian Church alone
represented a complete theory of life, to which men were attached, as they
had hundreds of years before been attached to their local city, with its
local gods and intense corporate local life.

Without any doubt the presence of that Church and of what it stood for
would have concerned our Senator. It was no longer negligible nor a thing
to be only occasionally observed. It was a permanent force and, what is
more, a State within the State.

If he were like most of his kind in that generation the Catholic Church
would have affected him as an irritant; its existence interfered with the
general routine of public affairs. If he were, as a small minority even of
the rich already were, in sympathy with it though not of it, it would still
have concerned him. It was the only exceptional organism of his uniform
time: and it was growing.

This Senator goes into the Curia. He deals with the business of the day.
It includes complaints upon certain assessments of the Imperial taxes. He
consults the lists and sees there (it was the fundamental conception of
the whole of that society) men drawn up in grades of importance exactly
corresponding to the amount of freehold land which each possessed. He has
to vote, perhaps, upon some question of local repairs, the making of some
new street, or the establishment of some monument. Probably he hears of
some local quarrel provoked (he is told) by the small, segregated Christian
body, and he follows the police report upon it.

He leaves the Curia for his own business and hears at home the accounts of
his many farms, what deaths of slaves there have been, what has been the
result of the harvest, what purchases of slaves or goods have been made,
what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenantry for the
army, and so forth. Such a man was concerned one way or another with
perhaps a dozen large farming centres or villages, and had some thousands
of human beings dependent upon him. In this domestic business he hardly
comes across the Church at all. It was still in the towns. It was not yet
rooted in the countryside.

There might possibly, even at that distance from the frontiers, be rumors
of some little incursion or other of barbarians; perhaps a few hundred
fighting men, come from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge with a Roman
garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of neighboring barbarians;
or perhaps they were attempting to live by pillage in the neighborhood of
the garrison and the soldiers had been called out against them. He might
have, from the hands of a friend in that garrison, a letter brought to
him officially by the imperial post, which was organized along all the
great highways, telling him what had been done to the marauders or the
suppliants; how, too, some had, after capture, been allotted land to till
under conditions nearly servile, others, perhaps, forcibly recruited for
the army. The news would never for a moment have suggested to him any
coming danger to the society in which he lived.

He would have passed from such affairs to recreations probably literary,
and there would have been an end of his day.

In such a day what we note as most exceptional is the aspect of the small
Catholic body in a then pagan city, and we should remember, if we are to
understand history, that by this time it was already the phenomenon which
contemporaries were also beginning to note most carefully.

That is a fair presentment of the manner in which a number of local affairs
(including the Catholic Church in his city) would have struck such a man at
such a time.

If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire as a whole, we must observe
certain other things in the landscape, touching the Church and the society
around it, which a local view cannot give us. In the first place there had
been in that society from time to time acute spasmodic friction breaking
out between the Imperial power and this separate voluntary organism, the
Catholic Church. The Church's partial secrecy, its high vitality, its
claim to independent administration, were the superficial causes of this.
Speaking as Catholics, we know that the ultimate causes were more profound.
The conflict was a conflict between Jesus Christ with His great foundation
on the one hand, and what Jesus Christ Himself had called "the world." But
it is unhistorical to think of a "Pagan" world opposed to a "Christian"
world at that time. The very conception of "a Pagan world" requires some
external manifest Christian civilization against which to contrast it.
There was none such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the
third century. The Church had around her a society in which education was
very widely spread, intellectual curiosity very lively, a society largely
skeptical, but interested to discover the right conduct of human life, and
tasting now this opinion, now that, to see if it could discover a final
solution.

It was a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to speak
of its "luxury" or its "cruelty." A cruel man could be cruel in it without
suffering the punishment which centuries of Christian training would render
natural to our ideas. But a merciful man could be, and would be, merciful
and would preach mercy, and would be generally applauded. It was a society
in which there were many ascetics--whole schools of thought contemptuous
of sensual pleasure--but a society distinguished from the Christian
particularly in this, that at bottom it _believed man to be sufficient to
himself and all belief to be mere opinions_.

Here was the great antithesis between the Church and her surroundings. It
is an antithesis which has been revived today. Today, outside the Catholic
Church, there is no distinction between opinion and faith nor any idea that
man is other than sufficient to himself.

The Church did not, and does not, believe man to be sufficient to himself,
nor naturally in possession of those keys which would open the doors to
full knowledge or full social content. It proposed (and proposes) its
doctrines to be held not as opinions but as a body of faith.

It differed from--or was more solid than--all around it in this: that it
proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical
facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of "mysteries" as
realities instead of symbols.

A word as to the constitution of the Church. All men with an historical
training know that the Church of the years 200-250 was what I have
described it, an organized society under bishops, and, what is more, it is
evident that there was a central primacy at Rome as well as local primacies
in various other great cities. But what is not so generally emphasized is
the way in which Christian society appears to have _looked at itself_ at
that time.

The conception which the Catholic Church had of _itself_ in the early third
century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if we use
the word "Christianity" we are unhistorical. "Christianity" is a term in
the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it connotes an
opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The Christians of the time
of which I speak had no such conception. Upon the contrary, they were
attached to its very antithesis. They were attached to the conception of a
_thing_: of an organized body instituted for a definite end, disciplined in
a definite way, and remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete
doctrine. One can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of
stoic_ism_, or epicurean_ism_, or neoplaton_ism_; but one cannot talk of
"Christian_ism_" or "Christ_ism_." Indeed, no one has been so ignorant
or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase
"Christianity," used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in
the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of "Christianism" or
"Christism;" and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea; it
connotes something historically false; something that never existed.

Let me give an example of what I mean:

Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private house in
Carthage in the year 225. They are all men of culture; all possessed of the
two languages, Greek and Latin, well-read and interested in the problems
and half-solutions of their skeptical time. One will profess himself
Materialist, and will find another to agree with him; there is no personal
God, certain moral duties must be recognized by men for such and such
utilitarian reasons, and so forth. He finds support.

The host is not of that opinion; he has been profoundly influenced by
certain "mysteries" into which he has been "initiated:" That is, symbolical
plays showing the fate of the soul and performed in high seclusion before
members of a society sworn to secrecy. He has come to feel a spiritual
life as the natural life round him. He has curiously followed, and often
paid at high expense, the services of necromancers; he believes that in
an "initiation" which he experienced in his youth, and during the secret
and most vivid drama or "mystery" in which he then took part, he actually
came in contact with the spiritual world. Such men were not uncommon. The
declining society of the time was already turning to influences of that
type.

The host's conviction, his awed and reticent attitude towards such things,
impress his guests. One of the guests, however, a simple, solid kind of
man, not drawn to such vagaries, says that he has been reading with great
interest the literature of the Christians. He is in admiration of the
traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. He quotes certain
phrases, especially from the four orthodox Gospels. They move him to
eloquence, and their poignancy and illuminative power have an effect upon
his friends. He ends by saying: "For my part, I have come to make it a sort
of rule to act as this Man Christ would have had me act. He seems to me to
have led the most perfect life I ever read of, and the practical maxims
which are attached to His Name seem to me a sufficient guide to life.
That," he will conclude simply, "is the groove into which I have fallen,
and I do not think I shall ever leave it."

Let us call the man who has so spoken, Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have
been a _Christian_? Would the officials of the Roman Empire have called
him a _Christian_? Would he have been in danger of unpopularity where
_Christians_ were unpopular? Would _Christians_ have received him among
themselves as part of their strict and still somewhat secret society? Would
he have counted with any single man of the whole Empire as one of the
_Christian_ body?

The answer is most emphatically _No_.

No Christian in the first three centuries would have held such a man as
coming within his view. No imperial officer in the most violent crisis of
one of those spasmodic persecutions which the Church had to undergo would
have troubled him with a single question. No Christian congregation would
have regarded him as in any way connected with their body. Opinion of that
sort, "Christism," had no relation to the Church. How far it existed we
cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In so far as it existed it would have
been on all fours with any one of the vague opinions which floated about
the cultured Roman world.

Now it is evident that the term "Christianity" used as a point of view, a
mere mental attitude, would include such a man, and it is equally evident
that we have only to imagine him to see that he had nothing to do with
the Christian _religion_ of that day. For the Christian religion (then as
now) was a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in what I have called an
organism, and that organism was the Catholic Church.

The reader may here object: "But surely there was heresy after heresy and
thousands of men were at any moment claiming the name of Christian whom
the orthodox Church rejected. Nay, some suffered martyrdom rather than
relinquish the name."

True; but the very existence of such sects should be enough to prove the
point at issue.

These sects arose precisely because within the Catholic Church (1) exact
doctrine, (2) unbroken tradition, and (3) absolute unity, were, all three,
regarded as the necessary marks of the institution. The heresies arose
one after another, from the action of men who were prepared to define yet
more punctiliously what the truth might be, and to claim with yet more
particular insistence the possession of living tradition and the right to
be regarded as the centre of unity. No heresy pretended that the truth was
vague and indefinite. The whole gist and meaning of a heresy was that it,
the heresy, or he, the heresiarch, was prepared to make doctrine yet more
sharp, and to assert his own definition.

What you find in these foundational times is not the Catholic Church
asserting and defining a thing and then, some time after, the heresiarch
denying this definition; no heresy comes within a hundred miles of such
a procedure. What happens in the early Church is that some doctrine not
yet fully defined is laid down by such and such a man, that his final
settlement clashes with the opinion of others, that after debate and
counsel, and also authoritative statement on the part of the bishops, this
man's solution is rejected and an orthodox solution is defined. From that
moment the heresiarch, if he will not fall into line with defined opinion,
ceases to be in communion; and his rejection, no less than his own original
insistence upon his doctrine, are in themselves proofs that both he and
his judges postulate unity and definition as the two necessary marks of
Catholic truth.

No early heretic or no early orthodox authority dreams of saying to his
opponent: "You may be right! Let us agree to differ. Let us each form his
part of 'Christian society' and look at things from his own point of view."
The moment a question is raised it must of its nature, the early Church
being what it was, be defined one way or the other.

Well, then, what was this body of doctrine held by common tradition and
present everywhere in the first years of the third century?

Let me briefly set down what we know, as a matter of historical and
documentary evidence, the Church of this period to have held. What we
know is a very different matter from what we can guess. We may amplify it
from our conceptions of the _probable_ according to our knowledge of that
society--as, for instance, when we say that there was probably a bishop at
Marseilles before the middle of the second century. Or we may amplify it by
guesswork, and suppose, in the absence of evidence, some just possible but
exceedingly improbable thing: as, that an important canonical Gospel has
been lost. There is an infinite range for guesswork, both orthodox and
heretical. But the plain and known facts which repose upon historical and
documentary evidence, and which have no corresponding documentary evidence
against them, are both few and certain.

Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what was certainly
true of his time.

Tertullian was a man of about forty in the year 200. The Church then taught
as an unbroken tradition that a Man who had been put to death about 170
years before in Palestine--only 130 years before Tertullian's birth--had
risen again on the third day. This Man was a known and real person with
whom numbers had conversed. In Tertullian's childhood men still lived who
had met eye witnesses of the thing asserted.

This Man (the Church said) was also the supreme Creator God. There you have
an apparent contradiction in terms, at any rate a mystery, fruitful in
opportunities for theory, and as a fact destined to lead to three centuries
of more and more particular definition.

This Man, Who also was God Himself, had, through chosen companions called
Apostles, founded a strict and disciplined society called the Church. The
doctrines the Church taught professed to be His doctrines. They included
the immortality of the human soul, its redemption, its alternative of
salvation and damnation.

Initiation into the Church was by way of baptism with water in the name of
The Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Before His death this Man Who was also God had instituted a certain rite
and _Mystery_ called the Eucharist. He took bread and wine and changed them
into His Body and Blood. He ordered this rite to be continued. The central
act of worship of the Christian Church was therefore a consecration of
bread and wine by priests in the presence of the initiated and baptized
Christian body of the locality. The bread and wine so consecrated were
certainly called (universally) the Body of the Lord.

The faithful also certainly communicated, that is, eat the Bread and drank
the Wine thus changed in the _Mystery_.

It was the central rite of the Church thus to take the Body of the Lord.

There was certainly at the head of each Christian community a bishop:
regarded as directly the successor of the Apostles, the chief agent of the
ritual and the guardian of doctrine.

The whole increasing body of local communities kept in touch through their
bishops, held one doctrine and practiced what was substantially one ritual.

All that is plain history.

The numerical proportion of the Church in the city of Carthage, where
Tertullian wrote, was certainly large enough for its general suppression to
be impossible. One might argue from one of his phrases that it was a tenth
of the population. Equally certainly did the unity of the Christian Church
and its bishops teach the institution of the Eucharist, the Resurrection,
the authority of the Apostles, and their power of tradition through the
bishops. A very large number of converts were to be noted and (to go back
to Tertullian) the majority of his time, by his testimony, were recruited
by conversion, and were not born Christians.

Such is known to have been, in a very brief outline, the manner of the
Catholic Church in these early years of the third century. Such was the
undisputed manner of the Church, as a Christian or an inquiring pagan would
have been acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and onwards.

I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the moment in which
Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale. Many of the
points I have set down are, of course, _demonstrably_ anterior to the third
century. I mean by "demonstrably" anterior, proved in earlier documentary
testimony. That ritual and doctrine firmly fixed are long anterior to the
time in which you find them rooted is obvious to common sense. But there
are documents as well.

Thus, we have Justin Martyr. He was no less than sixty years older than
Tertullian. He was as near to the Crucifixion as my generation is to the
Reform Bill--and he gave us a full description of the Mass.

We have the letters of St. Ignatius. He was a much older man than St.
Justin--perhaps forty or fifty years older. He stood to the generations
contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the generation of Gladstone,
Bismarck, and, early as he is, he testifies fully to the organization of
the Church with its Bishops, the Eucharistic Doctrine, and the Primacy in
it of the Roman See.

The literature remaining to us from the early first century and a half
after the Crucifixion is very scanty. The writings of what are called
"Apostolic" times--that is, documents proceeding immediately from men who
could remember the time of Our Lord, form not only in their quantity (and
that is sufficiently remarkable), but in their quality, too, a far superior
body of evidence to what we possess from the next generation. We have
more in the New Testament than we have in the writings of these men who
came just after the death of the Apostles. But what does remain is quite
convincing. There arose from the date of Our Lord's Ascension into heaven,
from, say, A. D. 30 or so, before the death of Tiberius and a long lifetime
after the Roman organization of Gaul, a definite, strictly ruled and highly
individual _Society_, with fixed doctrines, special mysteries, and a
strong discipline of its own. With a most vivid and distinct personality,
unmistakeable. And this Society was, and is, called "The Church."

I would beg the reader to note with precision both the task upon which we
are engaged and the exact dates with which we are dealing, for there is no
matter in which history has been more grievously distorted by religious
bias.

The task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a portion of history
as it was. I am not writing here from a brief. I am concerned to set forth
a fact. I am acting as a witness or a copier, not as an advocate or lawyer.
And I say that the conclusion we can establish with regard to the Christian
community on these main lines is the conclusion to which any man must come
quite independently of his creed. He will deny these facts only if he has
such bias against the Faith as interferes with his reason. A man's belief
in the mission of the Catholic Church, his confidence in its divine origin,
do not move him to these plain historical conclusions any more than
they move him to his conclusions upon the real existence, doctrine and
organization of contemporary Mormonism. Whether the Church told the truth
is for philosophy to discuss: What the Church in fact _was_ is plain
history. The Church may have taught nonsense. Its organization may have
been a clumsy human thing. That would not affect the historical facts.

By the year 200 the Church was--everywhere, manifestly and in ample
evidence throughout the Roman world--what I have described, and taught the
doctrines I have just enumerated: but it stretches back one hundred and
seventy years before that date and it has evidence to its title throughout
that era of youth.

To see that the state of affairs everywhere widely apparent in A.D. 200 was
rooted in the very origins of the institution one hundred and seventy years
before, to see that all this mass of ritual, doctrine and discipline starts
with the first third of the first century, and the Church was from its
birth the Church, the reader must consider the dates.

We know that we have in the body of documents contained in the "canon"
which the Church has authorized as the "New Testament," documents
proceeding from men who were contemporaries with the origin of the
Christian religion. Even modern scholarship with all its love of phantasy
is now clear upon so obvious a point. The authors of the Gospels, the Acts,
and the Epistles, Clement also, and Ignatius also (who had conversed with
the Apostles) may have been deceived, they may have been deceiving. I am
not here concerned with that point. The discussion of it belongs to another
province of argument altogether. But they were _contemporaries_ of the
things they said they were contemporaries of. In other words, their
writings are what is called "authentic."

If I read in the four Gospels (not only the first three) of such and such
a miracle, I believe it or I disbelieve it. But I am reading the account of
a man who lived at the time when the miracle is _said_ to have happened.
If you read (in Ignatius' seven certainly genuine letters) of Episcopacy
and of the Eucharist, you may think him a wrong-headed enthusiast. But you
know that you are reading the work of a man who _personally_ witnessed the
beginnings of the Church; you know that the customs, manners, doctrines and
institutions he mentions or takes for granted, were certainly those of his
time, that is, of the _origin_ of Catholicism, though you may think the
customs silly and the doctrines nonsense.

St. Ignatius talking about the origin and present character of the Catholic
Church is exactly in the position--in the matter of dates--of a man of our
time talking about the rise and present character of the Socialists or of
the rise and present character of Leopold's Kingdom of Belgium, of United
Italy, the modern. He is talking of what is, virtually, his own time.

Well, there comes after this considerable body of _contemporary_
documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very spring
and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first founders), a gap
which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a man.

This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast mass of its documentary
evidence has, of course, perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient
writing. The little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and
fragments. But after this gap, from somewhat before the year 200, we come
to the beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing in volume,
of documentary evidence. Not, I repeat, of evidence to the _truth_ of
supernatural doctrines, but of evidence to what these doctrines and their
accompanying ritual and organization were: evidence to the way in which the
Church was constituted, to the way in which she regarded her mission, to
the things she thought important, to the practice of her rites.

That is why I have taken the early third century as the moment in which we
can first take a full historical view of the Catholic Church in being, and
this picture is full of evidence to the state of the Church in its origins
three generations before.

I say, again, it is all-important for the reader who desires a true
historical picture to seize the _sequence of the dates with which we are
dealing_, their relation to the length of human life and therefore to the
society to which they relate.

It is all-important because the false history which has had its own way for
so many years is based upon two false suggestions of the first magnitude.
The first is the suggestion that the period between the Crucifixion and
the full Church of the third century was one in which vast changes could
proceed unobserved, and vast perversions of original ideas be rapidly
developed; the second is that the space of time during which those changes
are supposed to have taken place was sufficient to account for them.

It is only because those days are remote from ours that such suggestions
can be made. If we put ourselves by an effort of the imagination into
the surroundings of that period, we can soon discover how false these
suggestions are.

The period was not one favorable to the interruption of record. It was
one of a very high culture. The proportion of curious, intellectual, and
skeptical men which that society contained was perhaps greater than in any
other period with which we are acquainted. It was certainly greater than
it is today. Those times were certainly less susceptible to mere novel
assertion than are the crowds of our great cities under the influence of
the modern press. It was a period astonishingly alive. Lethargy and decay
had not yet touched the world of the Empire. It built, read, traveled,
discussed, and, above all, _criticized_, with an enormous energy.

In general, it was no period during which alien fashions could rise within
such a community as the Church without their opponents being immediately
able to combat them by an appeal to the evidence of the immediate past.
The world in which the Church arose was one; and that world was intensely
vivid. Anyone in that world who saw such an institution as Episcopacy
(for instance) or such a doctrine as the Divinity of Christ to be a novel
corruption of originals could have, and would have, protested at once. It
was a world of ample record and continual communication.

Granted such a world let us take the second point and see what was the
distance in mere time between this early third century of which I speak and
what is called the Apostolic period; that is, the generation which could
still remember the origins of the Church in Jerusalem and the preaching of
the Gospel in Grecian, Italian, and perhaps African cities. We are often
told that changes "gradually crept in;" that "the imperceptible effect of
time" did this or that. Let us see how these vague phrases stand the test
of confrontation with actual dates.

Let us stand in the years 200-210, consider a man then advanced in years,
well read and traveled, and present in those first years of the third
century at the celebration of the Eucharist. There were many such men who,
if they had been able to do so, would have reproved novelties and denounced
perverted tradition. That none did so is a sufficient proof that the main
lines of Catholic government and practice had developed unbroken and
unwarped from at least his own childhood. But an old man who so witnessed
the constitution of the Church and its practices as I have described them
in the year 200, would correspond to that generation of old people whom we
have with us today; the old people who were born in the late twenties and
thirties of the nineteenth century; the old people who can just remember
the English Reform Bill, and who were almost grown up during the troubles
of 1848 and the establishment of the second Empire in Paris: the old people
in the United States who can remember as children the election of Van Buren
to the office of President: the old people whose birth was not far removed
from the death of Thomas Jefferson, and who were grown men and women when
gold was first discovered in California.

Well, pursuing that parallel, consider next the persecution under Nero. It
was the great event to which the Christians would refer as a date in the
early history of the Church. It took place in Apostolic times. It affected
men who, though aged, could easily remember Judea in the years connected
with Our Lord's mission and His Passion. St. Peter lived to witness, in
that persecution, to the Faith. St. John survived it. It came not forty
years later than the day of Pentecost. But the persecution under Nero was
to an old man such as I have supposed assisting at the Eucharist in the
early part of the third century, no further off than the Declaration of
Independence is from the old people of our generation. An old man in the
year 200 could certainly remember many who had themselves been witnesses
of the Apostolic age, just as an old man today remembers well men who saw
the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The old people who had
surrounded his childhood would be to St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John what
the old people who survived, say, to 1845, would have been to Jefferson, to
Lafayette, or to the younger Pitt. They could have seen and talked to that
first generation of the Church as the corresponding people surviving in the
early nineteenth century could have seen and talked with the founders of
the United States.

It is quite impossible to imagine that the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Rite
of Initiation (Baptism in the name of the Trinity), the establishment of an
Episcopacy, the fierce defence of unity and orthodoxy, and all those main
lines of Catholicism which we find to be the very essence of the Church in
the early third century, could have risen without protest. They cannot have
come from an innocent, natural, uncivilized perversion of an original so
very recent and so open to every form of examination.

That there should have been discussion as to the definition and meaning of
undecided doctrines is natural, and fits in both with the dates and with
the atmosphere of the period and with the character of the subject. But
that a whole scheme of Christian government and doctrine should have
developed in contradiction of Christian origins and yet without protest in
a period so brilliantly living, full of such rapid intercommunication, and,
_above all, so brief_, is quite impossible.

That is what history has to say of the early Church in the Roman Empire.
The Gospels, the Acts, the Canonical Epistles and those of Clement and
Ignatius may tell a true or a false story; their authors may have written
under an illusion or from a conscious self-deception; or they may have been
supremely true and immutably sincere. _But they are contemporary._ A man
may respect their divine origin or he may despise their claims to instruct
the human race; but that the Christian body from its beginning was not
"Christianity" but a Church and that that Church was identically one with
what was already called long before the third century [Footnote: The
Muratorian Fragment is older than the third century, and St. Ignatius, who
also uses the word Catholic, was as near to the time of the Gospels as I
am to the Crimean War.] the _Catholic_ Church, is simply plain history,
as plain and straightforward as the history, let us say, of municipal
institutions in contemporary Gaul. It is history indefinitely better
proved, and therefore indefinitely more certain than, let us say, modern
guesswork on imaginary "Teutonic Institutions" before the eighth century or
the still more imaginary "Aryan" origins of the European race, or any other
of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which still try to pass for historical
truth.

So much for the Catholic Church in the early third century when first we
have a mass of evidence upon it. It is a highly disciplined, powerful
growing body, intent on unity, ruled by bishops, having for its central
doctrine the Incarnation of God in an historical Person, Jesus Christ, and
for its central rite a Mystery, the transformation of Bread and Wine by
priests into the Body and Blood which the faithful consume.

This "State within the States" by the year 200 already had affected the
Empire: in the next generation it permeated the Empire; it was already
transforming European civilization. By the year 200 the thing was done. As
the Empire declined the Catholic Church caught and preserved it.

What was the process of that decline?

To answer such a question we have next to observe three developments that
followed: (1) The great increase of barbarian hired soldiery within the
Empire; (2) The weakening of the central power as compared with the local
power of the small and increasingly rich class of great landowners; (3)
The rise of the Catholic Church from an admitted position (and soon a
predominating position) to complete mastery over all society.

All these three phenomena developed together; they occupied about two
hundred years--roughly from the year 300 to the year 500. When they had run
their course the Western Empire was no longer governed as one society from
one Imperial centre. The chance heads of certain auxiliary forces in the
Roman Army, drawn from barbaric recruitment, had established themselves in
the various provinces and were calling themselves "Kings." The Catholic
Church was everywhere the religion of the great majority; it had everywhere
alliance with, and often the use of, the official machinery of government
and taxation which continued unbroken. It had become, far beyond all other
organisms in the Roman State, the central and typical organism which gave
the European world its note. This process is commonly called "The Fall of
the Roman Empire;" what was that "fall?" What really happened in this great
transformation?




III

WHAT WAS THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


That state of society which I have just described, the ordered and united
society of the Roman Empire, passed into another and very different state
of society: the society of what are called "The Dark Ages."

From these again rose, after another 600 years of adventures and perils,
the great harvest of medićval civilization. Hardly had the Roman Empire
turned in its maturity to accept the fruit of its long development (I mean
the Catholic Church), when it began to grow old and was clearly about to
suffer some great transition. But that transition, which threatened to be
death, proved in the issue not death at all, but a mixture of Vision and
Change.

The close succession of fruit and decay in society is what one expects from
the analogy of all living things: at the close of the cycle it is death
that should come. A plant, just after it is most fruitful, falls quickly.
So, one might imagine, should the long story of Mediterranean civilization
have proceeded. When it was at its final and most complete stage, one would
expect some final and complete religion which should satisfy its long
search and solve its ancient riddles: but after such a discovery, after the
fruit of such a maturity had fully developed, one would expect an end.

Now it has been the singular fortune of our European civilization that an
end did not come. Dissolution was in some strange way checked. Death was
averted. And the more closely one looks into the unique history of that
salvation--the salvation of all that could be saved in a most ancient and
fatigued society--the more one sees that this salvation was effected by no
agency save that of the Catholic Church. Everything else, after, say, 250
A.D., the empty fashionable philosophies, the barbarians filling the army,
the current passions and the current despair, made for nothing but ruin.

There is no parallel to this survival in all the history of mankind. Every
other great civilization has, after many centuries of development, either
fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or died and disappeared. There
is nothing left of Egypt, there is nothing left of Assyria. The Eastern
civilizations remain, but remain immovable; or if they change can only
vulgarly copy external models.

But the civilization of Europe--the civilization, that is, of Rome and
of the Empire--had a third fortune differing both from death and from
sterility: it survived to a resurrection. Its essential seeds were
preserved for a Second Spring.

For five or six hundred years men carved less well, wrote verse less well,
let roads fall slowly into ruin, lost or rather coarsened the machinery of
government, forgot or neglected much in letters and in the arts and in the
sciences. But there was preserved, right through that long period, not only
so much of letters and of the arts as would suffice to bridge the great
gulf between the fifth century and the eleventh, but also so much of what
was really vital in the mind of Europe as would permit that mind to blossom
again after its repose. And the agency, I repeat, which effected this
conservation of the seeds, was the Catholic Church.

It is impossible to understand this truth, indeed it is impossible to
make any sense at all of European history, if we accept that story of the
decline which is currently put forward in anti-Catholic academies, and
which has seemed sufficient to anti-Catholic historians.

_Their_ version is, briefly, this: The Roman Empire, becoming corrupt and
more vicious through the spread of luxury and through a sort of native
weakness to be discovered in the very blood of the Mediterranean, was at
last invaded and overwhelmed by young and vigorous tribes of Germans.
These brought with them all the strength of those native virtues which
later rejected the unity of Christendom and began the modern Protestant
societies--which are already nearly atheist and very soon will be wholly
so.

A generic term has been invented by these modern and false historians whose
version I am here giving; the vigorous, young, uncorrupt, and virtuous
tribes which are imagined to have broken through the boundaries of
the effete Empire and to have rejuvenated it, are grouped together as
"Teutonic:" a German strain very strong numerically, superior also to what
was left of Roman civilization in virile power, is said to have come in
and to have taken over the handling of affairs. One great body of these
Germans, the Franks, are said to have taken over Gaul; another (the Goths,
in their various branches) Italy and Spain. But most complete, most
fruitful, and most satisfactory of all (they tell us) was the eruption of
these vigorous and healthy pagans into the outlying province of Britain,
which they wholly conquered, exterminating its original inhabitants and
colonizing it with their superior stock.

"It was inevitable" (the anti-Catholic historian proceeds to admit) "that
the presence of uncultured though superior men should accelerate the
decline of arts in the society which they thus conquered. It is further to
be deplored that their simpler and native virtues were contaminated by the
arts of the Roman clergy and that in some measure the official religion
of Rome captured their noble souls; for that official religion permitted
the poison of the Roman decline to affect all the European mind--even the
German mind--for many centuries. But at the same time this evil effect was
counter-balanced by the ineradicable strength and virtues of the Northern
barbaric blood. This sacred Teutonic blood it was which brought into
Western Europe the subtlety of romantic conceptions, the true lyric touch
in poetry, the deep reverence which was (till recently) the note of their
religion, the love of adventure in which the old civilization was lacking,
and a vast respect for women. At the same time their warrior spirit evolved
the great structure of feudalism, the chivalric model and the whole
military ideal of medićval civilization.

"Is it to be wondered at that when great new areas of knowledge were opened
up in the later fifteenth century by suddenly expanded travel, by the
printing press, and by an unexpected advance in physical science, the
emancipation of the European mind should have brought this pure and
barbaric stock to its own again?

"In proportion as Teutonic blood was strong, in that proportion was
the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the hold upon men of Catholic
tradition, shaken in the early sixteenth century; and before that century
had closed the manly stirp of North Germany, Holland, Scandinavia and
England, had developed the Protestant civilization a society advancing,
healthy, and already the master of all rivals; destined soon to be, if it
be not already, supreme."

Such is not an exaggerated summary of what the anti-Catholic school of
history gave us from German and from English universities (with the partial
aid of anti-Catholic academic forces within Catholic countries) during the
first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.

There went with this strange way of rewriting history a flood of wild
hypotheses presented as fact. Thus Parliaments (till lately admired) were
imagined--and therefore stated--to be Teutonic, non-Roman, therefore
non-Catholic in origin. The gradual decline of slavery was attributed to
the same miraculous powers in the northern pagans; and in general whatever
thing was good in itself or was consonant with modern ideas, was referred
back to this original source of good in the business of Europe: the German
tribes.

Meanwhile the religious hatred these false historians had of civilization,
that is, of Roman tradition and the Church, showed itself in a hundred
other ways: the conquest of Spain by the Mohammedans was represented by
them as the victory of a superior people over a degraded and contemptible
one: the Reconquest of Spain by our race over the Asiatics as a disaster:
its final triumphant instrument, the Inquisition, which saved Spain from a
Moorish ravage was made out a monstrosity. Every revolt, however obscure,
against the unity of European civilization in the Middle Ages (notably the
worst revolt of all, the Albigensian), was presented as a worthy uplifting
of the human mind against conditions of bondage. Most remarkable of all,
the actual daily life of Catholic Europe, the habit, way of thought and
manner of men, during the period of unity--from, say, the eighth century to
the fifteenth--was simply omitted!

At the moment when history was struggling to become a scientific study,
this school of self-pleasing fairy tales held the field. When at last
history _did_ become a true scientific study, this school collapsed. But
it yet retains, as an inheritance from its old hegemony, a singular power
in the lower and more popular forms of historical writing; and where the
English language is spoken it is, even today, almost the only view of
European development which the general student can obtain.

It will be noted at the outset that the whole of the fantastic picture
which this old and now discredited theory presented, is based upon a
certain conception of what happened at the breakdown of the Roman Empire.

Unless these barbaric German tribes _did_ come in and administrate, unless
they really _were_ very considerable in number, unless their character in
truth _was_ what this school postulated it to be--vigorous, young, virtuous
and all the rest of it--unless there _did indeed_ take place a struggle
between this imaginary great German nation and the Mediterranean
civilization, in which the former won and ruled as conquerors over subject
peoples; unless these primary axioms have some historical truth in them,
the theory which is deduced from them has no historical value whatsoever.

A man may have a preference, as a Protestant or merely as an inhabitant
of North Germany or Scandinavia, for the type of man who originally lived
his degraded life outside the Roman Empire. He may, as an anti-Catholic of
any kind, hope that civilization was decadent through Catholicism at the
end of the united Roman Empire, and it may please him to imagine that the
coincidence of what was originally barbaric with what is now Protestant
German Europe is a proof of the former's original prowess. Nay, he may even
desire that the non-Catholic and non-traditional type in our civilization
shall attain to a supremacy which it certainly has not yet reached.
[Footnote: I wrote that phrase before the break up of Prussia and at a
moment when Prussia was still the idol of Oxford.] But the whole thing
is only a pleasant (or unpleasant) dream, something to imagine and not
something to discover, unless we have a solid historical foundation for the
theory: to wit, the destruction of the Roman Empire in the way which, and
by the men whom, the theory presupposes.

The validity of the whole scheme depends upon our answer to the question,
"What was the fall of the Roman Empire?"

If it was a conquest such as we have just seen postulated, and a conquest
actuated by the motives of men so described, then this old anti-Catholic
school, though it could not maintain its exaggerations (though, for
instance, it could not connect representative institutions with the German
barbarians) would yet be substantially true.

Now the moment documents began to be seriously examined and compared, the
moment modern research began to approach some sort of finality in the study
of that period wherein the United Roman Empire of the West was replaced by
sundry local Kingdoms, students of history thenceforward (and in proportion
to their impartiality) became more and more convinced that the whole of
this anti-Catholic attitude reposed upon nothing more than assertion.

There was no conquest of effete Mediterranean peoples by vigorous
barbarians. The vast number of barbarians who lived as slaves within the
Empire, the far smaller number who were pressed or hired into the military
service of the Empire, the still smaller number which entered the Empire as
marauders, during the weakness of the Central Government towards its end,
were not of the sort which this anti-Catholic theory, mistaking its desires
for realities, pre-supposed.

The barbarians were not "Germans" (a term difficult to define), they were
of very mixed stocks which, if we go by speech (a bad guide to race) were
some of them Germanic, some Slav, some even Mongol, some Berber, some of
the old unnamed races: the Picts, for instance, and the dark men of the
extreme North and West.

They had no conspicuous respect for women of the sort which should produce
the chivalric ideal.

They were not free societies, but slave-owning societies.

They did not desire, attempt, or even dream, the destruction of the
Imperial power: that misfortune--which was gradual and never complete--in
so far as it came about at all, came about in spite of the barbarians and
not by their conscious effort.

They were not numerous; on the contrary, they were but handfuls of men,
even when they appeared as successful pillagers and raiders over the
frontiers. When they came in large numbers, they were wiped out.

They did not introduce any new institutions or any new ideas.

Again, you do not find, in that capital change from the old civilization to
the Dark Ages, that the rise of legend and of the romantic and adventurous
spirit (the sowing of the modern seed) coincides with places where the
great mass of barbaric slaves are settled, or where the fewer barbaric
pillagers or the regular barbaric soldiers in the Roman Army pass. Romance
appears hundreds of years later, and it _appears more immediately and
earliest in connection with precisely those districts in which the passage
of the few Teutonic, Slavonic and other barbarians had been least felt_.

There is no link between barbaric society and the feudalism of the Middle
Ages; there is no trace of such a link. There is, on the contrary, a very
definite and clearly marked historical sequence between Roman civilization
and the feudal system, attested by innumerable documents which, once read
and compared in their order, leave no sort of doubt that feudalism and the
medićval civilization repose on purely Roman origins.

In a word, the gradual cessation of central Imperial rule in Western
Europe, the failure of the power and habit of one united organization
seated in Rome to color, define and administrate the lives of men, was an
internal revolution; it did not come from without. It was a change from
within; it was nothing remotely resembling an external, still less a
barbaric, conquest from without.

All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old,
failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local government
subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five hundred years
supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of
central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality
began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry soldiers benefited by
the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the local "palaces" as they were
called, of Roman administration, secured such revenues as the remains of
Roman taxation could give them, and, conversely, had thrust upon them so
much of the duty of government as the decline of civilization could still
maintain. That is what happened, and that is all that happened.

As an historical phenomenon it is what I have called it--enormous. It most
vividly struck the imagination of men. The tremors and the occasional local
cataclysms which were the symptoms of this change of base from the old
high civilization to the Dark Ages, singularly impressed the numerous and
prolific writers of the time. Their terrors, their astonishment, their
speculations as to the result, have come down to us highly emphasized. We
feel after all those centuries the shock which was produced on the literary
world of the day by Alaric's sack of Rome, or by the march of the Roman
auxiliary troops called "Visigoths" through Gaul into Spain, or by the
appearance of the mixed horde called--after their leaders--"Vandals" in
front of Hippo in Africa. But what we do _not_ feel, what we do _not_
obtain from the contemporary documents, what was a mere figment of
the academic brain in the generation now just passing away, is that
anti-Catholic and anti-civilized bias which would represent the ancient
civilization as conquered by men of another and of a better stock who have
since developed the supreme type of modern civilization, and whose contrast
with the Catholic world and Catholic tradition is at once applauded as
the principle of life in Europe and emphasized as the fundamental fact in
European history.

The reader will not be content with a mere affirmation, though the
affirmation is based upon all that is worth counting in modern scholarship.
He will ask what, then, did really happen? After all, Alaric did sack Rome.
The Kings of the Franks were Belgian chieftains, probably speaking (at
first) Flemish as well as Latin. Those of the Burgundians were probably
men who spoke that hotchpotch of original barbaric, Celtic and Roman words
later called "Teutonic dialects," as well as Latin. The military officers
called (from the original recruitment of their commands) "Goths," both
eastern and western, were in the same case. Even that mixed mass of Slav,
Berber, escaped slaves and the rest which, from original leaders was called
in North Africa "Vandal," probably had some considerable German nucleus.

The false history has got superficial ground to work upon. Many families
whose origins came from what is now German-speaking Central Europe ruled in
local government during the transition, and distinct though small tribes,
mainly German in speech, survived for a short time in the Empire. Like all
falsehood, the falsehood of the "Teutonic theory" could not live without
an element of truth to distort, and it is the business of anyone who is
writing true history, even in so short an essay as this, to show what that
ground was and how it has been misrepresented.

In order to understand what happened we must first of all clearly represent
to ourselves the fact that the structure upon which our united civilization
had in its first five centuries reposed, was the _Roman Army_. By which I
do not mean that the number of soldiers was very large compared with the
civilian population, but that the organ which was vital in the State, the
thing that really counted, the institution upon which men's minds turned,
and which they thought of as the foundation of all, was the military
institution.

The original city-state of the Mediterranean broke down a little before the
beginning of our era.

When (as always ultimately happens in a complex civilization of many
millions) self-government had broken down, and when it was necessary,
after the desperate faction fights which that breakdown had produced,
to establish a strong centre of authority, the obvious and, as it were,
necessary person to exercise that authority (in a State constituted as was
the Roman State) was the Commander-in-Chief of the army; all that the word
"Emperor"--the Latin word _Imperator_--means, is a commander-in-chief.

It was the Army which made and unmade Emperors; it was the Army which
designed and ordered and even helped to construct the great roads of the
Empire. It was in connection with the needs of the Army that those roads
were traced. It was the Army which secured (very easily, for peace was
popular) the civil order of the vast organism. It was the Army especially
which guarded its frontiers against the uncivilized world without; upon
the edge of the Sahara and of the Arabian desert; upon the edge of the
Scotch mountains; upon the edge of the poor, wild lands between the Rhine
and Elbe. On those frontiers the garrisons made a sort of wall within
which wealth and right living could accumulate, outside which small and
impoverished bodies of men destitute of the arts (notably of writing) save
in so far as they rudely copied the Romans or were permeated by adventurous
Roman commerce, lived under conditions which, in the Celtic hills, we can
partially appreciate from the analogy of ancient Gaul and from tenacious
legends, but of which in the German and Slavonic sand-plains, marshes and
woods we know hardly anything at all.

Now this main instrument, the Roman Army--the instrument remember, which
not only preserved civil functions, but actually created the master of all
civic functions, the Government--went through three very clear stages of
change in the first four centuries of the Christian era--up to the year
A.D. 400 or so. And it is the transformation of the Roman Army during the
first four centuries which explains the otherwise inexplicable change
in society just afterwards, in the fifth and sixth centuries--that is,
from 400 to 600 A.D. The turn from the full civilization of Rome to the
beginning of the Dark Ages.

In its first stage, during the early Empire, just as the Catholic
Church was founded and was beginning to grow, the Roman Army was still
theoretically an army of true Roman citizens. [Footnote: A soldier was
still technically a citizen up to the very end. The conception of a soldier
as a citizen, the impossibility, for instance, of his being a slave, was
in the very bones of Roman thought. Even when the soldiers were almost
entirely recruited from barbarians, that is, from slave stock, the soldiers
themselves were free citizens always.]

As a matter of fact the Army was already principally professional, and
it was being recruited even in this first stage very largely from the
territories Rome had conquered.

Thus we have Cćsar raising a Gallic legion almost contemporaneous with his
conquest of Gaul. But for a long time after, well into the Christian era,
the Army was conceived of in men's minds as a sort of universal institution
rooted in the citizenship which men were still proud to claim throughout
the Empire, and which belonged only to a minority of its inhabitants; for
the majority were slaves.

In the second phase (which corresponded with the beginning of a decline in
letters and in the arts, which carries us through the welter of civil wars
in the third century and which introduces the remodeled Empire at their
close) the Army was becoming purely professional and at the same time drawn
from whatever was least fortunate in Roman society. The recruitment of it
was treated much after the fashion of a tax; the great landed proprietors
(who, by a parallel development in the decline, were becoming the chief
economic feature in the Roman State) were summoned to send a certain number
of recruits from their estates.

Slaves would often be glad to go, for, hard as were the conditions of
military service, it gave them civic freedom, certain honors, a certain
pay, and a future for their children. The poorer freed men would also go at
the command of their lord (though only of course a certain proportion--for
the conscription was very light compared with modern systems, and was made
lighter by reënlistment, long service, absence of reserves, and the use of
veterans).

During this second stage, while the Army was becoming less and less civic,
and more and more a profession for the destitute and the unfortunate, the
unpopularity and the ignorance of military service among the rest of the
population, was increasing. The average citizen grew more and more divorced
from the Army and knew less and less of its conditions. He came to regard
it partly as a necessary police force or defence of his frontiers, partly
as a nuisance to him at home. He also came to regard it as something with
which he had nothing to do. It lived a life separate from himself. It
governed (through the power of the Emperor, its chief); it depended on, and
also supported or re-made, the Imperial Court. But it was external, at the
close of the Empire, to general society.

Recruiting was meanwhile becoming difficult, and _the habit grew up of
offering the hungry tribes outside the pale of the Empire the advantage of
residence within it on condition that they should serve as Roman soldiers_.

The conception of territories within the Empire which were affiliated and
allied to it rather than absorbed by it, was a very ancient one. That
conception had lost reality so far as the old territories it had once
affected were concerned; but it paved the way for the parallel idea of
troops affiliated and allied to the Roman Army, part of that army in
discipline and organization, yet possessed of considerable freedom within
their own divisions.

Here we have not only a constant and increasing use of barbaric troops
drafted into the regular corps, but also _whole bodies which were more
and more frequently accepted "en bloc" and, under their local leaders, as
auxiliaries to the Roman forces_.

Some such bodies appear to have been settled upon land on the frontiers,
to others were given similar grants at very great distances from the
frontiers. Thus we have a small body of German barbarians settled at Rennes
in Brittany. And, again, within the legions (who were all technically of
Roman citizenship and in theory recruited from the full civilization of
Rome), the barbarian who happened to find himself within that civilization
tended more than did his non-barbarian fellow citizen (or fellow slave)
to accept military service. He would nearly always be poorer; he would,
unless his experience of civilization was a long one, feel the hardship
of military service less; and in this second phase, while the army was
becoming more sedentary (more attached, that is, to particular garrisons),
more permanent, more of an hereditary thing handed on from father to son,
and distinguished by the large element of what we call "married quarters,"
it was also becoming more and more an army of men who, whether as
auxiliaries or as true Roman soldiers, were in _blood, descent, and to some
extent in manners and less in language, barbarians_. There were negroes,
there were probably Celts, there were Slavs, Mongols of the Steppes, more
numerous Germans, and so forth.

In the third stage, which is the stage that saw the great convulsion of the
fifth century, the army though not yet wholly barbaric, had already become
in its most vital part, barbaric. It took its orders, of course, wholly
from the Roman State, but great groups within it were only partly even
Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking, and were certainly regarded both by
themselves and by their Roman masters as non-Roman in manners and in blood.

It must most clearly be emphasized that not only no such thought as an
attack upon the Empire entered the heads of these soldiers, but that the
very idea of it would have been inconceivable to them. Had you proposed it
they would not even have known what you meant. That a particular section
of the army should fight against a particular claimant to the Empire (and
therefore and necessarily in favor of some other claimant) they thought
natural enough; but to talk of an attack upon the Empire itself would have
seemed to them like talking of an attack upon bread and meat, air, water
and fire. The Empire was the whole method and meaning of their lives.

At intervals the high and wealthy civilization of the Roman Empire was,
of course, subjected to attempted pillage by small and hungry robber bands
without its boundaries, but that had nothing to do with the barbaric
recruitment of the Roman Army save when such bands were caught and
incorporated. The army was always ready at a moment's order to cut such
foreign raiders to pieces--and always did so successfully.

The portion of the Army chosen to repel, cut up, and sell into slavery a
marauding band of Slavs or Germans or Celts, always had Celts or Slavs or
Germans present in large numbers among its own soldiery. But no tie of
blood interfered with the business. To consider such a thing would have
been inconceivable to the opponents on either side. The distinction was not
between speech and speech, still less between vague racial customs. It was
a distinction between the Imperial Service on the one side, against the
outer, unrecognized, savage on the other.

As the machinery of Government grew weak through old age, and as the
recruitment of the Army from barbarians and the large proportion of
auxiliary regular forces began to weaken that basis of the whole State,
the tendency of pillaging bands to break in past the frontiers into the
cultivated lands and the wealth of the cities, grew greater and greater;
but it never occurred to them to attack the Empire as such. All they wanted
was permission to enjoy the life which was led within it, and to abandon
the wretched conditions to which they were compelled outside its
boundaries.

Sometimes they were transformed from pillagers to soldiers by an offer
extended by the Roman authorities; more often they snatched a raid when
there was for the moment no good garrison in their neighborhood. Then a
Roman force would march against them, and if they were not quick at getting
away would cut them to pieces. But with the progress of the central decline
the attacks of these small bands on the frontiers became more frequent.
Frontier towns came to regard such attacks as a permanent peril and to
defend themselves against them. Little groups of raiders would sometimes
traverse great districts from end to end, and whether in the form of
pirates from the sea or of war bands on land, the ceaseless attempts
to enjoy or to loot (but principally to enjoy) the conditions that
civilization offered, grew more and more persistent.

It must not be imagined, of course, that civilization had not occasionally
to suffer then, as it had had to suffer at intervals for a thousand years
past, the attacks of really large and organized barbaric armies. [Footnote:
For instance, a century and a half before the breakdown of central
Government, the Goths, a barbaric group, largely German, had broken in and
ravaged in a worse fashion than their successors in the fifth century.]
Thus in the year 404, driven by the pressure of an Eastern invasion upon
their own forests, a vast barbaric host under one Radagasius pushed into
Italy. The men bearing arms alone were estimated (in a time well used to
soldiery and to such estimates) at 200,000.

But those 200,000 were wiped out. The barbarians were always wiped out when
they attempted to come as conquerors. Stilicho (a typical figure, for he
was himself of barbarian descent, yet in the regular Roman service) cut
to pieces one portion of them, the rest surrendered and were sold off and
scattered as slaves.

Immediately afterwards you have a violent quarrel between various soldiers
who desire to capture the Imperial power. The story is fragmentary and
somewhat confused: now one usurper is blamed, and now another, but the fact
common to all is that with the direct object of usurping power a Roman
General calls in barbarian bands of pillagers (all sorts of small groups,
Franks, Suevians, Vandals) to cross the Rhine into Gaul, _not_ as barbarian
"conquerors," but as allies, to help in a civil war.

The succeeding generation has left us ample evidence of the results. It
presents us with documents that do not give a picture of a ruined province
by any means; only of a province which has been traversed in certain
directions by the march of barbarian robber bands, who afterwards
disappeared, largely in fighting among themselves.

We have, later, the very much more serious business of the Mongol Attila
and his Huns, leading the great outer mass of Germans and Slavs into the
Empire on an enormous raid. In the middle of the fifth century, fifty years
after the destruction of Radagasius, these Asiatics, leading more numerous
other barbaric dependents of theirs from the Germanies and the eastern
Slavonic lands, penetrated for two brief moments into Northern Italy and
Eastern Gaul. The end of that business--infinitely graver though it was
than the raids that came before it--is just what one might have expected.
The regular and auxiliary disciplined forces of the Empire destroy the
barbarian power near Chalons, and the last and worst of the invasions is
wiped out as thoroughly as had been all the others.

In general, the barbaric eruptions into the Empire failed wholly as soon as
Imperial troops could be brought up to oppose them.

What, then, were the supposed barbaric successes? What was the real nature
of the action of Alaric, for instance, and his sack of Rome; and how,
later, do we find local "kings" in the place of the Roman Governors?

The real nature of the action of men like Alaric is utterly different from
the imaginary picture with which the _old_ picturesque popular history
recently provided us. That false history gives us the impression of a
barbarian Chieftain gathering his Clan to a victorious assault on Rome.
Consider the truth upon Alaric and contrast it with this imaginary picture.

Alaric was a young noble of Gothic blood, but from birth a Roman; at
eighteen years of age he was put by the Court in command of a small Roman
auxiliary force _originally_ recruited from the Goths. He was as much a
Roman officer, as incapable of thinking of himself in any other terms
than those of the Roman Army, as any other one of his colleagues about
the throne. He had his commission from the Emperor Theodosius, and when
Theodosius marched into Gaul against the usurper Eugenius, he counted
Alaric's division as among the most faithful of his Army.

It so happened, moreover, that those few original auxiliaries--mainly Goths
by race--were nearly all destroyed in the campaign. Alaric survived. The
remnant of his division was recruited, we know not how, but probably from
all kinds of sources, to its old strength. It was still called "Gothic,"
though now of the most mixed origin, and it was still commanded by himself
in his character of a Roman General.

Alaric, after this service to the Emperor, was rewarded by further military
dignities in the Roman military hierarchy. He was ambitious of military
titles and of important command, as are all soldiers.

Though still under twenty years of age and only a commander of auxiliaries,
he asks for the title of _Magister Militum_, with the dignity which
accompanied that highest of military posts. The Emperor refuses it. One of
the Ministers thereupon begins to plot with Alaric, and suggests to him
that he might gather other auxiliary troops under his command, and make
things uncomfortable for his superiors. Alaric rebels, marches through the
Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and Greece, and down into the Peloponesus;
the regulars march against him (according to some accounts) and beat him
back into Albania.

There ends his first adventure. It is exactly like that of a hundred
other Roman generals in the past, and so are his further adventures. He
remains in Albania at the head of his forces, and makes peace with the
Government--still enjoying a regular commission from the Emperor.

He next tries a new adventure to serve his ambition in Italy, but his army
is broken to pieces at Pollentia by the armies in Italy--under a general,
by the way, as barbaric in mere descent as was Alaric, but, like Alaric,
wholly Roman in training and ideas.

The whole thing is a civil war between various branches of the Roman
service, and is motived, like all the Roman civil wars for hundreds of
years before, by the ambitions of generals.

Alaric does not lose his commission even after his second adventure; he
begins to intrigue between the Western and Eastern heads of the Roman
Empire. The great invasion under Radagasius interrupts this civil war. That
invasion was for Alaric, of course, as for any other Roman officer, an
invasion of barbaric enemies. That these enemies should be called by this
or that barbaric name is quite indifferent to him. They come from outside
the Empire and are therefore, in his eyes, cattle. He helps to destroy
them, and destroyed they are--promptly and thoroughly.

When the brief invasion was over, Alaric had the opportunity to renew the
civil wars within the Empire, and asked for certain arrears of pay that
were due to him. Stilicho, the great rival general (himself, by the way,
a Vandal in descent), admitted Alaric's right to arrears of pay, but just
at that moment there occurred an obscure palace intrigue which was based,
like all the real movements of the time, on differences of religion, not of
race. Stilicho, suspected of attempting to restore paganism, is killed. In
the general confusion certain of the families of the auxiliaries garrisoned
in Italy are massacred by the non-military population. As Alaric is
a general in partial rebellion against the Imperial authority, these
auxiliaries join him.

The total number of Alaric's men was at this moment very small; they were
perhaps 30,000. There was no trace of nationality about them. They were
simply a body of discontented soldiers; they had not come from across the
frontier; they were not invaders; they were part of the long established
and regular garrisons of the Empire; and, for that matter, many garrisons
and troops of equally barbaric origin, sided with the regular authorities
in the quarrel. Alaric marches on Rome with this disaffected Roman Army,
claiming that he has been defrauded of his due in salary, and leaning upon
the popularity of the dead Stilicho, whose murder he says he will avenge.
His thirty thousand claim the barbarian slaves within the city, and certain
sums of money which had been, the pretext and motive of his rebellion.

As a result of this action the Emperor promises Alaric his regular salary
as a general, and a district which he may not only command, but plant with
his few followers. Even in the height of his success, Alaric again demands
the thing which was nearest his heart, the supreme and entirely Roman
title of _Magister Militum_, the highest post in the hierarchy of military
advancement. But the Emperor again refuses to give that. Alaric again
marches on Rome, a Roman officer followed by a rebellious Roman Army.
He forces the Senate to make Attalus nominal Emperor of the West, and
Attalus to give him the desired title, his very craving for which is most
significant of the Roman character of the whole business. Alaric then
quarrels with his puppet, deprives him of the insignia of the Empire, and
sends them to Honorius; quarrels again with Honorius, reënters Rome and
pillages it, marches to Southern Italy, dies, and his small army is
dismembered.

There is the story of Alaric as it appears from documents and as it was in
reality. There is the truth underlying the false picture with which most
educated men were recently provided by the anti-Roman bias of recent
history.

Certainly the story of Alaric's discontent with his salary and the terms of
his commission, his raiding marches, his plunder of the capital, shows how
vastly different was the beginning of the fifth century from the society
of three hundred years before. It is symptomatic of the change, and it
could only have been possible at a moment when central government was
at last breaking down. But it is utterly different in motive and in
social character from the vague customary conception of a vast barbarian
"invasion," led by a German "war lord" pouring over the Alps and taking
Roman society and its capital by storm. It has no relation to such a
picture.

If all this be true of the dramatic adventure of Alaric, which has so
profoundly affected the imagination of mankind, it is still truer of the
other contemporary events which false history might twist into a "conquest"
of the Empire by the barbarian.

There was no such conquest. All that happened was an internal
transformation of Roman society, in which the chief functions of local
government fell to the heads of local auxiliary forces in the Roman
Army. As these auxiliary forces were now mainly barbaric, so were the
personalities of the new local governors.

I have only dealt with the particular case of Alaric because it is the
most familiar, and the most generally distorted: a test, as it were, of my
theme.

But what is true of him is true of all other auxiliaries in the
Armies--even of the probably Slavonic Vandals. These did frankly loot a
province--North Africa--and they (and they alone of the auxiliary troops)
did revolt against the Imperial system and defy it for a century: but
the Vandals themselves were already, before their adventure, a part of
the Imperial forces; they were but a nucleus for a mixed host made up of
all the varied elements of rebellion present in the country; and their
experiment in separation went down at last forever before the Imperial
armies. Meanwhile the North African society on which the rebels lived, and
which, with their various recruits--Moors, escaped slaves, criminals--they
maladministered and half ruined, was and remained Roman.

In the case of local Italian government the case is quite clear. There was
never any question of "invasion" or "conquest."

Odoacer held a regular Roman commission; he was a Roman soldier: Theodoric
supplanted him by leave of, and actually under orders from, the Emperor.
The last and greatest example, the most permanent, Gaul, tells the same
story. The Burgundians are auxiliaries regularly planted after imploring
the aid of the Empire and permission to settle. Clovis, the Belgian
Fleming, fights no Imperial Army. His forebears were Roman officials: his
little band of perhaps 8,000 men was victorious in a small and private
civil war which made him Master in the North over other rival generals. He
defended the Empire against the Eastern barbaric German tribes. He rejoiced
in the titles of Consul and Patrician.

There was no destruction of Roman society, there was no breach of
continuity in the main institutions of what was now the Western Christian
world; there was no considerable admixture (in these local civil wars)
of German, Slav, or outer Celtic blood--no appreciable addition at least
to the large amount of such blood which, through the numerous soldiers
and much more numerous slaves, had already been incorporated with the
population of the Roman world.

But in the course of this transformation in the fifth and sixth centuries
local government _did_ fall into the hands of those who happened to
command the main local forces of the Roman Army, and these were by descent
barbarian because the Army had become barbarian in its recruitment.

Why local government gradually succeeded the old centralized Imperial
Government, and how, in consequence, there slowly grew up the modern
nations, we will next examine.




IV

THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS


European civilization, which the Catholic Church has made and makes, is by
that influence still one. Its unity now (as for three hundred years past)
is suffering from the grievous and ugly wound of the Reformation. The
earlier wounds have been healed; that modern wound we hope may still be
healed--we hope so because the alternative is death. At any rate unity,
wounded or unwounded, is still the mark of Christendom.

That unity today falls into national groups. Those of the West in
particular are highly differentiated. Gaul (or France as we now call it)
is a separate thing. The Iberian or Spanish Peninsula (though divided into
five particular, and three main, regions, each with its language, of which
one, Portugal, is politically independent of the rest) is another. The old
European and Roman district of North Africa is but partially re-occupied by
European civilization. Italy has quite recently appeared as another united
national group. The Roman province of England has (south of the border)
formed one united nation for a longer period than any of the others. To
England Scotland has been added.

How did these modern nations arise in the transformation of the Roman
Empire from its old simple pagan condition to one complex Christian
civilization? How came there to be also nations exterior to the Empire; old
nations like Ireland, new nations like Poland? We must be able to answer
this question if we are to understand, not only that European civilization
has been continuous (that is, one in time as well as one in spirit and in
place), but also if we are to know _why_ and _how_ that continuity was
preserved. For one we are and will be, all Europeans. The moment something
threatens our common morals from within, we face it, however tardily. We
have forgotten what it is to feel a threat from without: but it may come.

We are already familiar with the old popular and false explanation of the
rise of the European nations. This explanation tells us that great numbers
of vigorous barbarians entered the Roman Empire, conquered it, established
themselves as masters, and parceled out its various provinces.

We have seen that such a picture is fantastic and, when it is accepted,
destroys a man's historic sense of Europe.

We have seen that the barbarians who burst through the defence of
civilization at various times (from before the beginnings of recorded
history; through the pagan period prefacing Our Lord's birth; during the
height of the Empire proper, in the third century; again in the fourth and
the fifth) never had the power to affect that civilization seriously, and
therefore were invariably conquered and easily absorbed. It was in the
natural course of things this should be so.

I say "in the natural course of things." Dreadful as the irruption of
barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale,
the _conquest_ of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily
impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to _destroy_ the civilization
they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it. But it is
inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner upon civilized
men. Now to impose one's view and manner, _dare leges_ (to give laws), is
to conquer.

Moreover, save under the most exceptional conditions, a civilized army
with its training, discipline and scientific traditions of war, can always
ultimately have the better of a horde. In the case of the Roman Empire
the armies of civilization did, as a fact, always have the better of the
barbarian hordes. Marius had the better of the barbarians a hundred years
before Our Lord was born, though their horde was not broken until it had
suffered the loss of 200,000 dead. Five hundred years later the Roman
armies had the better of another similar horde of barbarians, the host of
Radagasius, in their rush upon Italy; and here again the vast multitude
lost some 200,000 killed or sold into slavery. We have seen how the Roman
generals, Alaric and the others, destroyed them.

But we have also seen that within the Roman Army itself certain auxiliary
troops (which may have preserved to some slight extent traces of their
original tribal character, and probably preserved for a generation or so
a mixture of Roman speech, camp slang, and the original barbaric tongues)
assumed greater and greater importance in the Roman Army towards the end
of the imperial period--that is, towards the end of the fourth, and in the
beginning of the fifth, centuries (say, 350-450).

We have seen why these auxiliary forces continued to increase in importance
within the Roman Army, and we have seen how it was only as Roman soldiers,
and as part of the regular forces of civilization, that they had that
importance, or that their officers and generals, acting as _Roman_ officers
and generals, could play the part they did.

The heads of these auxiliary forces were invariably men trained as Romans.
They knew of no life save that civilized life which the Empire enjoyed.
They regarded themselves as soldiers and politicians of the State _in_
which--not _against_ which--they warred. They acted wholly within the
framework of Roman things. The auxiliaries had no memory or tradition of
a barbaric life beyond the Empire, though their stock in some part sprang
from it; they had no liking for barbarism, and no living communication with
it. The auxiliary soldiers and their generals lived and thought entirely
within those imperial boundaries which guarded paved roads, a regular and
stately architecture, great and populous cities, the vine, the olive,
the Roman law and the bishoprics of the Catholic Church. Outside was a
wilderness with which they had nothing to do.

Armed with this knowledge (which puts an end to any fantastic theory of
barbarian "conquest"), let us set out to explain that state of affairs
which a man born, say, a hundred years after the last of the mere raids
into the Empire was destroyed under Radagasius, would have observed in
middle age.

Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, lived and
wrote his classical work at such a date after Alaric's Roman adventure and
Radagasius' defeat that the life of a man would span the distance between
them; it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those events and his
maturity. A grandson of his would correspond to such a spectator as we are
imagining; a grandson of that generation might be born before the year
500. Such a man would have stood towards Radagasius' raid, the last futile
irruption of the barbarian, much as men, old today, in England, stand to
the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War, to the second Napoleon in France, to
the Civil War in the United States. Had a grandson of Sidonius traveled in
Italy, Spain and Gaul in his later years, this is what he would have seen:

In all the great towns Roman life was going on as it had always gone on,
so far as externals were concerned. The same Latin speech, now somewhat
degraded, the same dress, the same division into a minority of free men,
a majority of slaves, and a few very rich masters round whom not only the
slaves but the mass of the free men also were grouped as dependents.

In every city, again, he would have found a Bishop of the Catholic Church,
a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and headship to be
at Rome. Everywhere religion, and especially the settlement of divisions
and doubts in religion, would have been the main popular preoccupation. And
everywhere _save in Northern Gaul_ he would have perceived small groups
of men, wealthy, connected with government, often bearing barbaric names,
and sometimes (perhaps) still partly acquainted with barbaric tongues. Now
these few men were as a rule of a special set in religion. They were called
_Arians_; heretics who differed in religion from the mass of their fellow
citizens very much as the minority of Protestants in an Irish county today
differ from the great mass of their Catholic fellows; and that was a point
of capital importance.

The little provincial courts were headed by men who, though Christian
(with the Mass, the Sacraments and all Christian things), were yet out of
communion with the bulk of their officials, and all their taxpayers. They
had inherited that odd position from an accident in the Imperial history.
At the moment when their grandfathers had received Baptism the Imperial
Court had supported this heresy. They had come, therefore, by family
tradition, to regard their separate sect (with its attempt to rationalize
the doctrine of the Incarnation) as a "swagger." They thought it an odd
title to eminence. And this little vanity had two effects. It cut them off
from the mass of their fellow citizens in the Empire. It made their tenure
of power uncertain and destined to disappear very soon at the hands of
men in sympathy with the great Catholic body--the troops led by the local
governors of Northern France.

We shall return to this matter of Arianism. But just let us follow the
state of society as our grandson of Sidonius would have seen it at the
beginning of the Dark Ages.

The armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he traveled would have
been rare; their accoutrements, their discipline, their words of command,
were still, though in a degraded form, those of the old Roman Army. There
had been no breach in the traditions of that Army or in its corporate life.
Many of the bodies he met would still have borne the old imperial insignia.

The money which he handled and with which he paid his bills at the inns,
was stamped with the effigy of the reigning Emperor at Byzantium, or one of
his predecessors, just as the traveler in a distant British colony today,
though that province is virtually independent, will handle coins stamped
with the effigies of English Kings. But though the coinage was entirely
imperial, he would, upon a passport or a receipt for toll and many another
official document he handled, often see side by side with and subordinate
to the imperial name, the name of _the chief of the local government_.

This phrase leads me to a feature in the surrounding society which we must
not exaggerate, but which made it very different from that united and
truly "Imperial" form of government which had covered all civilization two
hundred to one hundred years before.

_The descendants of those officers who from two hundred to one hundred
years before had only commanded regular or auxiliary forces in the Roman
Army, were now seated as almost independent local administrators in the
capitals of the Roman provinces_.

They still thought of themselves, in 550, say, as mere provincial powers
within the one great Empire of Rome. But there was now no positive central
power remaining in Rome to control them. The central power was far off in
Constantinople. It was universally accepted, but it made no attempt to act.

Let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some commerce which brought
him to the centres of local government throughout the Western Empire.
Let him have to visit Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, Arles. He has, let us say,
successfully negotiated some business in Spain, which has necessitated
his obtaining official documents. He must, that is, come into touch with
_officials_ and with the actual _Government_ in Spain. Two hundred years
before he would have seen the officials of, and got his papers from, a
government directly dependent upon Rome. The name of the Emperor alone
would have appeared on all the papers and his effigy on the seals. Now,
in the sixth century, the papers are made out in the old official way
and (of course) in Latin, all the public forces are still Roman, all the
civilization has still the same unaltered Roman character; has anything
changed at all?

Let us see.

To get his papers in the Capital he will be directed to the "_Palatium_."
This word does not mean "Palace."

When we say "palace" today we mean the house in which lives the real or
nominal ruler of a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham Palace, St.
James' Palace, the Palace in Madrid, and so on.

But the original word _Palatium_ had a very different meaning in late Roman
society. It signified the _official seat_ of Government, and in particular
the centre from which the writs for Imperial taxation were issued, and to
which the proceeds of that taxation were paid. The name was originally
taken from the Palatine Hill in Rome, on which the Cćsars had their
private house. As the mask of private citizenship was gradually thrown
off by the Emperors, six hundred to five hundred years before, and as
the commanders-in-chief of the Roman Army became more and more true and
absolute sovereigns, their house became more and more the official centre
of the Empire.

The term "_Palatium_" thus became consecrated to a particular use. When the
centre of Imperial power was transferred to Byzantium the word "_Palatium_"
followed it; and at last it was applied to _local centres_ as well as to
the Imperial city. In the laws of the Empire then, in its dignities and
honors, in the whole of its official life, the _Palatium_ means the machine
of government, local or imperial. Such a traveler as we have imagined in
the middle of the sixth century comes, then, to that Spanish _Palatium_
from which, throughout the five centuries of Imperial rule, the Spanish
Peninsular had been locally governed. What would he find?

He would find, to begin with, a great staff of clerks and officials, of
exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the place, drawing up the
same sort of documents as they had drawn up for generations, using certain
fixed formulć, and doing everything in the Latin tongue. No local dialect
was yet of the least importance. But he would also find that the building
was used for acts of authority, and that these acts were performed in the
name of a _certain person_ (who was no longer the old Roman Governor) _and
his Council_. It was this local person's name, rather than the Emperor's,
which usually--or at any rate more and more frequently--appeared on the
documents.

Let us look closely at this new person seated in authority over Spain, and
at his Council: for from such men as he, and from the districts they ruled,
the nations of our time and their royal families were to spring.

The first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this
person who governed Spain, would be that he still had all the insignia and
manner of Roman Government.

He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor's delegate had sat: the
provincial delegate of the Emperor. On official occasions he would wear the
official Roman garments: the orb and the sceptre were already his symbols
(we may presume) as they had been those of the Emperor and the Emperor's
local subordinates before him. But in two points this central official
differed from the old local Governor whom he exactly succeeded, and upon
whose machinery of taxation he relief for power.

These two points were, first, that he was surrounded by a very powerful and
somewhat jealous body of Great Men; secondly, that he did not habitually
give himself an imperial Roman title, but was called _Rex_.

Let us consider these points separately.

As to the first point, the Emperor in Byzantium, and before that in Rome or
at Ravenna, worked, as even absolute power must work, through a multitude
of men. He was surrounded by high dignitaries, and there devolved from
him a whole hierarchy of officials, with the most important of whom
he continually consulted. But the Emperor had not been officially and
regularly bound in with such a Council. His formulć of administration were
personal formulć. Now and then he mentioned his great officials, but he
only mentioned them if he chose.

This new local person, who had been very gradually and almost unconsciously
substituted for the old Roman Governors, the _Rex_, was, on the contrary,
a part of his own Council, and all his formulć of administration mentioned
the Council as his coadjutors and assessors in administration. This was
necessary above all (a most important point) in anything that regarded the
public funds.

It must not be imagined for a moment that the _Rex_ issued laws or edicts,
or (what was much more common and much more vital) levied taxation under
the dominion of, or subject to the consent of, these great men about him.
On the contrary, he spoke as absolutely as ever the Imperial Governors had
done in the past, and indeed he could not do otherwise because the whole
machinery he had inherited presupposed absolute power. But some things
were already said to be done "with" these great men: and it is of capital
importance that we should note this word "with." The phrases of the
official documents from that time run more and more in one of half-a-dozen
regular formulć, all of which are based upon this idea of the Council
and are in general such words as these: "So and so, _Rex_, ordered and
commanded (_with his chief men_) that so and so ... should be done."

As to the second point: we note the change of title. The authority of the
Palatium is a _Rex_; not a Legate nor a Governor, nor a man sent from the
Emperor, nor a man directly and necessarily nominated by him, but a _Rex_.
Now what is the meaning of that word _Rex_?

It is usually translated by our word "King." But it does not here mean
anything like what our word "King" means when we apply it today--or as we
have applied it for many centuries. It does not mean the ruler of a large
independent territory. It means a combination of two things when it is
used to name these local rulers in the later Roman Empire. It means (1)
The _chieftain_ of an auxiliary _group of soldiers_ who holds an Imperial
commission: and it means (2) That man acting as a local governor.

Centuries and centuries before, indeed a thousand years before, the word
_Rex_ had meant the chieftain of the little town and petty surrounding
district of Rome or of some similar neighboring and small state. It had in
the Latin language always retained some such connotation. The word "_Rex_"
was often used in Latin literature as we use the word "King" in English:
_i.e._, to describe the head of a state great or small. But as applied to
the local rulers of the fifth century in Western Europe, it was not so
used. It meant, as I have said, Chieftain or Chief officer of auxiliaries.
A _Rex_ was not then, in Spain, or in Gaul, a King in our modern sense of
the word: he was only the military head of a particular armed force. He
was originally the commander (hereditary or chosen or nominated by the
Emperor) of an auxiliary force serving as part of the Roman Army. Later,
when these troops--originally recruited perhaps from some one barbaric
district--changed by slow degrees into a body half police, half noble,
their original name would extend to the whole local army. The "Rex" of,
say, Batavian auxiliaries, the commander of the Batavian Corps, would
probably be a man of Batavian blood, with hereditary position and would be
called "_Rex Bataviorum_." Afterwards, when the recruiting was mixed, he
still kept that title and later still, when the _Batavii_, as such, had
disappeared, his fixed title would remain.

There was no similarity possible between the word _Rex_ and the word
_Imperator_, any more than there is between the words "Miners' Union" or
"Trade Conference" and the word "England." There was, of course, no sort
of equality. A Roman General in the early part of the process planning a
battle would think of a _Rex_ as we think of a Divisionary General. He
might say: "I shall put my regulars here in the centre. My auxiliaries
(Huns or Goths or Franks or what not) I shall put here. Send for their
'Rex' and I will give him his orders."

A _Rex_ in this sense was a subject and often an unimportant subject of
the _Imperator_ or Emperor: the _Imperator_ being, as we remember, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Army, upon which institution the Roman
State or Empire or civilization had depended for so many centuries.

When the Roman Army began to add to itself auxiliary troops (drilled of
course after the Roman fashion and forming one body with the Roman forces,
but contracted for "in bulk," as it were) the chieftains of these barbaric
and often small bodies were called in the official language, _Reges_. Thus
Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, was the _Rex_ of his officially
appointed auxiliary force; and since the nucleus of that force had _once_
been a small body of Goths, and since Alaric held his position as an
officer of that auxiliary force because he had once been, by inheritance,
a chieftain of the Goths, the word _Rex_ was attached to his Imperial
Commission in the Roman Army, and there was added to it the name of that
particular barbaric tribe with which his command had originally been
connected. He was _Rex_ of the Roman auxiliary troops called "Goths."
The "_Rex_" in Spain was "_Rex Gotorum_," not "_Rex Hispanić_"--that was
altogether a later idea. The Rex in Northern France was not _Rex Gallić_,
he was "_Rex Francorum_." In each case he was the _Rex_ of the particular
auxiliary troop from which his ancestors--sometimes generations before--had
originally drawn their Imperial Commission and their right to be officers
in the Roman Army.

Thus you will have the _Rex Francorum_, or King of the Franks, so styled
in the Palatium at Paris, as late as, say, 700 A.D. Not because any body
of "Franks" still survived as a separate corps--they had been but a couple
of regiments or so [Footnote: We have documentary record. The greater
part of the Frankish auxiliaries under Clovis were baptized with their
General. They came to 4,000 men.] two hundred years before and had long
disappeared--but because the original title had derived from a Roman
auxiliary force of Franks.

In other words, the old Roman local legislative and taxing power, the
reality of which lay in the old surviving Roman machinery of a hierarchy of
officials with their titles, writs, etc., was vested in the hands of a man
called "_Rex_," that is, "Commander" of such and such an auxiliary force;
Commander of the Franks, for instance, or Commander of the Goths. He still
commanded in the year 550 a not very large military force on which local
government depended, and in this little army the barbarians were still
probably predominant because, as we have seen, towards the end of the
Empire the stuff of the army had become barbaric and the armed force was
mainly of barbaric recruitment. But that small military force was also,
and as certainly, very mixed indeed; many a slave or broken Roman freedman
would enlist, for it had privileges and advantages of great value;
[Footnote: Hence the "leges" or codes specially regulating the status of
these Roman troops and called in documents the laws of the "Goths" or
"Burgundians," as the case may he. There is a trace of old barbaric customs
in some of these, sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage; but the mass
of them are obviously Roman privileges.] no one cared in the least whether
the members of the armed forces which sustained society were Roman, Gallic,
Italian or German in racial origin. They were of all races and origins.
Very shortly after--by, say, 600, at latest--the Army had become a
universal rough levy of all sorts and kinds, and the restriction of race
was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging by hereditary right to
certain families and called their "laws."

Again, there was no conception of rebellion against the Empire in the mind
of a _Rex_. All these _Reges_ without exception held their military office
and power originally by a commission from the Empire. All of them derived
their authority from men who had been regularly established as Imperial
functionaries. When the central power of the Emperor had, as a fact, broken
down, the _Rex_ as a fact administered the whole machinery without control.

But no _Rex_ ever tried to emancipate himself from the Empire or warred
for independence against the Emperor. The _Rex_, the local man, undertook
all government simply because the old Government above him, the central
Government, had failed. No _Rex_ ever called himself a local _Imperator_ or
dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the most significant thing in
all the transition between the full civilization of the old Empire and the
Dark Ages. The original Roman armies invading Gaul, Spain, the western
Germanies and Hungary, fought to conquer, to absorb, to be masters of and
makers of the land they seized. No local governor of the later transition,
no _Rex_ of Vandal, Goth, Hun, Frank or Berber or Moor troop ever dreamt
of such a thing. He might fight another local _Rex_ to get part of his
taxing-power or his treasure. He might take part in the great religious
quarrels (as in Africa) and act tyrannically against a dissident majority,
but to fight against the _Empire_ as such or to attempt _conquest_ and
_rule_ over a "subject population" would have meant nothing to him; in
theory the Empire was still under one control.

There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers of the machine of
government during the period of its degradation and transformation, which
followed the breakdown of central authority. Clovis, in the north of
France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles, Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild
later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them men who had stepped into the
shoes of an unbroken local Roman administration, who worked entirely by it,
and whose machinery of administration wherever they went was called by the
Roman and official name of _Palatium_.

Their families were originally of barbaric stock: they had for their small
armed forces a military institution descended and derived from the Roman
auxiliary forces; often, especially in the early years of their power, they
spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue [Footnote: The barbaric dialects
outside the Empire were already largely latinized through commerce with
the Empire and by its influence, and, of course, what we call "Teutonic
Languages" are in reality half Roman, long before we get our first full
documents in the eighth and ninth centuries.] more easily than pure Latin;
but every one of them was a soldier of the declining Empire and regarded
himself as a part of it, not as even conceivably an enemy of it.

When we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those
changes of frontier which make so great a show in historical atlases.

The _Rex_ of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his
"kingdom" between two sons. What does that mean? Not that a nation with
its customs and its whole form of administration was suddenly divided into
two, still less that there has been what today we call "annexation" or
"partition" of states. It simply means that the honor and advantage of
administration are divided between the two heirs, who take, the one the
one area, the other the other, over which to gather taxes and to receive
personal profit. It must always be remembered that the personal privilege
so received was very small in comparison with the total revenue to be
administrated, and that the vast mass of public work as carried on by the
judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and so forth, continued to be quite
impersonal and fundamentally imperial. This governmental world of clerks
and civil servants lived its own life and was only in theory dependent upon
the _Rex_, and the _Rex_ was no more than the successor of the chief local
Roman official. [Footnote: Our popular historical atlases render a very bad
service to education by their way of coloring these districts as though
they were separate modern nations. The real division right up to full tide
of feudalism was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, Eastern and
Western: Greek and Latin.]

The _Rex_, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior
Roman title, such as _Vir Illuster_, as an Englishman today might be called
"Sir Charles So and So" or "Lord So and So," never anything more; and often
(as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted directly from the Roman
Emperor a particular office, but observed the old popular Roman customs
such as, largesse and procession, upon his induction into that office.

Now why did not this man, this _Rex_, in Italy or Gaul or Spain, simply
remain in the position of local Roman Governor? One would imagine, if one
did not know more about that society, that he should have done this.

The small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain rapidly merged
into the body of the Empire, as had the infinitely larger mass of slaves
and colonists, equally barbarian in origin, for century after century
before that time. The body of civilization was one, and we wonder, at
first, why its moral unity did not continue to be represented by a central
Monarch. Though the civilization continued to decline, its forms should,
one would think, have remained unchanged and the theoretic attachment of
each of these subordinates to the Roman Emperor at Constantinople should
have endured indefinitely. As a fact, the memory of the old central
authority of the Emperor was gradually forgotten; the _Rex_ and his local
government as he got weaker also got more isolated. He came to coining his
own money, to treating directly as a completely independent ruler. At last
the idea of "kings" and "kingdoms" took shape in men's minds. Why?

The reason that the nature of authority very slowly changed, that the last
links with the Roman Empire of the East--that is, with the supreme head
at Constantinople--gradually dissolved in the West, and that the modern
_nation arose_ around these local governments of the _Reges_, is to be
found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men around the
_Rex_, with whom everything is done.

This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were
transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague
underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic,
Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners, and,
lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church.

On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners were
the reality of that time.

We have no statistics to go upon. But the facts of the time and the nature
of its institutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics. In Spain,
in Gaul, in Italy, as in Africa, economic power had concentrated into the
hands of exceedingly few men. A few hundred men and women, a few dozen
corporations (especially the episcopal sees) had come to own most of the
land on which these millions and millions lived; and, with the land, most
of the implements and of the slaves.

As to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared. By the
middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of unmixed
blood, but quite certainly none were purely barbaric. Lands waste or
confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of the
interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the _Palatium_,
which granted them out again (strictly under the eye of the Council of
Great Men) to new holders.

The few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the
"chieftain" of the auxiliary forces benefited largely; but the thing that
really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of these
immensely rich owners (which was mixed), nor their sense of race (which
simply did not exist), but the fact that they were so few. It explains both
what happened and what was to happen.

That a handful of men, for they were no more than a handful, should thus be
in control of the economic destinies of mankind--the result of centuries of
Roman development in that direction--is the key to all the material decline
of the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise, with an object lesson
for our own politics today.

The decline of the Imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary
concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It was these few
great Roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of the
new administrators, each new _Rex_, with a tradition of imperial power, not
a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name, and the armed
force which it connoted: everywhere the _Rex_ had to reckon with the
strength of highly concentrated wealth. This was the first element in that
standing "Council of Great Men" which was the mark of the time in every
locality and wore down the old official, imperial, absolute, local power.

There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important
element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it
consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

Every Roman city of that time had a principal personage in it, who knew its
life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else, power over
its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually administered its
affairs. That person was the Bishop.

Throughout Western Europe at that moment men's interest and preoccupation
was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion. The great duel
between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now decided, after two hard
centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter. The Catholic Church, from a
small but definite and very tenacious organization within the Empire, and
on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, _first_, to be the only group
of men which knew its own mind (200 A.D.); _next_ to be the official
religion (300 A.D.); _finally_ to be the cohesive political principle of
the great majority of human beings (400 A.D.).

The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for "creed" he
will read "capital," and for the "Faith," "industrial civilization." For
just as today men principally care for great fortunes, and in pursuit of
them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as unimportant
compared with such an object, the other businesses of our time, so the
men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the _unity_ and
_exactitude_ of religion. That the religion to which the Empire was now
converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, was their
one preoccupation. For _this_ they exiled themselves; for _this_ they would
and did run great risks; as minor to _this_ they sank all other things.

The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil and
economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a spirit, it
was only its leader. And in connection with that intense preoccupation
of men's minds, two factors already appear in the fourth century and are
increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. The first is the desire
that the living Church should be as free as possible; hence the Catholic
Church and its ministers everywhere welcome the growth of local as against
centralized power. They do so unconsciously but none the less strongly. The
second factor is Arianism: to which I now return.

Arianism, which both in its material success and in the length of its
duration, as well as in its concept of religion, and the character of
its demise, is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent
centuries, had sprung up as the official and fashionable Court heresy
opposed to the orthodoxy of the Church.

The Emperor's Court did indeed at last--after many variations--abandon it,
but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that Arianism
stood for the "wealthy" and "respectable" in life.

Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in the
Roman armies, the greater part (the "Goths," for instance, as the generic
term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning) had
received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources, and this
in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was "the thing." Just
as we see in eighteenth century Ireland settlers and immigrants accepting
Protestantism as "gentlemanly" or "progressive" (some there are so
provincial as still to feel thus), so the _Rex_ in Spain and the _Rex_ in
Italy had a family tradition; they, and the descendants of their original
companions, were of what had been the "court" and "upper class" way of
thinking. They were "Arians" and proud of it. The number of these powerful
heretics in the little local courts was small, but their irritant effect
was great.

It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.

No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the final
form of the Church.

The populace felt it in their bones that if Arianism conquered, Europe was
lost: for Arianism lacked vision. It was essentially a hesitation to accept
the Incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or later a denial
of the Sacrament, and at length it would have relapsed, as Protestantism
has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagination and of will would have
been fatal to a society materially decadent. Had Arianism triumphed, the
aged Society of Europe would have perished.

Now it so happened that of these local administrators or governors who were
rapidly becoming independent, and who were surrounded by a powerful court,
_one_ only was not Arian.

That one was the _Rex Francorum_ or chieftain of the little barbaric
auxiliary force of "Franks" which had been drawn into the Roman system
from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine. This body at the time when
the transformation took place between the old Imperial system and the
beginnings of the nations, had its headquarters in the Roman town of
Tournai.

A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and whom his parents probably
called by some such sound as Clodovig (they had no written language),
succeeded his father, a Roman officer, [Footnote: He was presumably head
of auxiliaries. His tomb has been found. It is wholly Roman.] in the
generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth century.
Unlike the other auxiliary generals he was pagan. When with other forces of
the Roman Army, he had repelled one of the last of the barbaric invaders
close to the frontier at the Roman town of Tolbiacum, and succeeded to the
power of local administration in Northern Gaul, he could not but assimilate
himself with the civilization wherein he was mixed, and he and most of his
small command were baptized. He had already married a Christian wife, the
daughter of the Burgundian _Rex_; but in any case such a conclusion was
inevitable.

The important historical point is not that he was baptized; for an
auxiliary general to be baptized was, by the end of the fifth century, as
much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader from Bombay, who has
become an English Lord or Baronet in London in our time, to wear trousers
and a coat. The important thing is that he was received and baptized by
_Catholics_ and not by _Arians_--in the midst of that enormous struggle.

Clodovicus--known in history as Clovis--came from a remote corner of
civilization. His men were untouched by the worldly attraction of Arianism;
they had no tradition that it was "the thing" or "smart" to adopt the old
court heresy which was offensive to the poorer mass of Europeans. When,
therefore, this _Rex Francorum_ was settled in Paris--about the year
500--and was beginning to administer local government in Northern Gaul, the
weight of his influence was thrown with the popular feeling and against the
Arian _Reges_ in Italy and Spain.

The new armed forces of the _Rex Francorum_, a general levy continuing the
old Roman tradition, settling things once and for all by battle carried
orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul. They turned the Arian _Rex_
out of Toulouse, they occupied the valley of the Rhone. For a moment it
seemed as though they would support the Catholic populace against the Arian
officials in Italy itself.

At any rate, their championship of popular and general religion against
the irritant, small, administrative Arian bodies in the _Palatium_ of
this region and of that, was a very strong lever which the people and the
Bishops at their head could not but use in favor of the _Rex Francorum's_
independent power. It was, therefore, indirectly, a very strong lever for
breaking up the now (500-600) decayed and almost forgotten administrative
unity of the Roman world.

Under such forces--the power of the Bishop in each town and district, the
growing independence of the few and immensely rich great landowners, the
occupation of the _Palatium_ and its official machinery by the chieftains
of the old auxiliary forces--Western Europe, slowly, very slowly, shifted
its political base.

For three generations the mints continued to strike money under the effigy
of the Emperor. The new local rulers never took, or dreamed of taking,
the Imperial title; the roads were still kept up, the Roman tradition in
the arts of life, though coarsened, was never lost. In cooking, dress,
architecture, law, and the rest, all the world was Roman. But the visible
unity of the Western or Latin Empire not only lacked a civilian and
military centre, but gradually lost all need for such a centre.

Towards the year 600, though our civilization was still one, as it had
always been, from the British Channel to the Desert of Sahara, and even
(through missionaries) extended its effect a few miles eastward of the old
Roman frontier beyond the Rhine, men no longer thought of that civilization
as a highly defined area within which they could always find the civilian
authority of one organ. Men no longer spoke of our Europe as the
_Respublica_ or "common weal." It was already beginning to become a mass of
small and often overlapping divisions. The things that are older than, and
lie beneath, all exact political institutions, the popular legends, the
popular feelings for locality and countrysides, were rising everywhere; the
great landowners were appearing as semi-independent rulers, each on his own
estates (though the many estates of one man were often widely separated).

The daily speech of men was already becoming divided into an infinity of
jargons.

Some of these dialects were of Latin origin, some as in the Germanies and
Scandinavia, mixed original Teutonic and Latin; some, as in Brittany, were
Celtic; some, as in the eastern Pyrenees, Basque; in North Africa, we may
presume, the indigenous tongue of the Berbers resumed its sway; Punic also
may have survived in certain towns and villages there. [Footnote: We have
evidence that it survived in the fifth century.] But men paid no attention
to the origin of such diversities. The common unity that survived was
expressed in the fixed Latin tongue, the tongue of the Church; and the
Church, now everywhere supreme in the decay of Arianism and of paganism
alike, was the principle of life throughout all this great area of the
West.

So it was in Gaul, and with the little belt annexed to Gaul that had risen
in the Germanies to the east of the Rhine; so with nearly all Italy and
Dalmatia, and what today we call Switzerland and a part of what today we
call Bavaria and Baden; so with what today we call Spain and Portugal; and
so (after local adventures of a parallel sort, followed by a reconquest
against Arians by Imperial officers and armies) with North Africa and with
a strip of Andalusia.

But _one_ part of _one_ province _did_ suffer a limited and local--but
sharp--change: on one frontier belt, narrow but long, came something much
more nearly resembling a true barbaric success, and the results thereof,
than anything which the Continent could show. There was here a real breach
of continuity with Roman things.

This exceptional strip was the eastern coast belt of the province of
Britain; and we have next to ask: "_What happened in Britain when the
rest of the Empire was being transformed, after the breakdown of central
Imperial power?_" Unless we can answer that question we shall fail to
possess a true picture of the continuity of Europe and of the early perils
in spite of which that continuity has survived.

I turn, therefore, next to answer the question: "What happened in Britain?"




V

WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?


I have now carried this study through four sections. My object in
writing it is to show that the Roman Empire never perished but was only
transformed; that the Catholic Church, which, in its maturity, it accepted,
caused it to survive and was, in that origin of Europe, and has since
remained, the soul of one Western civilization.

In the first chapter I sketched the nature of the Roman Empire, in the
second the nature of the Church within the Roman Empire before that
civilization in its maturity accepted the Faith. In the third I attempted
to lay before the reader that transformation and material decline (it was
also a _survival_), which has erroneously been called "the fall" of the
Roman Empire. In the fourth I presented a picture of what society must have
seemed to an onlooker just after the crisis of that transformation and at
the entry into what are called the Dark Ages: the beginnings of the modern
European nations which have superficially differentiated from the old unity
of Rome.

I could wish that space had permitted me to describe a hundred other
contemporary things which would enable the reader to seize both the
magnitude and the significance of the great change from Pagan to Christian
times. I should in particular have dwelt upon the transformation of the
European mind with its increasing gravity, its ripening contempt for
material things, and its resolution upon the ultimate fate of the human
soul, which it now had firmly concluded to be personally immortal and
subject to a conscious destiny.

This doctrine of _personal_ immortality is the prime mark of the European
and stamps his leadership upon the world.

Its original seat--long before history begins--lay perhaps in Ireland,
later in Britain, certainly reduced to definition either in Britain or in
Gaul. It increasingly influenced Greece and even had some influence upon
the Jews before the Romans subdued them. But it remained an opinion, an
idea looming in the dark, till it was seen strong and concrete in the full
light of the Catholic Church. Oddly enough, Mahomet, who in most things
reacted towards weakness of flesh and spirit, adopted this Western doctrine
fully; it provided his system with its vigor. Everywhere is that doctrine
of immortality the note of superior intelligence and will, especially in
its contrast with the thin pantheism and negations of Asia. Everywhere does
it accompany health and decision.

Its only worthy counterpart (equally European but rare, uprooted and
private) is the bold affirmation of complete and final death.

The transformation of the Roman Empire, then, in the fourth century and
the fifth was eventually its preservation, in peril of full decay, by its
acceptation of the Faith.

To this I might have attached the continued carelessness for the plastic
arts and for much in letters, the continued growth in holiness, and all
that "salting," as it were, which preserved civilization and kept it whole
until, after the long sequestration of the Dark Ages, it should discover an
opportunity for revival.

My space has not permitted me to describe these things, I must turn at
once to the last, and what is for my readers the chief, of the historical
problems presented by the beginning of the Dark Ages. That problem is the
fate of Britain.

The importance of deciding what happened in Britain when the central
government of Rome failed, does not lie in the fact that an historical
conclusion one way or the other can affect the truth. European civilization
is still one whether men see that unity or no. The Catholic Church is still
the soul of it, whether men know it or do not know it. But the problem
presented by the fate of Britain at that critical moment when the provinces
of the Roman Empire became independent of any common secular control, has
this practical importance: that those who read it wrongly and who provide
their readers with a false solution (as the Protestant German school and
their copiers in English, Freeman, Green and the rest have done) those who
talk of "the coming of the English," "the Anglo-Saxon conquest," and the
rest, not only furnish arguments against the proper unity of our European
story but also produce a warped attitude in the mind. Such men as are
deceived by false accounts of the fate of Britain at the entry into the
Dark Ages, take for granted many other things historically untrue. Their
presumptions confuse or conceal much else that is historical truth: for
instance, the character of the Normans; and even contemporary and momentous
truth before our eyes today: for instance, the gulf between Englishmen and
Prussians. They not only render an Englishman ignorant of his own nation
and therefore of himself, they also render all men ignorant of Europe: for
a knowledge of Britain in the period 500-700 as in the period 1530-1630 is
the test of European history: and if you are wrong on these two points you
are wrong on the whole.

A man who desires to make out that the Empire--that is European
civilization--was "conquered" by barbarians cannot today, in the light of
modern research, prove his case in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, or in the
valley of the Rhine. The old German thesis of a barbaric "conquest" upon
the Continent, possible when modern history was a child, has necessarily
been abandoned in its maturity. But that thesis still tries to make out a
plausible case when it speaks of Britain, because so much of the record
here is lost that there is more room for make-believe; and having made
it out, the tale of a German and barbaric England, his false result
will powerfully affect modern and immediate conclusions upon our common
civilization, upon our institutions, and their nature, and in particular
upon the Faith and its authority in Europe.

For if _Britain_ be something other than _England_: if what we now know
is not original to this Island, but is of the Northern German barbarism
in race and tradition, if, in the breakdown of the Roman Empire, Britain
was the one exceptional province which really did become a separate
barbaric thing, cut off at the roots from the rest of civilization, then
those who desire to believe that the institutions of Europe are of no
universal effect, that the ancient laws of the Empire as on property and
marriage--were local, and in particular that the Reformation was the revolt
of a race--and of a strong and conquering race--against the decaying
traditions of Rome, have something to stand on. It does not indeed help
them to prove that our civilization is bad or that the Faith is untrue,
but it permits them to despair of, or to despise, the unity of Europe, and
to regard the present Protestant world as something which is destined to
supplant that unity.

Such a point of view is wrong historically as it is wrong in morals. It
will find no basis of military success in the future any more than it has
in the past. [Footnote: I wrote and first printed these words in 1912.
I leave them standing with greater force in 1920.] It must ultimately
break down if ever it should attempt to put into practice its theory of
superiority in barbaric things. But meanwhile as a self-confident theory it
can do harm indefinitely great by warping a great section of the European
mind; bidding it refer its character to imaginary barbaric origins, so
divorcing it from the majestic spirit of Western Civilization. The North
German "Teutonic" school of false popular history can create its own
imaginary past, and lend to such a figment the authority of antiquity and
of lineage.

To show how false this modern school of history has been, but also what
opportunities it had for advancing its thesis, is the object of what
follows.

Britain, be it remembered, is today the only part of the Roman world in
which a conscious antagonism to the ancient and permanent civilization of
Europe exists. The Northern Germanies and Scandinavia, which have had,
since the Reformation, a religious agreement with all that is still
politically powerful in Britain, lay outside the old civilization. They
would not have survived the schism of the sixteenth century had Britain
resisted that schism. When we come to deal with the story of the
Reformation in Britain, we shall see how the strong popular resistance to
the Reformation nearly overcame that small wealthy class which used the
religious excitement of an active minority as an engine to obtain material
advantage for themselves. But as a fact in _Britain_ the popular resistance
to the Reformation failed. A violent and almost universal persecution
directed, in the main by the wealthier classes, against the religion of the
English populace and the wealth which endowed it just happened to succeed.
In little more than a hundred years the newly enriched had won the battle.
By the year 1600 the Faith of the British masses had been stamped out from
the Highlands to the Channel.

It is our business to understand that this phenomenon, the moral severance
of Britain from Europe, was a phenomenon of the sixteenth century and
not of the fifth, and that Britain was in no way predestined by race or
tradition to so lamentable and tragic a loss.

Let us state the factors in the problem.

The main factor in the problem is that the history of Great Britain from
just before the middle of the fifth century (say the years 420 to 445)
until the landing of St. Augustine in 597 is a blank.

It is of the first importance to the student of the general history in
Europe to seize this point. It is true of no other Roman western province,
and the truth of it has permitted a vast amount of empty assertion, most
of it recent, and nearly all of it as demonstrably (as it is obviously)
created by a religious bias. When there is no proof or record men can
imagine almost anything, and the anti-Catholic historians have stretched
imagination to the last possible limit in filling this blank with whatever
could tell against the continuity of civilization.

It is the business of those who love historic truth to get rid of such
speculations as of so much rubbish, and to restore to the general reader
the few certain facts upon which he can solidly build.

Let me repeat that, had Britain remained true to the unity of Europe in
that unfortunate oppression of the sixteenth century which ended in the
loss of the Faith, had the populace stood firm or been able to succeed in
the field and under arms, or to strike terror into their oppressors by an
efficient revolt, in other words had the England of the Tudors remained
Catholic, the solution of this ancient problem of the early Dark Ages would
present no immediate advantage, nor perhaps would the problem interest men
even academically. England would now be one with Europe as she had been for
a thousand years before the uprooting of the Reformation. But, as things
are, the need for correction is immediate and its success of momentous
effect. No true historian, even though he should most bitterly resent the
effect of Catholicism upon the European mind, can do other than combat what
was, until quite recently, the prevalent teaching with regard to the fate
of Britain when the central government of the Empire decayed.

I will first deal with the evidence--such as it is--which has come down to
us upon the fate of Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, and next
consider the conclusions to which such evidence should lead us.


THE EVIDENCE

When we have to deal with a gap in history (and though none in Western
European history is so strangely empty as this, yet there are very many
minor ones which enable us to reason from their analogy), two methods of
bridging the gap are present to the historian. The first is research into
such rare contemporary records as may illustrate the period: the second is
the parallel of what has happened elsewhere in the same case, or better
still (when that is possible) the example of what was proceeding in similar
places and under similar circumstances at the same time. And there is a
third thing: both of these methods must be submitted to the criterion
of common sense more thoroughly and more absolutely than the evidence
of fuller periods. For when you have full evidence, even of a thing
extraordinary, you must admit its truth. But when there is little evidence
guess-work comes in, and common sense is the correction of guess-work.

If, for instance, I learn, as I can learn from contemporary records and
from the witness of men still living, that at the battle of Gettysburg
infantry advanced so boldly as to bayonet gunners at their guns, I must
believe it although the event is astonishing.

If I learn, as I can learn, that a highly civilized and informed government
like that of the French in 1870, entering into a war against a great
rival, had only the old muzzle-loading cannon when their enemies were
already equipped with modern breech-loading pieces, I must accept it on
overwhelming evidence, in spite of my astonishment.

When even the miraculous appears in a record--if its human evidence is
multiple, converging and exact--I must accept it or deny the value of human
evidence.

But when I am dealing with a period or an event for which evidence is
lacking or deficient, then obviously it is a sound criterion of criticism
to accept the probable and not to presuppose the improbable. Common
sense and general experience are nowhere more necessary than in their
application, whether in a court of law or in the study of history, to
those problems whose difficulty consists in the absence of direct proof.
[Footnote: For instance, there is no contemporary account mentioning London
during the last half of the fifth and nearly all the sixth century. Green,
Freeman, Stubbs, say (making it up as they go along) that London ceased
to exist: disappeared! Then (they assert) after a long period of complete
abandonment it was laboriously cleared by a totally new race of men and as
laboriously rebuilt on exactly the same site. The thing is not physically
impossible, but it is so exceedingly improbable that common sense laughs at
it.]

Remembering all this, let us first set down what is positively known from
record with regard to the fate of Britain in the hundred and fifty years of
"the gap."

We begin by noting that there were many groups of German soldiery in
Britain before the Pirate raids and that the southwest was--whether on
account of earlier pirate raids or on account of Saxon settlers the
descendants of Roman soldiers--called "the Saxon shore" long before the
Imperial system broke down.

Next we turn to documents.

There is exactly one contemporary document professing to tell us anything
at all of what happened within this considerable period, exactly one
document set down by a witness; and that document is almost valueless for
our purpose.

It bears the title, _De Excidio Brittanić Liber Querulus_. St. Gildas, a
monk, was its author. The exact date of its compilation is a matter of
dispute--necessarily so, for the whole of that time is quite dark. But it
is certainly not earlier than 545. So it was written one hundred years
after the beginning of that darkness which covers British history for one
hundred and fifty years; most of the Roman regulars had been called away
for a continental campaign in 410. They had often so left the island
before. But this time the troops sent out on expedition did not return.
Britain was visited in 429 and 447 by men who left records. It was not till
597 that St. Augustine landed. St. Augustine landed only fifty years at the
most after Gildas wrote his _Liber Querulus_, whereas the snapping of the
links between the Continent and southeastern Britain had taken place at
least a hundred years before.

Well, it so happens that this book is, as I have called it, almost
valueless for history. It is good in morals; its author complains, as all
just men must do in all times, of the wickedness of powerful men, and of
the vices of princes. It is a homily. The motive of it is not history, but
the reformation of morals. In all matters extending to more than a lifetime
before that of the writer, in all matters, that is, on which he could not
obtain personal evidence, he is hopelessly at sea. He is valuable only as
giving us the general impression of military and social struggles as they
struck a monk who desired to make them the text of a sermon.

He vaguely talks of Saxon auxiliaries from the North Sea being hired (in
the traditional Roman manner) by some Prince in Roman Britain to fight
savages who had come out of the Highlands of Scotland and were raiding.
He says this use of new auxiliaries began after the Third Consulship of
Aëtius (whom he calls "Agitius"), that is, after 446 A.D. He talks still
more vaguely of the election of local kings to defend the island from the
excesses of these auxiliaries. He is quite as much concerned with the
incursions of robber bands of Irish and Scotch into the civilized Roman
province as he is with the few Saxon auxiliaries who were thus called in to
supplement the arms of the Roman provincials.

He speaks only of a handful of these auxiliaries, three boatloads; but he
is so vague and ill-instructed on the whole of this early period--a hundred
years before his time--that one must treat his account of the transaction
as half legendary. He tells us that "more numerous companies followed," and
we know what that means in the case of the Roman auxiliaries throughout the
Empire, a few thousand armed men.

He goes on to say that these auxiliaries mutinying for pay (another
parallel to what we should expect from the history of all the previous
hundred years all over Europe), threatened to plunder the civil population.
Then comes one sentence of rhetoric saying how they ravaged the
countrysides "in punishment for our previous sins," until the "flames" of
the tumult actually "licked the Western Ocean." It is all (and there is
much more) just like what we read in the rhetoric of the lettered men on
the Continent who watched the comparatively small but destructive bands of
barbarian auxiliaries in revolt, with their accompaniment of escaped slaves
and local ne'er-do-wells, crossing Gaul and pillaging. If we had no record
of the continental troubles but that of some one religious man using a
local disaster as the opportunity for a moral discourse, historians could
have talked of Gaul exactly as they talk of Britain on the sole authority
of St. Gildas. All the exaggeration to which we are used in continental
records is here: the "gleaming sword" and the "flame crackling," the
"destruction" of cities (which afterward quietly continue an unbroken
life!) and all the rest of it. We know perfectly well that on the Continent
similar language was used to describe the predatory actions of little
bodies of barbarian auxiliaries; actions calamitous and tragic no doubt,
but not universal and in no way finally destructive of civilization.

It must not be forgotten that St. Gildas also tells us of the return
home of many barbarians with plunder (which is again what we should have
expected). But at the end of this account he makes an interesting point
which shows that--even if we had nothing but his written record to judge
by--the barbarian pirates had got some sort of foothold on the eastern
coasts of the island.

For after describing how the Romano-British of the province organized
themselves under one Ambrosius Aurelianus, and stood their ground, he tells
us that "sometimes the citizens" (that is, the Roman and civilized men)
"sometimes the enemy were successful," down to the thorough defeat of some
raiding body or other of the Pagans at an unknown place which he calls
"Mons Badonicus." This decisive action, he also tells us, took place in the
year of his own birth.

Now the importance of this last point is that Gildas after that date can
talk of things which he really knew. Let anyone who reads this page recall
a great event contemporary with or nearly following his own birth, and see
how different is his knowledge of it from his knowledge of that which came
even a few years before. This is so today with all the advantages of full
record. How much greater would be the contrasts between things really known
and hearsay when there was none!

This defeat of the pagan Pirates at Mt. Badon Gildas calls the last but not
the least slaughter of the barbarians; and though he probably wrote in the
West of Britain, yet we know certainly from his contemporary evidence _that
during the whole of his own lifetime up to the writing of his book_--a
matter of some forty-four years--there was no more serious fighting. In
other words, we are _certain_ that the little pagan courts settled on the
east coast of Britain were balanced by a remaining mass of declining Roman
civilization elsewhere, and that there was no attempt at anything like
expansion or conquest from the east westward. For this state of affairs,
remember, we have direct contemporary evidence during the whole lifetime of
a man and up to within at the most fifty years--perhaps less--from the day
when St. Augustine landed in Kent and restored record and letters to the
east coast.

We have more rhetoric and more homilies about the "deserted cities and the
wickedness of men and the evil life of the Kings;" but that you might hear
at any period. All we really get from Gildas is: (1) the confused tradition
of a rather heavy predatory raid conducted by barbaric auxiliaries summoned
from across the North Sea in true Roman fashion to help a Roman province
against uncivilized invaders, Scotch and Irish; (2) (which is most
important) the obtaining by these auxiliary troops or their rulers (though
in small numbers it is true), of political power over some territory within
the island; (3) the early cessation of any racial struggle, or conflict
between Christian and Pagan, or between Barbarian and Roman; even of so
much as would strike a man living within the small area of Britain, and the
confinement of the new little pagan Pirate courts to the east coast during
the whole of the first half of the sixth century.

Here let us turn the light of common sense on to these most imperfect,
confused and few facts which Gildas gives us. What sort of thing would a
middle-aged man, writing in the decline of letters and with nothing but
poor and demonstrably distorted verbal records to go by, set down with
regard to a piece of warfare, if (a) that man were a monk and a man of
peace, (b) his object were obviously not history, but a sermon on morals,
and (c) the fighting was between the Catholic Faith, which was all in all
to the men of his time, and Pagans? Obviously he would make all he could
of the old and terrified legends of the time long before his birth, he
would get more precise as his birth approached (though always gloomy and
exaggerating the evil), and he would begin to tell us precise facts with
regard to the time he could himself remember. Well, all we get from St.
Gildas is the predatory incursions of pagan savages from Scotland and
Ireland, long, long before he was born; a small number of auxiliaries
called in to help the Roman Provincials against these; the permanent
settlement of these auxiliaries in some quarter or other of the island (we
know from other evidence that it was the east and southeast coast); and
(d) what is of capital importance because it is really contemporary, _the
settling down of the whole matter, apparently during Gildas' own lifetime
in the sixth century_--from say 500 A.D. or earlier to say 545 or later.

I have devoted so much space to this one writer, whose record would hardly
count in a time where any sufficient historical document existed, because
his book is _absolutely the only one contemporary piece of evidence we
have upon the pirate, or Saxon, raiding of Britain_. [Footnote: The single
sentence in Prosper is insignificant--and what is more, demonstrably
false as it stands.] There are interesting fragments about it in the
various documents known (to us) collectively today as "The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle"--but these documents were compiled many hundreds of years
afterwards and had nothing better to go on than St. Gildas himself and
possibly a few vague legends.

Now we happen to have in this connection a document which, though not
contemporary must be considered as evidence of a kind. It is sober and
full, written by one of the really great men of Catholic and European
civilization, written in a spirit of wide judgment and written by a founder
of history, the Venerable Bede.

True, the Venerable Bede's _Ecclesiastical History_ was not produced until
_three hundred years after_ the first raids of these predatory bands, not
until nearly two hundred years after St. Gildas, and not until one hundred
and forty years after reading and writing and the full tide of Roman
civilization had come back to Eastern Britain with St. Augustine: but
certain fundamental statements of his are evidence.

Thus the fact that the Venerable Bede takes for granted permanent pirate
settlements (established as regular, if small, states), all the way along
the North Sea coast from the northern part of Britain in which he wrote,
brought down to the central south by Southampton Water, is a powerful or
rather a conclusive argument in favor of the existence of such states some
time before he wrote. It is not credible that a man of this weight would
write as he does without solid tradition behind him; and he tells us that
the settlers on this coast of Britain came from three lowland Frisian
tribes, German and Danish, called Saxons, Jutes and Angles.

The first name "Saxon" was _at that time_ the name of certain pirates
inhabiting two or three small islands on the coasts between the Elbe and
the Rhone. [Footnote: The name has retained a vague significance for
centuries and Is now attached to a population largely Slavonic and wholly
Protestant, south of Berlin--hundred of miles from its original seat.]
Ptolemy puts these "Saxons" two hundred years earlier, just beyond the
mouth of the Elbe; the Romans knew them as scattered pirates in the North
Sea, irritating the coasts of Gaul and Britain for generations. The name
later spread to a large island confederation: but that was the way with
German tribal names. The German tribal names do not stand for fixed races
or even provinces, but for chance agglomerations which suddenly rise and as
suddenly disappear. The local term, "Saxon," in the fifth and sixth century
had nothing to do with the general term, "Saxon," applied to all northwest
of the Germanies two hundred years and more afterwards. These pirates
then provided small bands of fighting men under chieftains who founded
small organized governments north of the Thames Estuary, at the head of
Southampton Water, and on the Sussex coast, when they may or may not have
found (but more probably _did_ find) existing settlements of their own
people already established as colonies by the Romans. The chiefs very
probably captured the Roman fiscal organization of the place, but seem
rapidly to have degraded society by their barbaric incompetence. They
learnt no new language, but continued to talk that of their original seat
on the Continent, which language was split up into a number of local
dialects, each of which was a mixture of original German and adopted Greek,
Latin and even Celtic words.

Of the Jutes we know nothing; there is a mass of modern guess work about
them, valueless like all such stuff. We must presume that they were an
insignificant little tribe who sent out a few mercenaries for hire; but
they had the advantage of sending out the first, for the handful of
mercenaries whom the Roman British called into Kent were by all tradition
Jutish. The Venerable Bede also bears witness to an isolated Jutish
settlement in the Meon Valley near Southampton Water, comparable to the
little German colonies established by the Romans at Bayeux in Normandy and
near Rennes.

The Angles were something more definite; they held that corner of land
where the neck of Denmark joins the mainland of Germany. This we know for
certain. There was a considerable immigration of them; enough to make their
departure noticeable in the sparsely populated heaths of their district,
and to make Bede record the traveler's tale that their barren country still
looked "depopulated." How many boatloads of them, however, may have come,
we have of course no sort of record: we only know from our common sense
that the number must have been insignificant compared with the total free
and slave population of a rich Roman province. Their chiefs got a hold of
the land far above the Thames Estuary, in scattered spots all up the east
coast of Britain, as far as the Firth of Forth.

There are no other authorities. There is no other evidence save St. Gildas,
a contemporary and--two hundred years after him, _three_ hundred after the
first event--Bede. A mass of legend and worse nonsense called the _Historia
Brittonum_ exists indeed for those who consult it--but it has no relation
to historical science nor any claim to rank as evidence. As we have it, it
is centuries late, and it need not concern serious history. Even for the
existence of Arthur--to which it is the principal witness--popular legend
is a much better guide. As to the original dates of the various statements
in the _Historia Brittonum_, those dates are guesswork. The legendary
narrative as a whole, though very ancient in its roots, dates only from a
period subsequent to Charlemagne, much more than a century later than Bede
and a time far less cultured.

The life of St. Germanus, who came and preached in Britain after the Roman
legions had left, is contemporary, and deals with events sixty years before
St. Gildas' birth. It would be valuable if it told us anything about the
Pirate settlements on the coast--whether these were but the confirmation of
older Roman Saxon garrisons or Roman agricultural colonies or what--but it
tells us nothing about them. We know that St. Germanus dealt in a military
capacity with "Picts and Scots"--an ordinary barbarian trouble--but we have
no hint at Saxon settlements. St. Germanus was last in Britain in 447,
and it is good negative evidence that we hear nothing during that visit
of any real trouble from the Saxon pirates who at that very time might be
imagined, if legend were to be trusted, to be establishing their power in
Kent.

That ends the list of witnesses; that is all our _evidence_. [Footnote: On
such a body of evidence--less than a morning's reading--did Green build up
for popular sale his romantic _Making of England_.] To sum up. So far as
recorded history is concerned, all we know is this: that probably some, but
certainly only few, of the Roman regular forces were to be found garrisoned
in Britain after the year 410; that in the Roman armies there had long been
Saxon and other German auxiliaries some of whom could naturally provide
civilian groups and that Rome even planted agricultural colonies of
auxiliaries permanently within the Empire; that the south and east coasts
were known as "the Saxon shore" even during Imperial times; that the
savages from Scotland and Ireland disturbed the civilized province cruelly;
that scattered pirates who had troubled the southern and eastern coasts
for two centuries, joined the Scotch and Irish ravaging bands; that some
of these were taken in as regular auxiliaries on the old Roman model,
somewhere about the middle of the fifth century (the conventional date is
445); that, as happened in many another Roman province, the auxiliaries
mutinied for pay and did a good deal of bad looting and ravaging; finally
that the ravaging was checked, and that the Pirates were thrown back upon
some permanent settlements of theirs established during these disturbances
along the easternmost and southernmost coasts. Their numbers must have been
very small compared with the original population. No town of any size was
destroyed.

Now it is most important in the face of such a paucity of information to
seize three points:

First, that the ravaging was not appreciably worse, either in the way it is
described or by any other criterion, than the troubles which the Continent
suffered at the same time and which (as we know) did not _there_ destroy
the continuity or unity of civilization.

Secondly, that the sparse raiders, Pagan (as were also some few of those
on the Continent) and incapable of civilized effort, obtained, as they did
upon the Continent (notably on the left bank of the Rhine), little plots of
territory which they held and governed for themselves, and in which after
a short period the old Roman order decayed in the incapable hands of the
newcomers.

But, thirdly (and upon this all the rest will turn), the _position which
these less civilized and pagan small courts happened permanently to hold,
were positions that cut the link between the Roman province of Britain and
the rest of what had been the united Roman Empire_.

This last matter--not numbers, not race--is the capital point in the story
of Britain between 447 and 597.

The uncivilized man happened, by a geographical accident, to have cut the
communication of the island with its sister provinces of the Empire. He was
numerically as insignificant, racially as unproductive and as ill provided
with fruitful or permanent institutions as his brethren on the Rhine or the
Danube. But on the Rhine and the Danube the Empire was broad. If a narrow
fringe of it was ruined it was no great matter: only a retreat of a few
miles. Those sea communications between Britain and Europe were narrow--and
the barbarian had been established across them.

The circulation of men, goods and ideas was stopped for one hundred and
fifty years because the small pirate settlements (mixed perhaps with
barbarian settlements already established by the Empire) had, by the
gradual breakdown of the Roman ports, destroyed communication with Europe
from Southampton Water right north to beyond the Thames.

It seems certain that even the great town of London, whatever its
commercial relations, kept up no official or political business beyond
the sea. The pirates had not gone far inland; but, with no intention of
conquest (only of loot or continued establishment), they had snapped the
bond by which Britain lived.

Such is the direct evidence, and such our first conclusion on it.

But of indirect indications, of reasonable supposition and comparison
between what came after the pirate settlements and what had been before,
there is much more. By the use of this secondary matter added to the
direct evidence one can fully judge both the limits and the nature of
the misfortune that overtook Britain after the central Roman government
failed and before the Roman missionaries, who restored the province to
civilization, had landed.

We may then arrive at a conclusion and know what that Britain was to which
the Faith returned with St. Augustine. When we know that, we shall know
what Britain continued to be until the catastrophe of the Reformation.

I say that, apart from the direct evidence of St. Gildas and the late but
respectable traditions gathered by the Venerable Bede, the use of other
and indirect forms of evidence permits us to be certain of one or two main
facts, and a method about to be described will enable us to add to these
a half-dozen more; the whole may not be sufficient, indeed, to give us a
general picture of the time, but it will prevent us from falling into any
radical error with regard to the place of Britain in the future unity of
Europe when we come to examine that unity as it re-arose in the Middle
Ages, partly preserved, partly reconstituted, by the Catholic Church.

The historical method to which I allude and to which I will now introduce
the reader may properly be called that of _limitations_.

We may not know what happened between two dates; but if we know pretty well
how things stood for some time before the earlier date and for sometime
after the later one, then we have two "jumping off places," as it were,
from which to build our bridge of speculation and deduction as to what
happened in the unexplored gap of time between.

Suppose every record of what happened in the United States between 1862
and 1880 to be wiped out by the destruction of all but one insufficient
document, and supposing a fairly full knowledge to survive of the period
between the Declaration of Independence and 1862, and a tolerable record to
survive of the period between 1880 and the present year. Further, let there
be ample traditional memory and legend that a civil war took place, that
the struggle was a struggle between North and South, and that its direct
and violent financial and political effects were felt for over a decade.

The student hampered by the absence of direct evidence might make many
errors in detail and might be led to assert, as probably true, things at
which a contemporary would smile. But by analogy with other contemporary
countries, by the use of his common sense and his knowledge of human
nature, of local climate, of other physical conditions, and of the motives
common to all men, he would arrive at a dozen or so general conclusions
which would be just. What came after the gap would correct the deductions
he had made from his knowledge of what came before it. What came before the
gap would help to correct false deductions drawn from what came after it.
His knowledge of contemporary life in Europe, let us say, or in western
territories which the war did not reach, between 1862 and 1880, would
further correct his conclusions.

If he were to confine himself to the most general conclusions he could not
be far wrong. He would appreciate the success of the North and how much
that success was due to numbers. He would be puzzled perhaps by the
different positions of the abolitionist theory before and after the war;
but he would know that the slaves were freed in the interval, and he
would rightly conclude that their freedom had been a direct historical
consequence and contemporary effect of the struggle. He would be equally
right in rejecting any theory of the colonization of the Southern States
by Northerners; he would note the continuity of certain institutions, the
non-continuity of others. In general, if he were to state first what he was
sure of, secondly, what he could fairly guess, his brief summary, though
very incomplete, would not be _off the rails_ of history; he would not be
employing such a method to produce historical nonsense, as so many of our
modern historians have done in their desire to prove the English people
German and barbaric in their origins.

This much being said, let me carefully set down what we know with regard
to Britain before and after the bad gap in our records, the unknown one
hundred and fifty years between the departure of St. Germanus and the
arrival of St. Augustine.

We know that before the bulk of Roman regulars left the country in 410,
Britain was an organized Roman province. Therefore, we know that it had
regular divisions, with a town as the centre of each, many of the towns
forming the Sees of the Bishops. We know that official records were kept
in Latin and that Latin was the official tongue. We further know that the
island at this time had for generations past suffered from incursions of
Northern barbarians in great numbers over the Scottish border and from
piratical raids of seafarers (some Irish, others Germanic, Dutch and Danish
in origin) in much lesser numbers, for the amount of men and provisions
conveyable across a wide sea in small boats is highly limited.

Within four years of the end of the sixth century, nearly two hundred years
after the cessation of regular Roman government, missionary priests from
the Continent, acting on a Roman episcopal commission, land in Britain;
from that moment writing returns and our chronicles begin again. What do
they tell us?

First, that the whole island is by that time broken up into a number
of small and warring districts. Secondly, that these numerous little
districts, each under its petty king or prince, fall into two divisions:
some of these petty kings and courts are evidently Christian,
Celtic-speaking and by all their corporate tradition inherit from the
old Roman civilization. The other petty kings and courts speak various
"Teutonic" dialects, that is, dialects made up of a jargon of original
German words and Latin words mixed. The population of the little
settlements under these eastern knights spoke, apparently, for the most
part the same dialects as their courts. Thirdly, we find that these courts
and their subjects are not only mainly of this speech, but also, in the
mass, pagan. There may have been relics of Catholicism among them, but at
any rate the tiny courts and petty kinglets were pagan and "Teutonic" in
speech. Fourthly, the divisions between these two kinds of little states
were such that the decayed Christians were, when St. Augustine came,
roughly-speaking in the West and centre of the island, the Pagans on the
coasts of the South and the East.

All this tallies with the old and distorted legends and traditions, as
it does with the direct story of Gildas, and also with whatever of real
history may survive in the careful compilation of legend and tradition made
by the Venerable Bede.

The _first_ definite historical truth which we derive from this use of the
method of limitations, is of the same sort as that to which the direct
evidence of Gildas leads us. A series of settlements had been effected upon
the coasts of the North Sea and the eastern part of the Channel from, let
us say, Dorsetshire or its neighborhood, right up to the Firth of Forth,
They had been effected by the North Sea pirates and their foothold was
good.

Now let us use this method of limitations for matters a little less
obvious, and ask, first, what were the limits between these two main groups
of little confused and warring districts; secondly, how far was either
group coherent; thirdly, what had survived in either group of the old
order; and, fourthly, what novel thing had appeared during the darkness of
this century-and-a-half or two centuries? [Footnote: A century-and-a-half
from the very last Roman evidence, the visit of St. Germanus in 447 to
the landing of St. Augustine exactly 150 years later (597); nearly two
centuries from the withdrawal of the expeditionary Roman Army to the
landing of St. Augustine (410-597).]

Taking these four points _seriatim_:

(1) Further inland than about a day's march from the sea or from the
estuaries of rivers, we have no proof of the settlement of the pirates or
the formation by them of local governments. It is impossible to fix the
boundaries in such a chaos, but we know that most of the county of Kent and
the seacoast of Sussex, also all within a raiding distance of Southampton
Water, and of the Hampshire Avon, the maritime part of East Anglia and of
Lincolnshire, so far as we can judge, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Durham,
the coastal part at least of Northumberland and the Lothians, were under
numerous pagan kinglets, whose courts talked this mixture of German and
Latin words called "Teutonic dialects."

What of the Midlands? The region was a welter, and a welter of which we can
tell very little indeed. It formed a sort of march or borderland between
the two kinds of courts, those of the kinglets and chieftains who still
preserved a tradition of civilization, and those of the kinglets who had
lost that tradition. This mixed borderland tended apparently to coalesce
(the facts of which we have to judge are very few) under one chief. It was
later known not under a Germanic or Celtic name, but under the low Latin
name of "Mercia" that is the "Borderland." To the political aspect of this
line of demarcation I will return in a moment.

(2) As to the second question: What kind of cohesion was there between
the western or the eastern sets of these vague and petty governments? The
answer is that the cohesion was of the loosest in either case. Certain
fundamental habits differentiated East from West, language, for instance,
and much more religion. Before the coming of St. Augustine, all the western
and probably most of the central kinglets were Christians; the kinglets on
the eastern coasts Pagan.

There was a tendency in the West apparently to hold together for common
interests, but no longer to speak of one head. But note this interesting
point. The West that felt some sort of common bond, called itself the
_Cymry_, and only concerned the mountain land. It did not include, it
carefully distinguished itself from the Christians of the more fertile
Midlands and South and East, which it called "_Laghans_."

Along the east coast there was a sort of tradition of common headship,
very nebulous indeed, but existent. Men talked of "chiefs of Britain,"
"_Bretwaldas_," a word, the first part of which is obviously Roman, the
second part of which may be Germanic or Celtic or anything, and which we
may guess to indicate a titular headship. But--and this must be especially
noted--there was no conscious or visible cohesion among the little courts
of the east and southeast coasts; there was no conscious and deliberate
continued pagan attack against the Western Christians as such in the end
of the sixth century when St. Augustine landed, and no Western Celtic
Christian resistance, organized as such, to the chieftains scattered
along the eastern coast. Each kinglet fought with each, pagan with pagan,
Christian with Christian, Christian and pagan in alliance against pagan and
Christian in alliance--and the cross divisions were innumerable. You have
petty kings on the eastern coasts with Celtic names; you have Saxon allies
in Celtic courts; you have Western Christian kings winning battles on the
coasts of the North Sea and Eastern kings winning battles nearly as far
west as the Severn, etc., etc. I have said that it is of capital importance
to appreciate this point--that the whole thing was a chaos of little
independent districts all fighting in a hotchpotch and not a clash of
warring races or tongues.

It is difficult for us with our modern experience of great and highly
conscious nations to conceive such a state of affairs. When we think
of fighting and war, we cannot but think of one considerable conscious
_nation_ fighting against another similar _nation_, and this modern habit
of mind has misled the past upon the nature of Britain at the moment when
civilization reëntered the South and East of the island with St. Augustine.
Maps are published with guesswork boundaries showing the "frontiers" of the
"Anglo-Saxon conquest," at definite dates, and modern historians are fond
of talking of the "limits" of that conquest being "extended" to such and
such points. There were no "frontiers:" there was no "conquest" either
way--of east over west or west over east. There were no "extending" limits
of Eastern (or of Western) rule. There was no "advance to Chester," no
"conquest of the district of Bath." There were battles near Bath and
battles near Chester, the loot of a city, a counter raid by the Westerners
and all the rest of it. But to talk of a gradual "Anglo-Saxon conquest" is
an anachronism.

The men of the time would not have understood such language, for indeed it
has no relation to the facts of the time.

The kinglet who could gather his men from a day's march round his court in
the lower Thames Valley, fought against the kinglet who could gather
his men from a day's march round his stronghold at Canterbury. A Pagan
Teutonic-speaking Eastern kinglet would be found allied with a Christian
Celtic-speaking Western kinglet and his Christian followers; and the allies
would march indifferently against another Christian or another pagan.

There was indeed _later_ a westward movement in language and habit which
I shall mention; that was the work of the Church. So far as warfare goes
there was no movement westward or eastward. Fighting went on continually in
all directions, from a hundred separate centres, and if there are reliable
traditions of an Eastern Pagan kinglet commanding some mixed host once
reaching so far west as to raid the valley of the Wiltshire Avon and
another raiding to the Dee, so there are historical records of a Western
Christian kinglet reaching and raiding the Eastern settlements right down
to the North Sea at Bamborough.

(3) Now to the third point: What had survived of the old order in either
half of this anarchy? Of Roman government, of Roman order, of true Roman
civilization, of that _palatium_ of which we spoke in a previous chapter,
nothing had anywhere survived. The disappearance of the Roman taxing and
judicial machinery is the mark of Britain's great wound. It differentiates
the fate of Britain from that of Gaul.

The West of Britain had lost this Roman tradition of government just as
much as the East. The "Pict and Scot" [Footnote: The "Scots"--that is, the
Irish--were, of course, of a higher civilization than the other raiders of
Britain during this dark time. The Catholic Church reached them early. They
had letters and the rest long before Augustine came to Britain.] and the
North Sea pirates, since they could not read or write, or build or make a
road or do anything appreciably useful--interrupted civilized life and so
starved it. The raids did more to break up the old Roman society than did
internal decay. The Western chieftains who retained the Roman Religion had
thoroughly lost the Roman organization of society before the year 600. The
Roman language, probably only really familiar in the towns, seems to have
gone; the Roman method of building had certainly gone. In the West the
learned could still write, but they must have done so most sparingly, if we
are to judge by the absence of any remains. The Church in some truncated
and starved form, survived indeed in the West; it was the religion to
which an Imperial fragment cut off from all other Roman populations might
be expected to cling. Paganism seems to have died out in the West; but
the mutilated Catholicism that had taken its place became provincial,
ill-instructed, and out of touch with Europe. We may guess, though it is
only guesswork, that its chief ailment came from the spiritual fervor,
ill-disciplined but vivid, of Brittany and of Ireland.

What had survived in the eastern part of Britain? On the coasts, and up
the estuaries of the navigable rivers? Perhaps in patches the original
language. It is a question whether Germanic dialects had not been known in
eastern Britain long before the departure of the Roman legions. But anyhow,
if we suppose the main speech of the East to have been Celtic and Latin
before the pirate raids, then that main speech had gone.

So, perhaps altogether, certainly for the most part had religion. So
certainly had the arts--reading and writing and the rest. Over-sea commerce
had certainly dwindled, but to what extent we cannot tell. It is not
credible that it wholly disappeared; but on the other hand there is very
little trace of connection with southern and eastern Britain in the sparse
continental records of this time.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the old bishoprics had gone.

When St. Gregory sent St. Augustine and his missionaries to refound the
old Sees of Britain, his original plan of that refounding had to be wholly
changed. He evidently had some old imperial scheme before him, in which
he conceived of London, the great city, as the Metropolis and the lesser
towns as suffragan to its See. But facts were too strong for him. He had to
restore the Church in the coasts that cut off Britain from Europe, and in
doing so he had to deal with a ruin. Tradition was lost; and Britain is the
only Roman province in which this very great break in the continuity of the
bishoprics is to be discovered.

One thing did _not_ disappear, and that was the life of the towns.

Of course, a Roman town in the sixth or seventh century was not what it had
been in the fourth or fifth; but it is remarkable that in all this wearing
away of the old Roman structure, its framework (which was, and is,
municipal) remained.

If we cast up the principal towns reappearing when the light of history
returns to Britain with St. Augustine's missionaries, we find that all
of them are Roman in origin; what is more important, we find that the
proportion of _surviving_ Roman towns centuries later, when full records
exist, is even larger than it is in other provinces of the Empire which
we know to have preserved the continuity of civilization. Exeter (perhaps
Norwich), Chester, Manchester, Lancaster, Carlisle, York, Canterbury,
Lincoln, Rochester, Newcastle, Colchester, Bath, Winchester, Chichester,
Gloucester, Cirencester, Leicester, Old Salisbury, Great London
itself--these pegs upon which the web of Roman civilization was
stretched--stood firm through the confused welter of wars between all
these petty chieftains, North Sea Pirate, Welsh and Cumbrian and Pennine
highlander, Irish and Scotch.

There was a slow growth of suburbs and some substitution of new suburban
sites for old city sites--as at Southampton, Portsmouth, Bristol,
Huntingdon, etc. It is what you find all over Europe. But there was no real
disturbance of this scheme of towns until the industrial revolution of
modern times came to diminish the almost immemorial importance of the Roman
cities and to supplant their economic functions by the huge aggregations
of the Potteries, the Midlands, South Lancashire, the coal fields and the
modern ports.

The student of this main problem in European history, the fate of Britain,
must particularly note the phenomenon here described. It is the capital
point of proof that Roman Britain, though suffering grievously from the
Angle, Saxon, Scotch, and Irish raids, and though cut off for a time from
civilization, did survive.

Those who prefer to think of England as a colony of barbarians in which the
European life was destroyed, have to suppress many a truth and to conceive
many an absurdity in order to support their story; but no absurdity of
theirs is _worse_ than the fiction they put forward with regard to the
story of the English towns.

It was solemnly maintained by the Oxford School and its German masters that
these great Roman towns, one after the other, were first utterly destroyed
by the Pirates of the North Sea, then left in ruins for generations, and
then _re-occupied_ through some sudden whim by the newcomers! It needs no
historical learning to laugh at such a fancy; but historical learning makes
it even more impossible than it is laughable.

Certain rare towns, of course, decayed in the course of centuries: the same
is true, for that matter, of Spain and Gaul and Italy. Some few here (as
many in Spain, in Gaul and in Italy) may have been actually destroyed in
the act of war. There is tradition of something of the sort at Pevensey
(the old port of Anderida in Sussex) and for some time a forgery lent the
same distinction to Wroxeter under the Wrekin. A great number of towns
again (as in every other province of the Empire) naturally diminished with
the effect of time. Dorchester on the Thames, for instance, seems to have
been quite a large place for centuries after the first troubles with the
pirates, though today it is only a village; but it did not decay as the
result of war. Sundry small towns became smaller still, some few sank to
hamlets as generation after generation of change passed over them: but we
find just the same thing in Picardy in the Roussillon, in Lombardy and in
Aquitaine. What did _not_ happen in Britain was a subversion of the Roman
municipal system.

Again, the unwalled settlement outside the walled town often grew at the
expense of the municipality within the walls. I have given Huntingdon as
an example of this; and there is St. Albans, and Cambridge. But these also
have their parallels in every other province of the West. Even in distant
Africa you find exactly the same thing. You find it in the northern suburb
of Roman Paris itself. That suburb turns into the head of the medićval
town--yet Paris is perhaps the best example of Roman continuity in all
Europe.

The seaports naturally changed in character and often in actual site,
especially upon the flat, and therefore changeable, eastern shores--and
that is exactly what you find in similar circumstances throughout the
tidal waters of the Continent. There is not the shadow or the trace of any
widespread destruction of the Roman towns in Britain. On the contrary there
is, as much or more than elsewhere in the Empire, the obvious fact of their
survival.

The phenomenon is the more remarkable when we consider first that the names
of Roman towns given above do not pretend to be a complete list (one may
add immediately from memory the southern Dorchester, Dover, Doncaster,
etc.), and, secondly, that we have but a most imperfect list remaining of
the towns in Roman Britain.

A common method among those who belittle the continuity of our
civilization, is to deny a Roman origin to any town in which Roman remains
do not happen to have been noted as yet by antiquarians. Even under that
test we can be certain that Windsor, Lewes, Arundel, Dorking, and twenty
others, were seats of Roman habitation, though the remaining records of the
first four centuries tell us nothing of them. But in nine cases out of ten
the mere absence of catalogued Roman remains proves nothing. The soil of
towns is shifted and reshifted continually generation after generation. The
antiquary is not stationed at every digging of a foundation, or sinking of
a well, or laying of a drain, or paving of a street. His methods are of
recent establishment. We have lost centuries of research, and, even with
all our modern interest in such matters, the antiquary is not informed once
in a hundred times of chance discoveries, unless perhaps they be of coins.
When, moreover, we consider that for fifteen hundred years this turning and
returning of the soil has been going on within the municipalities, it is
ridiculous to affirm that such a place as Oxford, for instance--a town
of importance in the later Dark Ages--had no Roman root, simply because
the modern antiquary is not yet possessed of any Roman remains recently
discovered in it: there may have been no town here before the fifth
century: but it is unlikely.

One further point must be noticed before we leave this prime matter: had
there been any considerable destruction of the Roman towns in Britain,
large and small, we should expect it where the pirate raids fell earliest
and most fiercely. We should expect to find the towns near the east and the
south coast to have disappeared. The historical truth is quite opposite.
The garrison of Anderida indeed and of Anderida alone (Pevensey) was, if
we may trust a vague phrase written four hundred years later, massacred in
war. But Lincoln, York, Newcastle, Colchester, London, Dover, Canterbury,
Rochester, Chichester, Portchester, Winchester, the very principal examples
of survival, are all of them either right on the eastern and southern coast
or within a day's striking distance of it.

As to decay, the great garrison centre of the Second Legion, in the heart
of the country which the pirate raiders never reached, has sunk to be
little Caerleon-upon-Usk, just as surely as Dorchester on the Thames, far
away from the eastern coast, has decayed from a town to a village, and
just as surely as Richboro', an island right on the pirate coast itself,
has similarly decayed! As with destruction, so with decay, there is no
increasing proportion as we go from the west eastward towards the Pirate
settlements.

But the point need not be labored. The supposition that the Roman towns
disappeared is no longer tenable, and the wonder is how so astonishing
an assertion should have lived even for a generation. The Roman towns
survived, and, with them, Britain, though maimed.

(4) Now for the last question: what novel things had come in to Britain
with this break down of the central Imperial authority in the fifth and
sixth centuries? To answer that is, of course, to answer the chief question
of all, and it is the most difficult of all to answer.

I have said that presumably on the South and East the language was new.
There were numerous Germanic troops permanently in Britain before the
legions disappeared, there was a constant intercourse with Germanic
auxiliaries: there were probably colonies, half military, half
agricultural. Some have even thought that "Belgic" tribes, whether in Gaul
or Britain, spoke Teutonic dialects; but it is safer to believe from the
combined evidence of place names and of later traditions, that there was a
real change in the common talk of most men within a march of the eastern
sea or the estuaries of its rivers.

This change in language, if it occurred (and we must presume it did, though
it is not absolutely certain, for there may have been a large amount
of mixed German speech among the people before the Roman soldiers
departed)--this change of language, I say, is the chief novel matter. The
decay of religion means less, for when the pirate raids began, though the
Empire was already officially Christian at its heart, the Church had only
just taken firm root in the outlying parts.

The institutions which arose in Britain everywhere when the central power
of Rome decayed--the meetings of armed men to decide public affairs,
money compensation for injuries, the organizing of society by "hundreds,"
etc., were common to all Europe. Nothing but ignorance can regard them as
imported into Britain (or into Ireland or Brittany for that matter) by the
Pirates of the North Sea. They are things native to all our European race
when it lives simply. A little knowledge of Europe will teach us that there
was nothing novel or peculiar in such customs. They appear universally
among the Iberians as among the Celts, among the pure Germans beyond the
Rhine, the mixed Franks and Batavians upon the delta of that river, and
the lowlands of the Scheldt and the Meuse; even among the untouched Roman
populations.

Everywhere you get, as the Dark Ages approach and advance, the meetings
of armed men in council, the chieftain assisted in his government by such
meetings, the weaponed assent or dissent of the great men in conference,
the division of the land and people into "hundreds," the fine for murder,
and all the rest of it.

Any man who says (and most men of the last generation said it) that among
the changes of the two hundred years' gap was the introduction of novel
institutions peculiar to the Germans, is speaking in ignorance of the
European unity and of that vast landscape of our civilization which every
true historian should, however dimly, possess. The same things, talked
of in a mixture of Germanic and Latin terms between Poole Harbour and
the Bass Rock, were talked of in Celtic terms from the Start to Glasgow;
the chroniclers wrote them down in Latin terms alone everywhere from
the Sahara to the Grampians and from the Adriatic to the Atlantic. The
very Basques, who were so soon to begin the resistance of Christendom
against the Mohammedan in Spain, spoke of them in Basque terms. But the
actual things--the institutions--for which all these various Latins,
Basque, German, and Celtic words stood (the blood-fine, the scale of
money--reparation for injury, division of society into "hundreds," the
Council advising the Chief, etc.) were much the same throughout the body
of Europe. They will always reappear wherever men of our European race
are thrown into small, warring communities, avid of combat, jealous of
independence, organized under a military aristocracy and reverent of
custom.

Everywhere, and particularly in Britain, the Imperial measurements
survived--the measurement of land, the units of money and of length and
weight were all Roman, and nowhere more than in Eastern Britain during the
Dark Ages.

Lastly, let the reader consider the curious point of language. No more
striking _simulacrum_ of racial unity can be discovered than a common
language or set of languages; but it is a _simulacrum_, and a _simulacrum_
only. It is neither a proof nor a product of true unity. Language
passes from conqueror to conquered, from conquered to conqueror, almost
indifferently. Convenience, accident, and many a mysterious force which
the historian cannot analyze, propagates it, or checks it. Gaul, thickly
populated, organized by but a few garrisons of Roman soldiers and one army
corps of occupation, learns to talk Latin universally, almost within living
memory of the Roman conquest. Yet two corners of Gaul, the one fertile and
rich, the other barren, Amorica and the Basque lands, never accept Latin.
Africa, though thoroughly colonized from Italy and penetrated with Italian
blood as Gaul never was, retains the Punic speech century after century,
to the very ends of Roman rule--seven hundred years after the fall of
Carthage: four hundred after the end of the Roman Republic!

Spain, conquered and occupied by the Mohammedan, and settled in very great
numbers by a highly civilized Oriental race, talks today a Latin only just
touched by Arabic influence. Lombardy, Gallic in blood and with a strong
infusion of repeated Germanic invasions (very much larger than ever Britain
had!) has lost all trace of Gallic accent, even in language, save in one
or two Alpine valleys, and of German speech retains nothing but a few rare
and doubtful words. The plain of Hungary and the Carpathian Mountains are
a tesselated pavement of languages quite dissimilar, Mongolian, Teutonic,
Slav. The Balkan States have, _not_ upon their westward or European side,
but at their extreme opposite limit, a population which continues the
memory of the Empire in its speech; and the vocabulary of the Rumanians is
_not the Greek of Byzantium_, which civilized them, but the Latin of Rome!

The most implacable of Mohammedans now under French rule in Algiers speak,
and have spoken for centuries, not Arabic in any form, but Berber; and the
same speech reappears beyond a wide belt of Arabic in the far desert to the
south.

The Irish, a people in permanent contrast to the English, yet talk in the
main the English tongue.

The French-Canadians, accepting political unity with Britain, retain their
tongue and reject English.

Look where we will, we discover in regard to language something as
incalculable as the human will, and as various as human instinct. The
deliberate attempt to impose it has nearly always failed. Sometimes it
survives as the result of a deliberate policy. Sometimes it is restored as
a piece of national protest--Bohemia is an example. Sometimes it "catches
on" naturally and runs for hundreds of miles covering the most varied
peoples and even the most varied civilizations with a common veil.

Now the Roman towns were not destroyed, the original population was
certainly not destroyed even in the few original settlements of Saxon and
Angles in the sea and river shores of the East. Such civilization as the
little courts of the Pirate chieftains maintained was degraded Roman or
it was nothing. But the so-called "Anglo-Saxon" _language_--the group of
half-German [Footnote: I say "_half_-German" lest the reader should think,
by the use of the word "German" or "Teutonic" that the various dialects
of this sort (including those of the North Sea Pirates) were something
original, uninfluenced by Rome. It must always be remembered that with
their original words and roots was mixed an equal mass of superior words
learned from the civilized men of the South in the course of the many
centuries during which Germans had served the Romans as slaves and in arms
and had met their merchants.] dialects which may have taken root before the
withdrawal of the Roman legions in the East of Britain, and which at any
rate were well rooted there a hundred years after--stood ready for one of
two fates. Either it would die out and be replaced by dialects half Celtic,
half Latin vocabulary, or it would spread westward. That the Teutonic
dialects of the eastern kinglets should spread westward might have seemed
impossible. The unlettered barbarian does not teach the lettered civilized
man; the pagan does not mold the Christian. It is the other way about. Yet
in point of fact that happened. Why?

Before we answer that question let us consider another point. Side by side
with the entry of civilization through the Roman missionary priests in
Kent, there was going on a missionary effort in the North of the Island
of Britain, which effort was Irish. It had various Celtic dialects for
its common daily medium, though it was, of course, Roman in ritual at the
altar. The Celtic missionaries, had they alone been in the field, would
have made us all Celtic speaking today. But it was the direct mission from
Rome that won, and this for the reason that it had behind it the full tide
of Europe. Letters, order, law, building, schools, re-entered England
through Kent--not through Northumberland where the Irish were preaching.

Even so the spread westward of a letterless and starved set of dialects
from the little courts of the eastern coasts (from Canterbury and
Bamborough and so forth) would have been impossible but for a tremendous
accident.

St. Augustine, after his landing, proposed to the native British bishops
that they should help in the conversion of the little pagan kinglets and
their courts on the eastern coast. They would not. They had been cut
off from Europe for so long that they had become warped. They refused
communion. The peaceful Roman Mission coming just at the moment when the
Empire had recovered Italy and was fully restoring itself, was thrown
back on the Eastern courts. It used them. It backed _their_ tongue,
_their_ arms, _their_ tradition. The terms of Roman things were carefully
translated by the priests into the Teutonic dialects of these courts; the
advance of civilization under the missionaries, recapturing more and more
of the province of Britain, proceeded westward from the courts of the
Eastern kinglets. The schools, the official world--all--was now turned by
the weight of the Church against a survival of the Celtic tongues and in
favor of the Eastern Teutonic ones.

Once civilization had come back by way of the South and East, principally
through the natural gate of Kent and through the Straits of Dover which had
been blocked so long, this tendency of the Eastern dialects to spread as
the language of an organized clerical officialdom and of its courts of
law, was immediately strengthened. It soon and rapidly swamped all but the
western hills. But of colonization, of the advance of a race, there was
none. What advanced was the Roman organization once more and, with it, the
dialects of the courts it favored.

What we know, then, of Britain when it was re-civilized we know through
Latin terms or through the half-German dialects which ultimately and much
later merge into what we call Anglo-Saxon. An historic King of Sussex
bears a Celtic name, but we read of him in the Latin, then in the Teutonic
tongues, and his realm, however feeble the proportion of over-sea blood in
it, bears an over-sea label for its court--"the South Saxon."

The mythical founder of Wessex bears a Celtic name, Cerdic: but we read of
him if not in Latin then in Anglo-Saxon. Not a _cantref_ but a _hundred_ is
the term of social organization in England when it is re-civilized; not an
_eglywys_ but a _church_ [Footnote: This word "church" is a good example of
what we mean by Teutonic dialect. It is straight from the Mediterranean.
The native German word for a temple--if they had got so far as to have
temples (for we know nothing of their religion)--is lost.] is the name of
the building in which the new civilization hears Mass. The ruler, whatever
his blood or the blood of his subjects, is a _Cynning_, not a _Reg_ or a
_Prins_. His house and court are a _hall_ [Footnote: And "hall" is again a
Roman word adopted by the Germans.] not a _plâs_. We get our whole picture
of renovated Britain (after the Church is restored) colored by this
half-German speech. But the Britain we see thus colored is not barbaric. It
is a Christian Britain of mixed origin, of ancient municipalities cut off
for a time by the Pirate occupation of the South and East, but now reunited
with the one civilization whose root is in Rome.

This clear historical conclusion sounds so novel today that I must
emphasize and confirm it.

Western Europe in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries was largely
indifferent to our modern ideas of race. Of nationality it knew nothing.
It was concerned with the maintenance of the Catholic Church especially
against the outer Pagan. This filled the mind. This drove all the mastering
energies of the time. The Church, that is, all the acts of life, but
especially record and common culture, came back into a Britain which had
been cut off. It reopened the gate. It was refused aid by the Christian
whom it relieved. It decided for the courts of the South and East, taught
them organization, and carried their dialects with it through the Island
which it gradually recovered for civilization.

We are now in a position to sum up our conclusions upon the matter:

Britain, connected with the rest of civilization by a narrow and precarious
neck of sea-travel over the Straits of Dover, had, in the last centuries of
Roman rule, often furnished great armies to usurpers or Imperial claimants,
sometimes leaving the Island almost bare of regular troops. But with
each return of peace these armies also had returned and the rule of the
central Roman government over Britain had been fairly continuous until the
beginning of the fifth century. At that moment--in 410 A.D.--the bulk of
the trained soldiers again left upon a foreign adventure. But the central
rule of Rome was then breaking down: these regulars never returned--though
many auxiliary troops may have remained.

At this moment, when every province of the West was subject to disturbance
and to the over-running of barbarian bands, small but destructive, Britain
particularly suffered. Scotch, Irish and German barbarians looted her on
all sides.

These last, the Saxon pirates, brought in as auxiliaries in the Roman
fashion, may already have been settled in places upon the eastern coast,
their various half-German dialects may have already been common upon those
coasts; but at any rate, after the breakdown of the Roman order, detached
communities under little local chiefs arose. The towns were not destroyed.
Neither the slaves, nor, for that matter, the greater part of the free
population fell. But wealth declined rapidly in the chaos as it did
throughout Western Europe. And side by side with this ruin came the
replacing of the Roman official language by a welter of Celtic and of
half-German dialects in a mass of little courts. The new official Roman
religion--certainly at the moment of the breakdown the religion of a small
minority--almost or wholly disappeared in the Eastern pirate settlements.
The Roman language similarly disappeared in the many small principalities
of the western part of the island; they reverted to their original
Celtic dialects. There was no boundary between the hotchpotch of little
German-speaking territories on the East and the little Celtic territories
on the West. There was no more than a vague common feeling of West against
East or East against West; all fought indiscriminately among themselves.

After a time which could be covered by two long lives, during which
decline had been very rapid, and as noticeable in the West as in the East
throughout the Island, the full influence of civilization returned, with
the landing in 597 of St. Augustine and his missionaries sent by the Pope.

_But the little Pirate courts of the East happened to have settled on
coasts which occupied the gateway into the Island_; it was thus through
them that civilization had been cut off, and it was through them that
civilization came back. On this account:

(1) The little kingdoms tended to coalesce under the united discipline of
the Church.

(2) The united British civilization so forming was able to advance
gradually _westward_ across the island.

(3) Though the institutions of Europe were much the same wherever Roman
civilization had existed and had declined, though the councils of magnates
surrounding the King, the assemblies of armed men, the division of land
and people into "hundreds" and the rest of it were common to Europe,
_these things were given, over a wider and wider area of Britain, Eastern,
half-German names because it was through the courts of the Eastern kinglets
that civilization had returned_. The kinglets of the East, as civilization
grew, were continually fed from the Continent, strengthened with ideas,
institutions, arts, and the discipline of the Church. Thus did they
politically become more and more powerful, until the whole island, except
the Cornish peninsula, Wales and the Northwestern mountains, was more or
less administered by the courts which had their roots in the eastern coasts
and rivers, and which spoke dialects cognate to those beyond the North Sea,
while the West, cut off from this Latin restoration, decayed in political
power and saw its Celtic dialects shrink in area.

By the time that this old Roman province of Britain re-arises as an ordered
Christian land in the eighth century, its records are kept not only in
Latin but in the Court "Anglo-Saxon" dialects: by far the most important
being that of Winchester. Many place names, and the general speech of its
inhabitants have followed suit, and this, a superficial but a very vivid
change, is the chief outward change in the slow transformation that has
been going on in Britain for three hundred years (450-500 to 750-800).

Britain is reconquered for civilization and that easily; it is again an
established part of the European unity, with the same sacraments, the
same morals, and all those same conceptions of human life as bound Europe
together even more firmly than the old central government of Rome had bound
it. And within this unity of civilized Christendom England was to remain
for eight hundred years.




VI

THE DARK AGES


So far we have traced the fortunes of the Roman Empire (that is of European
civilization and of the Catholic Church with which that civilization was
identified) from the origins both of the Church and of the Empire, to the
turning point of the fifth century. We have seen the character of that
turning point.

There was a gradual decline in the power of the central monarchy, an
increasing use of auxiliary barbarian troops in the army upon which Roman
society was founded, until at last (in the years from 400 to 500 A.D.)
authority, though Roman in every detail of its form, gradually ceased
to be exercised from Rome or Constantinople, but fell imperceptibly
into the hands of a number of local governments. We have seen that the
administration of these local governments usually devolved on the chief
officers of the auxiliary barbarian troops, who were also, as a rule, their
chieftains by some kind of inheritance.

We have seen that there was no considerable infiltration of barbarian
blood, no "invasions" in our modern sense of the term--(or rather,
no successful ones); no blotting out of civilization, still less any
introduction of new institutions or ideas drawn from barbarism.

The coast regions of Eastern Britain (the strongest example of all, for
there the change was most severe) were reconquered for civilization and
for the Faith by the efforts of St. Augustine; Africa was recaptured for
the direct rule of the Emperor: so was Italy and the South of Spain. At
the end of the seventh century that which was in the future to be called
Christendom (and which is nothing more than the Roman Empire continuing
though transformed) is again reunited.

What followed was a whole series of generations in which the forms of
civilization were set and crystallized in a few very simple, traditional
and easily appreciated types. The whole standard of Europe was lowered to
the level of its fundamentals, as it were. The primary arts upon which we
depend for our food and drink, and raiment and shelter survived intact.
The secondary arts reposing upon these, failed and disappeared almost
in proportion to their distance from fundamental necessities of our
race. History became no more than a simple chronicle. Letters, in the
finer sense, almost ceased. Four hundred years more were to pass before
Europe was to reawaken from this sort of sleep into which her spirit had
retreated, and the passage from the full civilization of Rome through this
period of simple and sometimes barbarous things, is properly called the
Dark Ages.

It is of great importance for anyone who would comprehend the general story
of Europe, to grasp the nature of those half-hidden centuries. They may be
compared to a lake into which the activities of the old world flowed and
stirred and then were still, and from which in good time the activities of
the Middle Ages, properly so called, were again to flow.

Again one may compare the Dark Ages to the leafsoil of a forest. They are
formed by the disintegration of an antique florescence. They are the bed
from which new florescence shall spring.

It is a curious phenomenon to consider: this hibernation, or sleep: this
rest of the stuff of Europe. It leads one to consider the flux and reflux
of civilization as something much more comparable to a pulse than to
a growth. It makes us remember that _rhythm_ which is observed in all
forms of energy. It makes us doubt that mere progress from simplicity to
complexity which used to be affirmed as the main law of history.

The contemplation of the Dark Ages affords a powerful criticism of that
superficial theory of social evolution which is among the intellectual
plagues of our own generation. Much more is the story of Europe like the
waking and the sleeping of a mature man, than like any indefinite increase
in the aptitudes and powers of a growing body.

Though the prime characteristic of the Dark Ages is one of recollection,
and though they are chiefly marked by this note of Europe sinking back into
herself, very much more must be known of them before we have the truth,
even in its most general form.

I will put in the form of a category or list the chief points which we must
bear in mind.

In the first place the Dark Ages were a period of intense military action.
Christendom was besieged from all around. It was held like a stronghold,
and in those centuries of struggle its institutions were molded by military
necessities: so that Christendom has ever since had about it the quality of
a soldier. There was one unending series of attacks, Pagan and Mohammedan,
from the North, from the East and from the South; attacks not comparable to
the older raids of external hordes, eager only to enjoy civilization within
the Empire, small in number and yet ready to accept the faith and customs
of Europe. The barbarian incursions of the fifth and sixth centuries--at
the end of the United Roman Empire--had been of this lesser kind.
The mighty struggles of the eighth, ninth and especially the tenth
centuries--of the Dark Ages--were a very different matter. Had the military
institutions of Europe failed in _that_ struggle, our civilization would
have been wiped out; and indeed at one or two critical points, as in the
middle of the eighth against the Mohammedan, and at the end of the ninth
century against the northern pirates, all human judgment would have decided
that Europe _was_ doomed.

In point of fact, as we shall see in a moment, Europe was just barely
saved. It was saved by the sword and by the intense Christian ideal which
nerved the sword arm. But it was only just barely saved.

The first assault came from Islam.

A new intense and vividly anti-Christian thing arose in a moment, as it
were, out of nothing, out of the hot sands to the East and spread like a
fire. It consumed all the Levant. It arrived at the doors of the West. This
was no mere rush of barbarism. The Mohammedan world was as cultured as
our own in its first expansion. It maintained a higher and an increasing
culture while ours declined; and its conquest, where it conquered us, was
the conquest of something materially superior for the moment over the
remaining arts and traditions of Christian Europe.

Just at the moment when Britain was finally won back to Europe, and when
the unity of the West seemed to be recovered (though its life had fallen
to so much lower a plane), we lost North Africa; it was swept from end
to end in one tidal rush by that new force which aimed fiercely at our
destruction. Immediately afterwards the first Mohammedan force crossed the
Straits of Gibraltar; and in a few months after its landing the whole of
the Spanish Peninsula, that strong Rock as it had seemed of ancient Roman
culture, the hard Iberian land, crumbled. Politically, at least, and right
up to the Pyrenees, Asia had it in its grip. In the mountain valleys alone,
and especially in the tangle of highlands which occupies the northwestern
corner of the Spanish square, individual communities of soldiers held out.
From these the gradual reconquest of Spain by Christendom was to proceed,
but for the moment they were crowded and penned upon the Asturian hills
like men fighting against a wall.

Even Gaul was threatened: a Mohammedan host poured up into its very centre
far beyond Poitiers: halfway to Tours. Luckily it was defeated; but Moslem
garrisons continued to hold out in the Southern districts, in the northern
fringes of the Pyrenees and along the shore line of the Narbonese and
Provence.

Southern Italy was raided and partly occupied. The islands of the
Mediterranean fell.

Against this sudden successful spring which had lopped off half of the
West, the Dark Ages, and especially the French of the Dark Ages, spent a
great part of their military energy. The knights of Northern Spain and the
chiefs of the unconquered valleys recruited their forces perpetually from
Gaul beyond the Pyrenees; and the northern valley of the Ebro, the high
plains of Castile and Leon, were the training ground of European valor
for three hundred years. The Basques were the unyielding basis of all the
advance.

This Mohammedan swoop was the first and most disastrously successful of the
three great assaults.

Next came the Scandinavian pirates.

Their descent was a purely barbaric thing, not numerous but (since pirates
can destroy much with small numbers) for centuries unexhausted. They
harried all the rivers and coasts of Britain, of Gaul, and of the
Netherlands. They appeared in the Southern seas and their efforts seemed
indefatigable. Britain especially (where the raiders bore the local name of
"Danes") suffered from a ceaseless pillage, and these new enemies had no
attraction to the Roman land save loot. They merely destroyed. They refused
our religion. Had they succeeded they would not have mingled with us, but
would have ended us.

Both in Northern Gaul and in Britain their chieftains acquired something of
a foothold, but only after the perilous moment in which their armies were
checked; they were tamed and constrained to accept the society they had
attacked.

This critical moment when Europe seemed doomed was the last generation
of the ninth century. France had been harried up to the gates of Paris.
Britain was so raided that its last independent king, Alfred, was in
hiding.

Both in Britain and Gaul Christendom triumphed and in the same generation.

Paris stood a successful siege, and the family which defended it was
destined to become the royal family of all France at the inception of the
Middle Ages. Alfred of Wessex in the same decade recovered South England.
In both provinces of Christendom the situation was saved. The chiefs of the
pirates were baptized; and though Northern barbarism remained a material
menace for another hundred years, there was no further danger of our
destruction.

Finally, less noticed by history, but quite as grievous, and needing a
defence as gallant, was the pagan advance over the North German Plain and
up the valley of the Danube.

All the frontier of Christendom upon this line from Augsburg and the Lech
to the course of the Elbe and the North Sea, was but a line of fortresses
and continual battlefields. It was but recently organized land. Until
the generations before the year 800 there was no civilization beyond the
Rhine save the upper Danube partially reclaimed, and a very scanty single
extension up the valley of the Lower Main.

But Charlemagne, with vast Gallic armies, broke into the barbaric Germanies
right up to the Elbe. He compelled them by arms to accept religion, letters
and arts. He extended Europe to these new boundaries and organized them as
a sort of rampart in the East: a thing the Roman Empire had not done. The
Church was the cement of this new belt of defence--the imperfect population
of which were evangelized from Ireland and Britain. It was an experiment,
this creation of the Germanies by Western culture, this spiritual
colonization of a _March_ beyond the limits of the Empire. It did not
completely succeed, as the Reformation proves; but it had at least the
strength in the century after Charlemagne, its founder, to withstand the
Eastern attack upon Christendom.

The attack was not racial. It was Pagan Slav, mixed with much that was left
of Pagan German, even Mongol. Its character was the advance of the savage
against the civilized man, and it remained a peril two generations longer
than the peril which Gaul and Britain had staved off from the North.

This, then, is the first characteristic to be remembered of the Dark Ages:
the violence of the physical struggle and the intense physical effort by
which Europe was saved.

The second characteristic of the Dark Ages proceeds from this first
military one: it may be called Feudalism.

Briefly it was this: the passing of actual government from the hands of the
old Roman provincial centres of administration into the hands of each small
local society and its lord. On such a basis there was a reconstruction of
society from below: these local lords associating themselves under greater
men, and these again holding together in great national groups under a
national overlord.

In the violence of the struggle through which Christendom passed, town and
village, valley and castle, had often to defend itself alone.

The great Roman landed estates, with their masses of dependents and slaves,
under a lord or owner, had never disappeared. The descendants of these
Roman, Gallic, British, _owners_ formed the fighting class of the Dark
Ages, and in this new function of theirs, perpetually lifted up to be the
sole depositories of authority in some small imperiled countryside, they
grew to be nearly independent units. For the purposes of cohesion that
family which possessed most estates in a district tended to become the
leader of it. Whole provinces were thus formed and grouped, and the vaguer
sentiments of a larger unity expressed themselves by the choice of some one
family, one of the most powerful in every county, who would be the overlord
of all the other lords, great and small.

Side by side with this growth of local independence and of voluntary local
groupings, went the transformation of the old imperial nominated offices
into hereditary and personal things.

A _count_, for instance, was originally a _"comes"_ or "companion" of
the Emperor. The word dates from long before the break-up of the central
authority of Rome. A _count_ later was a great official: a local governor
and judge--the Vice-Roy of a large district (a French county and English
shire). His office was revocable, like other official appointments. He was
appointed for a season, first at the Emperor's, later at the local King's
discretion, to a particular local government. In the Dark Ages the _count_
becomes hereditary. He thinks of his government as a possession which his
son should rightly have after him. He bases his right to his government
upon the possession of great estates within the area of that government.
In a word, he comes to think of himself not as an official at all but as
a _feudal overlord_, and all society (and the remaining shadow of central
authority itself) agrees with him.

The second note, then, of the Dark Ages is the gradual transition of
Christian society from a number of slave-owning, rich, landed proprietors,
taxed and administered by a regular government, to a society of fighting
_nobles_ and their descendants, organized upon a basis of independence and
in a hierarchy of lord and overlord, and supported no longer by _slaves_ in
the _villages_, but by half-free serfs or "_villeins_."

Later an elaborate theory was constructed in order to rationalize this
living and real thing. It was pretended--by a legal fiction--that the
central King owned nearly all the land, that the great overlords "held"
their land of him, the lesser lords "holding" theirs hereditarily of the
overlords, and so forth. This idea of "holding" instead of "owning," though
it gave an easy machinery for confiscation in time of rebellion, was legal
theory only, and, so far as men's views of property went, a mere form. The
reality was what I have described.

The third characteristic of the Dark Ages was the curious fixity of morals,
of traditions, of the forms of religion, and of all that makes up social
life.

We may presume that all civilization originally sprang from a soil in which
custom was equally permanent.

We know that in the great civilizations of the East an enduring fixity of
form is normal.

But in the general history of Europe, it has been otherwise. There has
been a perpetual flux in the outward form of things, in architecture,
in dress, and in the statement of philosophy as well (though not in its
fundamentals).

In this mobile surface of European history the Dark Ages form a sort of
island of changelessness. There is an absence of any great heresies in the
West, and, save in one or two names, an absence of speculation. It was as
though men had no time for any other activity but the ceaseless business of
arms and of the defence of the West.

Consider the life of Charlemagne, who is the central figure of those
centuries. It is spent almost entirely in the saddle. One season finds
him upon the Elbe, the next upon the Pyrenees. One Easter he celebrates
in Northern Gaul, another in Rome. The whole story is one of perpetual
marching, and of blows parrying here, thrusting there, upon all the
boundaries of isolated and besieged Christendom. He will attend to
learning, but the ideal of learning is repetitive and conservative: its
passion is to hold what was, not to create or expand. An anxious and
sometimes desperate determination to preserve the memory of a great but
half-forgotten past is the business of his court, which dissolves just
before the worst of the Pagan assault; as it is the business of Alfred,
who arises a century later, just after the worst assault has been finally
repelled.

Religion during these centuries settled and consolidated, as it were.
An enemy would say that it petrified, a friend that it was enormously
strengthened by pressure. But whatever the metaphor chosen, the truth
indicated will be this: that the Catholic Faith became between the years
600 and 1000 utterly one with Europe. The last vestiges of the antique and
Pagan civilization of the Mediterranean were absorbed. A habit of certitude
and of fixity even in the details of thought was formed in the European
mind.

It is to be noted in this connection that geographically the centre of
things had somewhat shifted. With the loss of Spain and of Northern Africa,
the Mohammedan raiding of Southern Italy and the islands, the Mediterranean
was no longer a vehicle of Western civilization, but the frontier of it.
Rome itself might now be regarded as a frontier town. The eruption of the
barbarians from the East along the Danube had singularly cut off the Latin
West from Constantinople and from all the high culture of its Empire.
Therefore, the centre of that which resisted in the West, the geographical
nucleus of the island of Christendom, which was besieged all round, was
France, and in particular Northern France. Northern Italy, the Germanies,
the Pyrenees and the upper valley of the Ebro were essentially the marches
of Gaul. Gaul was to preserve all that could be preserved of the material
side of Europe, and also of the European spirit. And therefore the New
World, when it arose, with its Gothic Architecture, its Parliaments, its
Universities, and, in general, its spring of the Middle Ages, was to be a
Gallic thing.

The fourth characteristic of the Dark Ages was a material one, and was that
which would strike our eyes most immediately if we could transfer ourselves
in time, and enjoy a physical impression of that world. This characteristic
was derived from what I have just been saying. It was the material
counterpart of the moral immobility or steadfastness of the time. It
was this: that the external forms of things stood quite unchanged. The
semi-circular arch, the short, stout pillar, occasionally (but rarely) the
dome: these were everywhere the mark of architecture. There was no change
nor any attempt at change. The arts were saved but not increased, and
the whole of the work that men did with their hands stood fast in mere
tradition. No new town arises. If one is mentioned (Oxford, for instance)
for the first time in the Dark Ages, whether in Britain or in Gaul, one
may fairly presume a Roman origin for it, even though there be no actual
mention of it handed down from Roman times.

No new roads were laid. The old Roman military system of highways was kept
up and repaired, though kept up and repaired with a declining vigor. The
wheel of European life had settled to one slow rate of turning.

Not only were all these forms enduring, they were also few and simple. One
type of public building and of church, one type of writing, everywhere
recognizable, one type of agriculture, with very few products to
differentiate it, alone remained.

The fifth characteristic of the Dark Ages is one apparently, but only
apparently, contradictory of that immobile and fundamental character which
I have just been describing. It is this: the Dark Ages were the point
during which there very gradually germinated and came into outward
existence things which still remain among us and help to differentiate our
Christendom from the past of classical antiquity.

This is true of certain material things. The spur, the double bridle, the
stirrup, the book in leaves distinct from the old roll--and very much
else. It is true of the road system of Europe wherever that road system
has departed from the old Roman scheme. It was in the Dark Ages with the
gradual break-down of expensive causeways over marshes; with the gradual
decline of certain centres; with bridges left unrepaired; culverts choked
and making a morass against the dam of the roads, that you got the
deflection of the great ways. In almost every broad river valley in
England, where an old Roman road crosses the stream and its low-lying
banks, you may see something which the Dark Ages left to us in our road
system: you may see the modern road leaving the old Roman line and picking
its way across the wet lands from one drier point to another, and rejoining
the Roman line beyond. It is a thing you will see in almost anyone of our
Strettons, Stanfords, Stamfords, Staffords, etc., which everywhere mark the
crossing of a Roman road over a water course.

But much more than in material things the Dark Ages set a mold wherein the
European mind grew. For instance, it was they that gave to us two forms of
legend. The one something older than history, older than the Roman order,
something Western reappearing with the release of the mind from the rigid
accuracy of a high civilization; the other that legend which preserves
historical truth under a guise of phantasy.

Of the first, the British story of Tristan is one example out of a
thousand. Of the second, the legend of Constantine, which gradually and
unconsciously developed into the famous Donation.

The Dark Ages gave us that wealth of story coloring and enlivening all our
European life, and what is more, largely preserving historic truth; for
nothing is more valuable to true history than legend. They also gave us
our order in speech. Great hosts of words unknown to antiquity sprang
up naturally among the people when the force of the classical centre
failed. Some of them were words of the languages before the Roman armies
came--cask, for instance, the old Iberian word. Some of them were the camp
talk of the soldiers. Spade, for instance, and "_épée_," the same piece of
Greek slang, "the broad one," which has come to mean in French a sword; in
English that with which we dig the earth. Masses of technical words in the
old Roman laws turned into popular usage through that appetite the poor
have for long official phrases: for instance, our English words _wild_,
_weald_, _wold_, _waste_, _gain_, _rider_, _rode_, _ledge_, _say_, and a
thousand others, all branch out from the lawyers' phrases of the later
Roman Empire.

In this closed crucible of the Dark Ages crystallized also--by a process
which we cannot watch, or of which we have but glimpses--that rich mass
of jewels, the local customs of Europe, and even the local dress, which
differentiates one place from another, when the communications of a high
material civilization break down. In all this the Dark Ages are a comfort
to the modern man, for he sees by their example that the process of
increasing complexity reaches its term; that the strain of development is
at last relieved; that humanity sooner or later returns upon itself; that
there is an end in repose and that the repose is fruitful.

The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that which has most engrossed,
puzzled, and warped the judgment of non-Catholic historians when they have
attempted a conspectus of European development; it was the segregation, the
homogeneity of and the dominance of clerical organization. The hierarchy
of the Church, its unity and its sense of discipline was the chief civil
institution and the chief binding social force of the times. Side by side
with it went the establishment of the monastic institution which everywhere
took on a separate life of its own, preserved what could be preserved of
arts and letters, drained the marshes and cleared the forests, and formed
the ideal economic unit for such a period; almost the only economic unit in
which capital could then be accumulated and preserved. The great order of
St. Benedict formed a framework of living points upon which was stretched
the moral life of Europe. The vast and increasing endowments of great and
fixed religious houses formed the economic flywheel of those centuries.
They were the granary and the storehouse. But for the monks, the
fluctuations proceeding from raid and from decline would, in their
violence, at some point or another, have snapped the chain of economic
tradition, and we should all have fallen into barbarism.

Meanwhile the Catholic hierarchy as an institution--I have already called
it by a violent metaphor, a civil institution--at any rate as a political
institution--remained absolute above the social disintegration of the time.

All natural things were slowly growing up unchecked and disturbing the
strict lines of the old centralized governmental order which men still
remembered. In language Europe was a medley of infinitely varying local
dialects.

Thousands upon thousands of local customs were coming to be separate laws
in each separate village.

Legend, as I have said, was obscuring fixed history. The tribal basis
from which we spring was thrusting its instincts back into the strict
and rational Latin fabric of the State. Status was everywhere replacing
contract, and habit replacing a reason for things. Above this medley the
only absolute organization that could be was that of the Church. The Papacy
was the one centre whose shifting could not even be imagined. The Latin
tongue, in the late form in which the Church used it, was everywhere the
same, and everywhere suited to rituals that differed but slightly from
province to province when we contrast them with the millioned diversity of
local habit and speech.

Whenever a high civilization was to re-arise out of the soil of the Dark
Ages, it was certain first to show a full organization of the Church
under some Pope of exceptional vigor, and next to show that Pope, or his
successors in this tradition, at issue with new civil powers. Whenever
central government should rise again and in whatever form, a conflict would
begin between the new kings and the clerical organization which had so
strengthened itself during the Dark Ages.

Now Europe, as we know, did awake from its long sleep. The eleventh century
was the moment of its awakening. Three great forces--the personality of St.
Gregory VII., the appearance (by a happy accident of slight cross breeding:
a touch of Scandinavian blood added to the French race) of the Norman race,
finally the Crusades--drew out of the darkness the enormous vigor of the
early Middle Ages. They were to produce an intense and active civilization
of their own; a civilization which was undoubtedly the highest and the
best our race has known, conformable to the instincts of the European,
fulfilling his nature, giving him that happiness which is the end of men.

As we also know, Europe on this great experiment of the Middle Ages, after
four hundred years of high vitality, was rising to still greater heights
when it suffered shipwreck.

With that disaster, the disaster of the Reformation, I shall deal later in
this series.

In my next chapter I shall describe the inception of the Middle Ages, and
show what they were before our promise in them was ruined.




VII

THE MIDDLE AGES


I said in my last chapter that the Dark Ages might be compared to a long
sleep of Europe: a sleep lasting from the fatigue of the old society in the
fifth century to the spring and rising of the eleventh and twelfth. The
metaphor is far too simple, of course, for that sleep was a sleep of war.
In all those centuries Europe was desperately holding its own against the
attack of all that desired to destroy it: refined and ardent Islam from the
South, letterless barbarian pagans from the East and North. At any rate,
from that sleep or that besieging Europe awoke or was relieved.

I said that three great forces, humanly speaking, worked this miracle; the
personality of St. Gregory VII.; the brief appearance, by a happy accident,
of the Norman State; and finally the Crusades.

The Normans of history, the true French Normans we know, are stirring a
generation after the year 1000. St. Gregory filled that same generation. He
was a young man when the Norman effort began. He died, full of an enormous
achievement, in 1085. As much as one man could, _he_, the heir of Cluny,
had re-made Europe. Immediately after his death there was heard the march
of the Crusades. From these three the vigor of a fresh, young, renewed
Europe proceeds.

Much might be added. The perpetual and successful chivalric charge against
the Mohammedan in Spain illumined all that time and clarified it. Asia
was pushed back from the Pyrenees, and through the passes of the Pyrenees
perpetually cavalcaded the high adventurers of Christendom. The Basques--a
strange and very strong small people--were the pivot of that reconquest,
but the valley of the torrent of the Aragon was its channel. The life of
St. Gregory is contemporaneous with that of El Cid Campeador. In the same
year that St. Gregory died, Toledo, the sacred centre of Spain, was at last
forced from the Mohammedans, and their Jewish allies, and firmly held. All
Southern Europe was alive with the sword.

In that same moment romance appeared; the great songs: the greatest of them
all, the Song of Roland; then was a ferment of the European mind, eager
from its long repose, piercing into the undiscovered fields. That watching
skepticism which flanks and follows the march of the Faith when the Faith
is most vigorous had also begun to speak.

There was even some expansion beyond the boundaries eastward, so that
something of the unfruitful Baltic Plain was reclaimed. Letters awoke and
Philosophy. Soon the greatest of all human exponents, St. Thomas Aquinas,
was to appear. The plastic arts leapt up: Color and Stone. Humor fully
returned: general travel: vision. In general, the moment was one of
expectation and of advance. It was spring.

For the purposes of these few pages I must confine the attention of my
reader to those three tangible sources of the new Europe, which, as I have
said, were the Normans, St. Gregory VII., and the Crusades.

Of the Norman race we may say that it resembled in history those _mirć_ or
new stars which flare out upon the darkness of the night sky for some few
hours or weeks or years, and then are lost or merged in the infinity of
things. He is indeed unhistorical who would pretend William the Conqueror,
the organizer and maker of what we now call England, Robert the Wizard, the
conquerors of Sicily, or any of the great Norman names that light Europe in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be even partly Scandinavians. They
were Gauls: short in stature, lucid in design, vigorous in stroke, positive
in philosophy. They bore no outward relation to the soft and tall and
sentimental North from which some few of their remote ancestry had drawn
ancestral names.

But on the other hand, anyone who should pretend that this amazing and
ephemeral phenomenon, the Norman, was _merely_ Gallo-Roman, would commit an
error: an error far less gross but still misleading. In speech, in manner,
in accoutrement, in the very trick of riding the horse, in the cooking of
food, in that most intimate part of man, his jests, the Norman was wholly
and apparently a Gaul. In his body--hard, short, square, broad-shouldered,
alert--the Norman was a Frenchman only. But no other part of Gaul _then_
did what Normandy did: nor could any other French province show, as
Normandy showed, immediate, organized and creative power, during the few
years that the marvel lasted.

That marvel is capable of explanation and I will attempt to explain it.
Those dull, blundering and murderous ravagings of the coasts of Christian
Europe by the pirates of Scandinavia (few in number, futile in achievement)
which we call in English history, "The Danish Invasions," were called upon
the opposite coast of the Channel, "The Invasions of the Nordmanni" or "the
Men of the North." They came from the Baltic and from Norway. They were
part of the universal assault which the Dark Ages of Christendom had to
sustain: part of a ceaseless pressure from without against civilization;
and they were but a part of it. They were few, as pirates always must be.
It was on the estuaries of a few continental rivers and in the British
Isles that they counted most in the lives of Europeans.

Now among the estuaries of the great rivers was the estuary of the Seine.
The Scandinavian pirates forced it again and again. At the end of the
ninth century they had besieged Paris, which was then rapidly becoming the
political centre of Gaul.

So much was there left of the Roman tradition in that last stronghold of
the Roman Empire that the quieting of invading hordes by their settlement
(by inter-marriage with and granting of land in, a fixed Roman province)
was a policy still obvious to those who still called themselves "The
Emperors" of the West.

In the year 911 this antique method, consecrated by centuries of tradition,
produced its last example and the barbarian troublers from the sea were
given a fixed limit of land wherein they might settle. The maritime
province "Lugdunensis Secunda" [Footnote: The delimitation of this province
dated from Diocletian. It was already six hundred years old, its later
name of "Normandy" masked this essential fact that it was and is a Roman
division, as for that matter are probably our English counties.] was handed
over to them for settlement, that is, they might not attempt a partition of
the land outside its boundaries.

On the analogy of all similar experiments we can be fairly certain of what
happened, though there is no contemporary record of such domestic details
in the case of Normandy.

The barbarians, few in number, coming into a fertile and thickly populated
Roman province, only slightly affected its blood, but their leaders
occupied waste land, planted themselves as heirs of existing childless
lords, took to wife the heiresses of others; enfeoffed groups of small men;
took a share of the revenue; helped to answer for military levy and general
government. Their chief was responsible to the crown.

To the mass of the population the new arrangement would make no change;
they were no longer slaves, but they were still serfs. Secure of their
small farms, but still bound to work for their lord, it mattered little to
them whether that lord of theirs had married his daughter to a pirate or
had made a pirate his heir or his partner in the management of the estate.
All the change the serf would notice from the settlement was that the
harrying and the plundering of occasional barbarian raids had ceased.

In the governing class of perhaps some ten to twenty thousand families the
difference would be very noticeable indeed. The pirate newcomers, though
insignificant in number compared with the total population, were a very
large fraction added to so small a body. The additional blood, though
numerically a small proportion, permeated rapidly throughout the whole
community. Scandinavian names and habits may have had at first some little
effect upon the owner-class with which the Scandinavians first mingled; it
soon disappeared. But, as had been the case centuries before in the earlier
experiments of that sort, it was the barbarian chief and his hereditary
descendants who took over the local government and "held it," as the phrase
went, of the universal government of Gaul.

These "North-men," the new and striking addition to the province, the
Gallo-Romans called, as we have seen "Nordmanni." The Roman province,
within the limits of which they were strictly settled, the second Lyonnese,
came to be called "Normannia." For a century the slight admixture of
new blood worked in the general Gallo-Roman mass of the province and,
numerically small though it was, influenced its character, or rather
produced a new thing; just as in certain chemical combinations the small
admixture of a new element transforms the whole. With the beginning of the
eleventh century, as everything was springing into new life, when the great
saint who, from the chair of Peter, was to restore the Church was already
born, when the advance of the Pyreneans against Islam was beginning to
strike its decisive conquering blows, there appeared, a sudden phenomenon,
this new thing--French in speech and habit and disposition of body, yet
just differentiated from the rest of Frenchmen--_the Norman Race_.

It possessed these characteristics--a great love of exact order, an alert
military temper and a passion for reality which made its building even of
ships (though it was not in the main seafaring) excellent, and of churches
and of castles the most solid of its time.

All the Normans' characteristics (once the race was formed), led them
to advance. They conquered England and organized it; they conquered and
organized Sicily and Southern Italy; they made of Normandy itself the model
state in a confused time; they surveyed land; they developed a regular
tactic for mailed cavalry. Yet they endured for but a hundred years, and
after that brief coruscation they are wholly merged again in the mass of
European things!

You may take the first adventurous lords of the Cotentin in, say 1030, for
the beginning of the Norman thing; you may take the Court of young Henry
II. with his Southerners and his high culture in, say 1160, most certainly
for the burial of it. During that little space of time the Norman had not
only reintroduced exactitude in the government of men, he had also provided
the sword of the new Papacy and he had furnished the framework of the
crusading host. But before his adventure was done the French language and
the writ of Rome ran from the Grampians to the Euphrates.

Of the Papacy and the Crusades I now speak.

St. Gregory VII., the second of the great re-creative forces of that time,
was of the Tuscan peasantry, Etrurian in type, therefore Italian in speech,
by name Hildebrand. Whether an historian understands his career or no is a
very test of whether that historian understands the nature of Europe. For
St. Gregory VII. imposed nothing upon Europe. He made nothing new. What he
did was to stiffen the ideal with reality. He provoked a resurrection of
the flesh. He made corporate the centralized Church and the West.

For instance; it was the ideal, the doctrine, the tradition, the major
custom by far, that the clergy should be celibate. He enforced celibacy as
universal discipline.

The awful majesty of the Papacy had been present in all men's minds as a
vast political conception for centuries too long to recall; St. Gregory
organized that monarchy, and gave it proper instruments of rule.

The Unity of the Church had been the constant image without which
Christendom could not be; St. Gregory VII. at every point made that unity
tangible and visible. The Protestant historians who, for the most part, see
in the man a sporadic phenomenon, by such a misconception betray the source
of their anćmia and prove their intellectual nourishment to be unfed from
the fountain of European life. St. Gregory VII. was not an inventor, but a
renovator. He worked not upon, but in, his material; and his material was
the nature of Europe: our nature.

Of the awful obstacles such workers must encounter all history speaks.
They are at conflict not only with evil, but with inertia; and with local
interest, with blurred vision and with restricted landscapes. Always they
think themselves defeated, as did St. Gregory when he died. Always they
prove themselves before posterity to have done much more than any other
mold of man. Napoleon also was of this kind.

When St. Gregory was dead the Europe which he left was the monument of
that triumph whose completion he had doubted and the fear of whose failure
had put upon his dying lips the phrase: "I have loved justice and hated
iniquity, therefore I die in exile."

Immediately after his death came the stupendous Gallic effort of the
Crusades.

The Crusades were the second of the main armed eruptions of the Gauls. The
first, centuries before, had been the Gallic invasion of Italy and Greece
and the Mediterranean shores in the old Pagan time. The third, centuries
later, was to be the wave of the Revolution and of Napoleon.

The preface to the Crusades appeared in those endless and already
successful wars of Christendom against Asia upon the high plateaus of
Spain. _These_ had taught the enthusiasm and the method by which Asia,
for so long at high tide flooding a beleaguered Europe, might be slowly
repelled, and from _these_ had proceeded the military science and the
aptitude for strain which made possible the advance of two thousand miles
upon the Holy Land. The consequences of this last and third factor in the
re-awakening of Europe were so many that I can give but a list of them
here.

The West, still primitive, discovered through the Crusades the intensive
culture, the accumulated wealth, the fixed civilized traditions of the
Greek Empire and of the town of Constantinople. It discovered also, in a
vivid new experience, the East. The mere covering of so much land, the mere
seeing of so many sights by a million men expanded and broke the walls
of the mind of the Dark Ages. The Mediterranean came to be covered with
Christian ships, and took its place again with fertile rapidity as the
great highway of exchange.

Europe awoke. All architecture is transformed, and that quite new thing,
the Gothic, arises. The conception of representative assembly, monastic
in origin, fruitfully transferred to civilian soil, appears in the
institutions of Christendom. The vernacular languages appear, and with them
the beginnings of our literature: the Tuscan, the Castilian, the Langue
d'Oc, the Northern French, somewhat later the English. Even the primitive
tongues that had always kept their vitality from beyond recorded time,
the Celtic and the German [Footnote: I mean, in neither of the groups of
tongues as we first find them recorded, for by that time each--especially
the German--was full of Southern words borrowed from the Empire; but the
original stocks which survived side by side with this new vocabulary. For
instance, our first knowledge of Teutonic dialect is of the eighth century
(the so-called Early Gothic is a fraud) but even then quite half the words
or more are truly German, apparently unaffected by the Imperial laws
and speech.] begin to take on new creative powers and to produce a new
literature. That fundamental institution of Europe, the University, arises;
first in Italy, immediately after in Paris--which last becomes the type and
centre of the scheme.

The central civil governments begin to correspond to their natural limits,
the English monarchy is fixed first, the French kingdom is coalescing, the
Spanish regions will soon combine. The Middle Ages are born.

The flower of that capital experiment in the history of our race was
the thirteenth century. Edward I. of England, St. Louis of France, Pope
Innocent III., were the types of its governing manhood. Everywhere Europe
was renewed; there were new white walls around the cities, new white Gothic
churches in the towns, new castles on the hills, law codified, the classics
rediscovered, the questions of philosophy sprung to activity and producing
in their first vigor, as it were, the summit of expository power in St.
Thomas, surely the strongest, the most virile, intellect which our European
blood has given to the world.

Two notes mark the time for anyone who is acquainted with its building, its
letters, and its wars: a note of youth, and a note of content. Europe was
imagined to be at last achieved, and that ineradicable dream of a permanent
and satisfactory society seemed to have taken on flesh and to have come to
live forever among Christian men.

No such permanence and no such good is permitted to humanity; and the great
experiment, as I have called it, was destined to fail.

While it flourished, all that is specially characteristic of our European
descent and nature stood visibly present in the daily life, and in the
large, as in the small, institutions, of Europe.

Our property in land and instruments was well divided among many or all; we
produced the peasant; we maintained the independent craftsman; we founded
coöperative industry. In arms that military type arose which lives upon the
virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms may breed. Above all, an
intense and living appetite for truth, a perception of reality, invigorated
these generations. They saw what was before them, they called things by
their names. Never was political or social formula less divorced from fact,
never was the mass of our civilization better welded--and in spite of all
this the thing did not endure.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the decaying of the flower was
tragically apparent. New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere intrigue
successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase and of sophistry in
philosophical argument, marked the turn of the tide. Not an institution of
the thirteenth but the fourteenth debased it; the Papacy professional and a
prisoner, the parliaments tending to oligarchy, the popular ideals dimmed
in the minds of the rulers, the new and vigorous and democratic monastic
orders already touched with mere wealth and beginning also to change--but
these last can always, and do always, restore themselves.

Upon all this came the enormous incident of the Black Death. Here half the
people, there a third, there again a quarter, died; from that additional
blow the great experiment of the Middle Ages could not recover.

Men clung to their ideal for yet another hundred and fifty years. The vital
forces it had developed still carried Europe from one material perfection
to another; the art of government, the suggestion of letters, the technique
of sculpture and of painting (here raised by a better vision, there
degraded by a worse one), everywhere developed and grew manifold. But
the supreme achievement of the thirteenth century was seen in the later
fourteenth to be ephemeral, and in the fifteenth it was apparent that the
attempt to found a simple and satisfied Europe had failed.

The full causes of that failure cannot be analyzed. One may say that
science and history were too slight; that the material side of life was
insufficient; that the full knowledge of the past which is necessary to
permanence was lacking--or one may say that the ideal was too high for men.
I, for my part, incline to believe that wills other than those of mortals
were in combat for the soul of Europe, as they are in combat daily for the
souls of individual men, and that in this spiritual battle, fought over our
heads perpetually, some accident of the struggle turned it against us for a
time. If that suggestion be fantastic (which no doubt it is), at any rate
none other is complete.

With the end of the fifteenth century there was to come a supreme test
and temptation. The fall of Constantinople and the release of Greek: the
rediscovery of the Classic past: the Press: the new great voyages--India to
the East, America to the West--had (in the one lifetime of a man [Footnote:
The lifetime of one very great and famous man did cover it. Ferdinand,
King of Aragon, the mighty Spaniard, the father of the noblest of English
queens, was born the year before Constantinople fell. He died the year
before Luther found himself swept to the head of a chaotic wave.] between
1453 and 1515) suddenly brought Europe into a new, a magic, and a dangerous
land.

To the provinces of Europe, shaken by an intellectual tempest of physical
discovery, disturbed by an abrupt and undigested enlargement in the
material world, in physical science, and in the knowledge of antiquity, was
to be offered a fruit of which each might taste if it would, but the taste
of which would lead, if it were acquired, to evils no citizen of Europe
then dreamt of; to things which even the criminal intrigues and the cruel
tyrants of the fifteenth century would have shuddered to contemplate, and
to a disaster which very nearly overset our ship of history and very nearly
lost us forever its cargo of letters, of philosophy, of the arts, and of
all our other powers.

That disaster is commonly called "The Reformation." I do not pretend to
analyze its material causes, for I doubt if any of its causes were wholly
material. I rather take the shape of the event and show how the ancient
and civilized boundaries of Europe stood firm, though shaken, under the
tempest; how that tempest might have ravaged no more than those outlying
parts newly incorporated--never sufficiently penetrated perhaps with
the Faith and the proper habits of ordered men--the outer Germanies and
Scandinavia.

The disaster would have been upon a scale not too considerable, and Europe
might quickly have righted herself after the gust should be passed, had not
one exception of capital amount marked the intensest crisis of the storm.
That exception to the resistance offered by the rest of ancient Europe was
the defection of Britain.

Conversely with this loss of an ancient province of the Empire, one nation,
and one alone, of those which the Roman Empire had not bred, stood the
strain and preserved the continuity of Christian tradition: that nation was
Ireland.




VIII

WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION?


This is perhaps the greatest of all historical questions, after the
original question: "What was the Church in the Empire of Rome?" A true
answer to this original question gives the nature of that capital
revolution by which Europe came to unity and to maturity and attained to a
full consciousness of itself. An answer to the other question: "What was
the Reformation?" begins to explain our modern ill-ease.

A true answer to the question: "What was the Reformation?" is of such vast
importance, because it is only when we grasp _what the Reformation was_
that we understand its consequences. Then only do we know how the united
body of European civilization has been cut asunder and by what a wound. The
abomination of industrialism; the loss of land and capital by the people in
great districts of Europe; the failure of modern discovery to serve the end
of man; the series of larger and still larger wars following in a rapidly
rising scale of severity and destruction--till the dead are now counted in
tens of millions; the increasing chaos and misfortune of society--all these
attach one to the other, each falls into its place, and a hundred smaller
phenomena as well, when we appreciate, as today we can, the nature and the
magnitude of that fundamental catastrophe.

It is possible that the perilous business is now drawing to its end, and
that (though those now living will not live to see it) Christendom may
enter into a convalescence: may at last forget the fever and be restored.
With that I am not here concerned. It is my business only to explain that
storm which struck Europe four hundred years ago and within a century
brought Christendom to shipwreck.

The true causes are hidden--for they were spiritual.

In proportion as an historical matter is of import to human kind, in that
proportion does it spring not from apparent--let alone material--causes,
but from some hidden revolution in the human spirit. To pretend an
examination of the secret springs whence the human mind is fed is futile.
The greater the affair, the more directly does it proceed from unseen
sources which the theologian may catalogue, the poet see in vision, the
philosopher explain, but with which positive external history cannot deal,
and which the mere historian cannot handle. It is the function of history
to present the outward thing, as a witness might have seen it, and to show
the reader as much as a spectator could have seen--illuminated indeed by a
knowledge of the past--and a judgment drawn from known succeeding events.
The historian answers the question, "_What_ was?" this or that. To the
question, "_Why_ was it?" if it be in the spiritual order (as are all major
things), the reader must attempt his own reply based upon other aptitudes
than those of historic science.

It is the neglect of this canon which makes barren so much work upon the
past. Read Gibbon's attempt to account for "why" the Catholic Church arose
in the Roman Empire, and mark his empty failure. [Footnote: It is true
that Gibbon was ill equipped for his task because he lacked historical
imagination. He could not grasp the spirit of a past age. He could not
enter into any mood save that of his master, Voltaire. But it is not only
true of Gibbon that he fails to explain the great revolution of A.D.
29-304. No one attempting that explanation has succeeded. It was not of
this world.]

Mark also how all examination of the causes of the French Revolution are
colored by something small and degraded, quite out of proportion to that
stupendous crusade which transformed the modern world. The truth is, that
the historian can only detail those causes, largely material, all evident
and positive, which lie within his province, and such causes are quite
insufficient to explain the full result. Were I here writing "Why" the
Reformation came, my reply would not be historic, but mystic. I should say
that it came "from outside mankind." But that would be to affirm without
the hope of proof, and only in the confidence that all attempts at positive
proof were contemptible. Luckily I am not concerned in so profound an
issue, but only in the presentation of the thing as it was. Upon this I now
set out.

With the close of the Middle Ages two phenomena appeared side by side in
the society of Europe. The first was an ageing and a growing fatigue of the
simple medićval scheme; the second was a very rapid accretion of technical
power.

As to the first I have suggested (it is no more than a suggestion), that
the medićval scheme of society, though much the best fitted to our race
and much the best expression which it has yet found, though especially
productive of happiness (which here and hereafter is the end of man), was
not properly provided with instruments of survival.

Its science was too imperfect, its institutions too local, though its
philosophy was the widest ever framed and the most satisfying to the human
intelligence.

Whatever be the reason, that society _did_ rapidly grow old. Its every
institution grew formal or debased. The Guilds from true coöperative
partnerships for the proper distribution of the means of production, and
for the prevention of a proletariat with its vile cancer of capitalism,
tended to become privileged bodies. Even the heart of Christian Europe, the
village, showed faint signs that it might become an oligarchy of privileged
farmers with some land and less men at their orders. The Monastic orders
were tainted in patches up and down Europe, with worldliness, with an
abandonment of their strict rule, and occasionally with vice. Civil
government grew befogged with tradition and with complex rules. All manner
of theatrical and false trappings began to deform society, notably the
exaggeration of heraldry and a riot of symbolism of which very soon no one
could make head or tail.

The temporal and visible organization of the Church did not escape in such
a welter. The lethargy, avarice, and routine from which that organization
suffered, has been both grossly exaggerated and set out of perspective.
A wild picture of it has been drawn by its enemies. But in a degree the
temporal organization of the Church had decayed at the close of the Middle
Ages. It was partly too much a taking of things for granted, a conviction
that nothing could really upset the unity of Europe; partly the huge
concentration of wealth in clerical hands, which proceeded from the new
economic activity all over Europe, coupled with the absolute power of the
clergy in certain centres and the universal economic function of Rome;
partly a popular loss of faith. All these between them helped to do the
business. At any rate the evil was there.

All institutions (says Machiavelli) must return to their origins, or they
fail. There appeared throughout Europe in the last century of united
Europe, breaking out here and there, sporadic attempts to revivify the
common life, especially upon its spiritual side, by a return to the
primitive communal enthusiasms in which religion necessarily has its
historical origins.

This was in no way remarkable. Neither was it remarkable that each such
sporadic and spontaneous outburst should have its own taint or vice or
false color.

What was remarkable and what made the period unique in the whole history
of Christendom (save for the Arian flood) was the incapacity of the
external organization of the Church at the moment to capture the spiritual
discontent, and to satisfy the spiritual hunger of which these errors were
the manifestation.

In a slower time the external organization of the Church would have
absorbed and regulated the new things, good and evil. It would have
rendered the heresies ridiculous in turn, it would have canalized the
exaltations, it would have humanized the discoveries. But things were
moving at a rate more and more rapid, the whole society of Western
Christendom raced from experience to experience. It was flooded with the
newly found manuscripts of antiquity, with the new discoveries of unknown
continents, with new commerce, printing, and, an effect perhaps rather than
a cause, the complete rebirth of painting, architecture, sculpture and all
the artistic expression of Europe.

In point of fact this doubt and seething and attempted return to early
religious enthusiasm were not digested and were not captured. The spiritual
hunger of the time was not fed. Its extravagance was not exposed to the
solvent of laughter or to the flame of a sufficient indignation: they were
therefore neither withered nor eradicated. For the spirit had grown old.
The great movement of the spirit in Europe was repressed haphazard and,
quite as much haphazard, encouraged, but there seemed no one corporate
force present throughout Christendom which would persuade, encourage
and command: even the Papacy, the core of our unity, was shaken by long
division and intrigue.

Let it be clearly understood that in the particular form of special
heresies the business was local, peculiar and contemptible. Wycliffe, for
instance, was no more the morning star of the Reformation than Catherine of
Braganza's Tangier Dowry, let us say, was the morning star of the modern
English Empire. Wycliffe was but one of a great number of men who were
theorizing up and down Europe upon the nature of society and morals, each
with his special metaphysic of the Sacrament; each with his "system."
Such men have always abounded; they abound today. Some of Wycliffe's
extravagances resemble what many Protestants happen, later, to have held;
others (such as his theory that you could not own land unless you were in
a state of grace) were of the opposite extreme to Protestantism. And so it
is with the whole lot: and there were hundreds of them. There was no common
theory, no common feeling in the various reactions against a corrupted
ecclesiastical authority which marked the end of the Middle Ages. There was
nothing the least like what we call Protestantism today. Indeed that spirit
and mental color does not appear until a couple of generations after the
opening of the Reformation itself.

What there _was_, was a widespread discontent and exasperated friction
against the existing, rigid, and yet deeply decayed, temporal organization
of religious affairs; and in their uneasy fretting against that unworthy
rule, the various centres of irritation put up now one startling theory
which they knew would annoy the official Church, now another, perhaps
the exact opposite of the last. Now they denied something as old as
Europe--such as the right to property: now a new piece of usage or
discipline such as Communion in one kind: now a partial regional rule, such
as celibacy. Some went stark mad. Others, at the contrary extreme, did no
more than expose false relics.

A general social ill-ease was the parent of all these sporadic heresies.
Many had elaborate systems, but none of these systems was a true creed,
that is, a _motive_. No one of the outbursts had any philosophic driving
power behind it; all and each were no more than violent and blind reactions
against a clerical authority which gave scandal and set up an intolerable
strain.

Shall I give an example? One of the most popular forms which the protest
took, was what I have just mentioned, a demand for Communion in both kinds
and for the restoration of what was in many places ancient custom, the
drinking from the cup after the priest.

Could anything better prove the truth that mere irritation against the
external organization of the Church was the power at work? Could any point
have less to do with the fundamentals of the Faith? Of course, as an
_implication_ of false doctrine--as that the Priesthood is not an Order,
or that the Presence of Our Lord is not in both species--it had its
importance. But in itself how trivial a "kick." Why should anyone desire
the cup save to mark dissension from established custom!

Here is another example. Prominent among the later expressions of
discontent you have the Adamites, [Footnote: The rise of these oddities
is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe and is, like his career, about one
hundred years previous to the Reformation proper: the sects are of various
longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have, while dwindling rapidly in
numbers, kept their full doctrines for now four hundred years, others
like the Johanna Southcottites hardly last a lifetime: others like the
Modernists a decade or less: others like the Mormons near a century, their
close is not yet. I myself met a man in Colorado in 1891 whose friends
thought him the Messiah. Unlike the Wycliffites certain members of the
Adamites until lately survived in Austria.] who among other tenets rejected
clothes upon the more solemn occasions of their ritual and went naked:
raving maniacs. The whole business was a rough and tumble of protest
against the breakdown of a social system whose breakdown seemed the more
terrible because it _had_ been such a haven! Because it _was_ in essence
founded upon the most intimate appetites of European men. The heretics were
angry because they had lost their home.

This very general picture omits Huss and the national movement for which he
stood. It omits the Papal Schism; the Council of Constance; all the great
facts of the fifteenth century on its religious side. I am concerned only
with the presentation of the general character of the time, and that
character was what I have described: an irrepressible, largely justified,
discontent breaking out: a sort of chronic rash upon the skin of Christian
Europe, which rash the body of Christendom could neither absorb nor cure.

Now at this point--and before we leave the fifteenth century--there is
another historical feature which it is of the utmost importance to seize
if we are to understand what followed; for it was a feature common to
all European thought until a time long after the final establishment of
permanent cleavage in Europe. It is a feature which nearly all historians
neglect and yet one manifest upon the reading of any contemporary
expression. That feature is this: _No one in the Reformation dreamt a
divided Christendom to be possible_.

This flood of heretical movement was _oecumenical_; it was not peculiar to
one race or climate or culture or nation. The numberless uneasy innovators
thought, even the wildest of them, in terms of Europe as a whole. They
desired to affect the universal Church and change it _en bloc_. They had
no local ambition. They stood for no particular blood or temperament; they
sprang up everywhere, bred by the universal ill-ease of a society still
universal. You were as likely to get an enthusiast declaring himself to
be the Messiah in Seville as an enthusiast denying the Real Presence in
Aberdeen.

That fatal habit of reading into the past what we know of its future has
in this matter most deplorably marred history, and men, whether Protestant
or Catholic, who are now accustomed to Protestantism, read Protestantism
and the absurd idea of a local religion--a religion true in one place and
untrue in another--into a time where the least instructed clown would have
laughed in your face at such nonsense.

The whole thing, the evil coupled with a quite ineffectual resistance to
the evil, was a thing common to all Europe.

It is the nature of any organic movement to progress or to recede. But this
movement was destined to advance with devastating rapidity, and that on
account of what I have called the _second_ factor in the Reformation: the
very rapid accretion in technical power which marked the close of the
Middle Ages.

Printing; navigation; all mensuration; the handling of metals and every
material--all these took a sudden leap forward with the _Renaissance_, the
revival of arts: that vast stirring of the later Middle Ages which promised
to give us a restored antiquity Christianized: which was burnt in the flame
of a vile fanaticism, and has left us nothing but ashes and incommiscible
salvage.

Physical knowledge, the expansion of physical experience and technical
skill, were moving in the century before the Reformation at such a rate
that a contemporary spiritual phenomenon, if it advanced at all, was bound
to advance very rapidly, and this spiritual eruption in Europe came to
a head just at the moment when the contemporary expansion of travel, of
economic activity and of the revival of learning, had also emerged in their
full force.

It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century that the
coalescing of the various forces of spiritual discontent and revolt
began to be apparent. Before 1530 the general storm was to burst and the
Reformation proper to be started on its way.

But as a preliminary to that matter, the reader should first understand how
another and quite disconnected social development had prepared the way for
the triumph of the reformers. This development was the advent of Absolute
Government in civil affairs.

Here and there in the long history of Europe there crops up an isolated
accident, very striking, very effective, of short duration. We have already
seen that the Norman race was one of these. Tyranny in civil government
(which accompanied the Reformation) was another.

A claim to absolute monarchy is one of the commonest and most enduring
of historical things. Countless centuries of the old Empires of the East
were passed under such a claim, the Roman Empire was based upon it; the
old Russian State was made by it, French society luxuriated in it for one
magnificent century, from the accession of Louis XIV. till Fontenoy. It is
the easiest and (when it works) the most prompt of all instruments.

But the sense of an absolute civil government at the moment of the
Reformation was something very different. It was a demand, an appetite,
proceeding from the whole community, a worship of civil authority. It was
deification of the State and of law; it was the adoration of the Executive.

"This governs me; therefore I will worship it and do all it tells me." Such
is the formula for the strange passion which has now and then seized great
bodies of human beings intoxicated by splendor and by the vivifying effects
of command. Like all manias (for it is a mania) this exaggerated passion is
hardly comprehended once it is past. Like all manias, while it is present
it overrides every other emotion.

Europe, in the time of which I speak, suffered such a mania. The free
cities manifested that disease quite as much as the great monarchical
states. In Rome itself the temporal power of the Papal sovereign was then
magnificent beyond all past parallel. In Geneva Calvin was a god. In Spain
Charles and Philip governed two worlds without question. In England the
Tudor dynasty was worshipped blindly. Men might and did rebel against a
particular government, but it was only to set up something equally absolute
in its place. Not the form but the fact of government was adored.

I will not waste the reader's time in any discussion upon the causes of
that astonishing political fever. It must suffice to say that for a moment
it hypnotized the whole world. It would have been incomprehensible to the
Middle Ages. It was incomprehensible to the nineteenth century. It wholly
occupied the sixteenth. If we understand it, we largely understand what
made the success of the Reformation possible.

Well, then, the increasing discontent of the masses against the decaying
forms of the Middle Ages, and the increasing irritation against the
temporal government and the organization of the Church, came to a head just
at that moment when civil government was worshipped as an awful and almost
divine thing.

Into such an atmosphere was launched the last and the strongest of the
overt protests against the old social scheme, and in particular against the
existing power of the Papacy, especially upon its economic side.

The name most prominently associated with the crisis is that of Martin
Luther, an Augustinian monk, German by birth and speech, and one of those
exuberant sensual, rather inconsequential, characters which so easily
attract hearty friendships, and which can never pretend to organization or
command, though certainly to creative power. What he precisely meant or
would do, no man could tell, least of all himself. He was "out" for protest
and he floated on the crest of the general wave of change. That he ever
intended, nay, that he could ever have imagined, a disruption of the
European Unity is impossible.

Luther (a voice, no leader) was but one of many: had he never lived, the
great bursting wave would have crashed onward much the same. One scholar
after another (and these of every blood and from every part of Europe)
joined in the upheaval. The opposition of the old monastic training to the
newly revived classics, of the ascetic to the new pride of life, of the
logician to the mystic, all these in a confused whirl swept men of every
type into the disruption. One thing only united them. They were all
inflamed with a vital necessity for change. Great names which in the
ultimate challenge refused to destroy and helped to preserve--the greatest
is that of Erasmus; great names which even appear in the roll of that
of the Catholic martyrs--the blessed Thomas More is the greatest of
these--must here be counted with the names of men like the narrow Calvin on
the one hand, the large Rabelais upon the other. Not one ardent mind in the
first half of the sixteenth century but was swept into the stream.

Now all this would and must have been quieted in the process of time, the
mass of Christendom would have settled back into unity, the populace would
have felt instinctively the risk they ran of spoliation by the rich and
powerful, if the popular institutions of Christendom broke down: the masses
would have all swung round to solidifying society after an upheaval (it is
their function): we should have attained repose and Europe, united again,
would have gone forward as she did after the rocking of four hundred years
before--but for that other factor of which I have spoken, the passion which
this eager creative moment felt for the absolute in civil government--that
craving for the something godlike which makes men worship a flag, a throne
or a national hymn.

This it was which caught up and, in the persons of particular men, used
the highest of the tide. Certain princes in the Germanies (who had, of all
the groups of Europe, least grasped the meaning of authority) befriended
here one heresiarch and there another. The very fact that the Pope of Rome
stood for one of these absolute governments put other absolute governments
against him. The wind of the business rose; it became a quarrel of
sovereigns. And the sovereigns decided, and powerful usurping nobles or
leaders decided, the future of the herd.

Two further characters appeared side by side in the earthquake that was
breaking up Europe.

The first was this: the tendency to fall away from European unity seemed
more and more marked in those outer places which lay beyond the original
limits of the old Roman Empire, and notably in the Northern Netherlands and
in Northern Germany--where men easily submitted to the control of wealthy
merchants and of hereditary landlords.

The second was this: a profound distrust of the new movement, a reaction
against it, a feeling that moral anarchy was too profitable to the rich and
the cupidinous, began at first in a dull, later in an angry way, to stir
the masses of the populace throughout _all_ Christendom.

The stronger the old Latin sense of human equality was, the more the
populace felt this, the more they instinctively conceived of the
Reformation as something that would rob them of some ill-understood but
profound spiritual guarantee against slavery, exploitation and oppression.

There began a sort of popular grumbling against the Reformers, who were now
already schismatic: their rich patrons fell under the same suspicion. By
the time the movement had reached a head and by the time the central power
of the Church had been openly defied by the German princes, this protest
took, as in France and England and the valley of the Rhone (the ancient
seats of culture), a noise like the undertone of the sea before bad
weather. In the outer Germanies it was not a defence of Christendom at all,
but a brutish cry for more food. But everywhere the populace stirred.

A general observer, cognizant of what was to come, would have been certain
at that moment that the populace would rise. When it rose _intelligently_
the movement against the Church and civilization would come to nothing. The
Revolt elsewhere--in half barbaric Europe--would come to no more than the
lopping off of outer and insignificant things. The Baltic Plain, sundry
units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia, probably Hungary, possibly
Bohemia, certain mountain valleys in Switzerland and Savoy and France and
the Pyrenees, which had suffered from lack of instruction and could easily
be recovered--these would be affected. The outer parts, which had never
been within the pale of the Roman Empire might go. But the soul and
intelligence of Europe would be kept sound; its general body would reunite
and Christendom would once more reappear whole and triumphant. It would
have reconquered these outer parts at its leisure: and Poland was a sure
bastion. We should, within a century, have been ourselves once more:
Christian men.

So it would have been--but for one master tragedy, which changed the whole
scheme. Of the four great remaining units of Western civilization, Iberia,
Italy, Britain, Gaul, one, at this critical moment, broke down by a tragic
accident and lost continuity. It was hardly intended. It was a consequence
of error much more than an act of will. But it had full effect.

The breakdown of Britain and her failure to resist disruption was the chief
event of all. It made the Reformation permanent. It confirmed a final
division in Europe.

By a curious accident, one province, extraneous to the Empire, Ireland,
heroically preserved what the other extraneous provinces, the Germanies and
Scandinavia, were to lose. In spite of the loss of Britain, and cut off
by that loss from direct succor, Ireland preserved the tradition of
civilization.

It must be my next business to describe the way in which Britain failed
in the struggle, and, at the hands of the King, and of a little group of
avaricious men (such as the Howards among the gentry, and the Cecils among
the adventurers) changed for the worse the history of Europe.




IX

THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN


One thing stands out in the fate of modern Europe: the profound cleavage
due to the Reformation. One thing made that wound (it was almost mortal) so
deep and _lasting_: the failure of one ancient province of civilization,
and one only, to keep the Faith: this province whereof I write: Britain.

The capital event, the critical moment, in the great struggle of the Faith
against the Reformation, was the defection of Britain.

It is a point which the modern historian, who is still normally
anti-Catholic, does not and cannot make. Yet the defection of Britain from
the Faith of Europe three hundred years ago is certainly the most important
historical event in the last thousand years: between the saving of Europe
from the barbarians and these our own times. It is perhaps the most
important historical event since the triumph of the Catholic Church under
Constantine.

Let me recapitulate the factors of the problem as they would be seen by
an impartial observer from some great distance in time, or in space, or
in mental attitude. Let me put them as they would appear to one quite
indifferent to, and remote from, the antagonists.

To such an observer the history of Europe would be that of the great Roman
Empire passing through the transformation I have described: its mind first
more and more restless, then more and more tending to a certain conclusion,
and that conclusion the Catholic Church.

To summarize what has gone before: the Catholic Church becomes by the fifth
century the soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe. It next
suffers grievously from the accident, largely geographical, of the Eastern
schism. It is of its nature perpetually subject to assault; from within,
because it deals with matters not open to positive proof; from without,
because all those, whether aliens or guests or parasites, who are not of
our civilization, are naturally its enemies.

The Roman Empire of the West, in which the purity and the unity of this
soul were preserved from generation to generation, declined in its body
during the Dark Ages--say, up to and rather beyond the year 1000. It
became coarsened and less in its material powers. It lost its central
organization, the Imperial Court (which was replaced first by provincial
military leaders or "kings," then, later, by a mass of local lordships
jumbled into more or less national groups). In building, in writing, in
cooking, in clothing, in drawing, in sculpture, the Roman Empire of the
West (which is ourselves) forgot all but the fundamentals of its arts--but
it expanded so far as its area is concerned. A whole belt of barbaric
Germany received the Roman influence--Baptism and the Mass. With the Creed
there came to these outer parts reading and writing, building in brick
and stone--all the material essentials of our civilization--and what is
characteristic of that culture, the power of thinking more clearly.

It is centuries before this slow digestion of the barbarian reached
longitude ten degrees east, and the Scandinavian peninsula. But a thousand
years after Our Lord it has reached even these, and there remains between
the unbroken tradition of our civilization in the West and the schismatic
but Christian civilization of the Greek Church, nothing but a belt of
paganism from the corner of the Baltic southward, which belt is lessened,
year after year, by the armed efforts and the rational dominance of Latin
culture. Our Christian and Roman culture proceeds continuously eastward,
mastering the uncouth.

After this general picture of a civilization dominating and mastering in
its material decline a vastly greater area than it had known in the height
of its material excellence--this sort of expansion in the dark--the
impartial observer, whom we have supposed, would remark a sort of dawn.

That dawn came with the eleventh century; 1000-1100. The Norman race, the
sudden invigoration of the Papacy, the new victories in Spain, at last the
first Crusade, mark a turn in the tide of material decline, and that tide
works very rapidly towards a new and intense civilization which we call
that of the Middle Ages: that high renewal which gives Europe a second
and most marvelous life, which is a late reflowering of Rome, but of Rome
revivified with the virtue and the humor of the Faith.

The second thing that the observer would note in so general a picture would
be the peculiar exception formed within it by the group of large islands
lying to the North and West of the Continent. Of these the larger, Britain,
had been a true Roman Province; but very early in the process--in the
middle and end of the fifth century--it had on the first assault of the
barbarians been cut off for more than the lifetime of a man. Its gate
had been held by the barbarian. Then it was re-Christianized almost as
thoroughly as though even its Eastern part had never lost the authority of
civilization. The Mission of St. Augustine recaptured Britain--but Britain
is remarkable in the history of civilization for the fact that alone of
civilized lands it needed to be recaptured at all. The western island of
the two, the smaller island, Ireland, presented another exception.

It was not compelled to the Christian culture, as were the German
barbarians of the Continent, by arms. No Charlemagne with his Gallic armies
forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was not savage like the Germanies;
it was therefore under no necessity to go to school. It was not a morass
of shifting tribes; it was a nation. But in a most exceptional fashion,
though already possessed, and perhaps because so possessed, of a high
pagan culture of its own, it accepted within the lifetime of a man, and by
spiritual influences alone, the whole spirit of the Creed. The civilization
of the Roman West was accepted by Ireland, not as a command nor as an
influence, but as a discovery.

Now let this peculiar fate of the two islands to the north and west of the
Continent remain in the observer's mind, and he will note, when the shock
of what is called "the Reformation" comes, new phenomena attaching to those
islands, cognate to their early history.

Those phenomena are the thesis which I have to present in the pages that
follow.

What we call "the Reformation" was essentially the reaction of the
barbaric, the ill-tutored and the isolated places external to the old
and deep-rooted Roman civilization, against the influences of that
civilization. The Reformation was not racial. Even if there were such a
physical thing as a "Teutonic Race" (and there is nothing of the kind), the
Reformation shows no coincidence with that race. The Reformation is simply
the turning-back of that tide of Roman culture which, for five hundred
years, had set steadily forward and had progressively dominated the
insufficient by the sufficient, the slower by the quicker, the confused by
the clear-headed. It was a sort of protest by the conquered against a moral
and intellectual superiority which offended them. The Slavs of Bohemia
joined in that sincere protest of the lately and insufficiently civilized,
quite as strongly as, and even earlier than, the vague peoples of the Sandy
Heaths along the Baltic. The Scandinavian, physically quite different from
these tribes of the Baltic Plain, comes into the game. Wretched villages in
the mark of Brandenburg, as Slavonic in type as the villages of Bohemia,
revolt as naturally against exalted and difficult mystery as do the
isolated villages of the Swedish valleys or the isolated rustics of the
Cevennes or the Alps. The revolt is confused, instinctive, and therefore
enjoying the sincere motive which accompanies such risings, but deprived
of unity and of organizing power. There has never been a fixed Protestant
creed. The common factor has been, and is, reaction against the traditions
of Europe.

Now the point to seize is this:

Inimical as such a revolt was to souls or (to speak upon the mere
historical plane) to civilization, bad as it was that the tide of culture
should have begun to ebb from the far regions which it had once so
beneficently flooded, the Reformation, that is, the reaction against the
unity, the discipline, and the clear thought of Europe, would never have
counted largely in human affairs had it been confined to the external
fringe of the civilized world. That fringe would probably have been
reconquered. The inherent force attaching to reality and to the stronger
mind should have led to its recovery. The Northern Germanies were, as a
fact, reconquered when Richelieu stepped in and saved them from their
Southern superiors. But perhaps it would not have been reconquered. Perhaps
it would have lapsed quite soon into its original paganism. At any rate
European culture would have continued undivided and strong without these
outer regions. Unfortunately a far worse thing happened.

Europe was rent and has remained divided.

The disaster was accomplished through forces I will now describe.

Though the revolt was external to the foundations of Europe, to the ancient
provinces of the Empire, yet an external consequence of that revolt arose
within the ancient provinces. It may be briefly told. _The wealthy took
advantage within the heart of civilization itself of this external revolt
against order_; for it is always to the advantage of the wealthy to deny
general conceptions of right and wrong, to question a popular philosophy
and to weaken the drastic and immediate power of the human will, organized
throughout the whole community. It is always in the nature of _great_
wealth to be insanely tempted (though it should know from active experience
how little wealth can give), to push on to more and more domination
over the bodies of men--and it can do so best by attacking fixed social
restraints.

The landed squires then, and the great merchants, powerfully supported by
the Jewish financial communities in the principal towns, felt that--with
the Reformation--their opportunity had come. The largest fortune holders,
the nobles, the merchants of the ports and local capitals even in Gaul
(that nucleus and stronghold of ordered human life) licked their lips.
Everywhere in Northern Italy, in Southern Germany, upon the Rhine, wherever
wealth had congested in a few hands, the chance of breaking with the old
morals was a powerful appeal to the wealthy; and, therefore, throughout
Europe, even in its most ancient seats of civilization, the outer barbarian
had allies.

These rich men, whose avarice betrayed Europe from within, had no excuse.
_Theirs_ was not any dumb instinctive revolt like that of the Outer
Germanies, the Outer Slavs, nor the neglected mountain valleys, against
order and against clear thought, with all the hard consequences that clear
thought brings. _They_ were in no way subject to enthusiasm for the vaguer
emotions roused by the Gospel or for the more turgid excitements derivable
from Scripture and an uncorrected orgy of prophecy. _They_ were "on the
make." The rich in Montpelier and Nîmes, a knot of them in Rome itself,
many in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris, enlisted intellectual aid for the
revolt, flattered the atheism of the Renaissance, supported the strong
inflamed critics of clerical misliving, and even winked solemnly at the
lunatic inspirations of obscure men and women filled with "visions." They
did all these things as though their object was religious change. But their
true object was money.

One group, and one alone, of the European nations was too recently filled
with combat against vile non-Christian things to accept any parley with
this anti-Christian turmoil. That unit was the Iberian Peninsula. It is
worthy of remark, especially on the part of those who realize that the
sword fits the hand of the Church and that Catholicism is never more alive
than when it is in arms, I say it is worthy of remark by these that Spain
and Portugal through the very greatness of an experience still recent when
the Reformation broke, lost the chance of combat. There came indeed, from
Spain (but from the Basque nation there) that weapon of steel, the Society
of Jesus, which St. Ignatius formed, and which, surgical and military,
saved the Faith, and therefore Europe. But the Iberian Peninsula rejecting
as one whole and with contempt and with abhorrence (and rejecting rightly)
any consideration of revolt--even among its rich men--thereby lost
its opportunity for combat. It did not enjoy the religious wars which
revivified France, and it may be urged that Spain would be the stronger
today had it fallen to her task, as it did to the general populace of Gaul,
to come to hand-grips with the Reformation at home, to test it, to know it,
to dominate it, to bend the muscles upon it, and to reemerge triumphant
from the struggle.

I say, then, that there was present in the field against the Church a
powerful ally for the Reformers: and that ally was the body of immoral
rich who hoped to profit by a general break in the popular organization of
society. The atheism and the wealth, the luxury and the sensuality, the
scholarship and aloofness of the Renaissance answered, over the heads of
the Catholic populace, the call of barbarism. The Iconoclasts of greed
joined hands with the Iconoclasts of blindness and rage and with the
Iconoclasts of academic pride.

Nevertheless, even with such allies, barbarism would have failed, the
Reformation would today be but an historical episode without fruit, Europe
would still be Christendom, had not there been added the decisive factor of
all--which was the separation of Britain.

Now how did Britain go, and why was the loss of Britain of such capital
importance?

The loss of Britain was of such capital importance because Britain alone
of those who departed, was Roman, and therefore capable of endurance and
increase. And _why_ did Britain fail in that great ordeal? It is a question
harder to answer.

The province of Britain was not a very great one in area or in numbers,
when the Reformation broke out. It was, indeed, very wealthy for its size,
as were the Netherlands, but its mere wealth does not account for the
fundamental importance of the loss of Britain to the Faith in the sixteenth
century. The real point was that one and only one of the old Roman
provinces with their tradition of civilization, letters, persuasive power,
multiple soul--one and only one went over to the barbaric enemy and gave
that enemy its aid. That one was Britain. And the consequence of its
defection was the perpetuation and extension of an increasingly evil
division within the structure of the West.

To say that Britain lost hold of tradition in the sixteenth century because
Britain is "Teutonic," is to talk nonsense. It is to explain a real problem
by inventing unreal words. Britain is not "Teutonic," nor does the word
"Teutonic" itself mean anything definite. To say that Britain revolted
because the seeds of revolt were stronger in her than in any ancient
province of Europe, is to know nothing of history. The seeds of revolt
were in her then as they were in every other community; as they must be in
every individual who may find any form of discipline a burden which he is
tempted, in a moment of disorder, to lay down. But to pretend that England
and the lowlands of Scotland, to pretend that the Province of Britain in
our general civilization was more ready for the change than the infected
portions of Southern Gaul, or the humming towns of Northern Italy, or the
intense life of Hainult, or Brabant, is to show great ignorance of the
European past.

Well, then, how did Britain break away?

I beg the reader to pay a special attention to the next page or so. I
believe it to be of capital value in explaining the general history of
Europe, and I know it to be hardly ever told; or--if told at all--told only
in fragments.

England went because of three things. First, her Squires had already become
too powerful. In other words, the economic power of a small class of
wealthy men had grown, on account of peculiar insular conditions, greater
than was healthy for the community.

Secondly, England was, more than any other part of Western Europe (save
the Batavian March), [Footnote: I mean Belgium: that frontier of Roman
Influence upon the lower Rhine which so happily held out for the Faith
and just preserved it.] a series of markets and of ports, a place of very
active cosmopolitan influence, in which new opportunities for the corrupt,
new messages of the enthusiastic, were frequent.

In the third place, that curious phenomena on which I dwelt in the last
chapter, the superstitious attachment of citizens to the civil power, to
awe of, and devotion to, the monarch, was exaggerated in England as nowhere
else.

Now put these three things together, especially the first and third (for
the second was both of minor importance and more superficial), and you will
appreciate why England fell.

One small, too wealthy class, tainted with the atheism that always creeps
into wealth long and securely enjoyed, was beginning to possess too much of
English land. It would take far too long to describe here what the process
had been. It is true that the absolute monopoly of the soil, the gripping
and the strangling of the populace by landlords, is a purely Protestant
development. Nothing of that kind had happened or would have been conceived
of as possible in pre-Reformation England; but still something like a
quarter of the land (or a little less) had _already_ before the Reformation
got into the full possession of one small class which had also begun to
encroach upon the judiciary, in some measure to supplant the populace in
local law-making, and quite appreciably to supplant the King in central
law-making.

Let me not be misunderstood; the England of the fifteenth century, the
England of the generation just before the Reformation, was not an England
of Squires; it was not an England of landlords; it was still an England
of Englishmen. The towns were quite free. To this day old boroughs nearly
always show a great number of freeholds. The process by which the later
English aristocracy (now a plutocracy) had grown up, was but in germ before
the Reformation. Nor had that germ sprouted. But for the Reformation it
would not have matured. Sooner or later a popular revolt (had the Faith
revived) would have killed the growing usurpation of the wealthy. But the
germ was there; and the Reformation coming just as it did, both was helped
by the rich and helped them.

The slow acquisition of considerable power over the Courts of Law and over
the soil of the country by an oligarchy, imperfect though that acquisition
was as yet, already presented just after 1500 a predisposing condition
to the disease. It may be urged that if the English people had fought
the growing power of the Squires more vigorously, the Squires would not
have mastered them as they did, during and on account of the religious
revolution. Possibly; and the enemies of the English people are quick to
suggest that some native sluggishness permitted the gradual weighing down
of the social balance in favor of the rich. But no one who can even pretend
to know medićval England will say that the English consciously desired
or willingly permitted such a state of affairs to grow up. Successful
foreign wars, dynastic trouble, a recent and vigorous awakening of
national consciousness, which consciousness had centred in the wealthier
classes--all these combined to let the evil in without warning, and, on
the eve of the Reformation, a rich, avaricious class was already empowered
to act in Britain, ready to grasp, as all the avaricious classes were
throughout the Western world, at the opportunity to revolt against that
Faith which has ever suspected, constrained and reformed the tyranny of
wealth.

Now add to this the strange, but at that time very real, worship of
government as a fetish. This spirit did not really strengthen government:
far from it. A superstition never strengthens its object, nor even makes
of the supposed power of that object a reality. But though it did not
give real power to the long intention of the prince, it gave to the
momentary word of the prince a fantastic power. In such a combination of
circumstances--nascent oligarchy, but the prince worshipped--you get,
holding the position of prince, Henry VIII., a thorough Tudor, that is, a
man weak almost to the point of irresponsibility where his passions were
concerned; violent from that fundamental weakness which, in the absence of
opposition, ruins things as effectively as any strength.

No executive power in Europe was less in sympathy with the revolt against
civilization than was the Tudor family. Upon the contrary, Henry VII., his
son, and his two granddaughters if anything exceeded in their passion for
the old order of the Western world. But at the least sign of resistance,
Mary who burnt, Elizabeth who intrigued, Henry, their father, who pillaged,
Henry, their grandfather, who robbed and saved, were one. To these
characters slight resistance was a spur; with strong manifold opposition
they were quite powerless to deal. Their minds did not grip (for their
minds, though acute, were not large) but their passions shot. And one
may compare them, when their passions of pride, of lust, of jealousy, of
doting, of avarice or of facile power were aroused, to vehement children.
Never was there a ruling family less statesmanlike; never one less full of
stuff and of creative power.

Henry, urged by an imperious young woman, who had gained control of him,
desired a divorce from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, grown old for him.
The Papal Court temporized with him and opposed him. He was incapable of
negotiation and still more incapable of foresight. His energy, which was
"of an Arabian sort," blasted through the void, because a void was there:
none would then withstand the Prince. Of course, it seemed to him no more
than one of these recurrent quarrels with the mundane power of Rome, which
all Kings (and Saints among them) had engaged in for many hundred years.
All real powers thus conflict in all times. But, had he known it (and he
did not know it), the moment was fatally inopportune for playing that game.
Henry never meant to break permanently with the unity of Christendom.
A disruption of that unity was probably inconceivable to him. He meant
to "exercise pressure." All his acts from the decisive Proclamation of
September 19, 1530, onwards prove it. But the moment was the moment of a
breaking-point throughout Europe, and he, Henry, blundered into disaster
without knowing what the fullness of that moment was. He was devout,
especially to the Blessed Sacrament. He kept the Faith for himself, and he
tried hard to keep it for others. But having lost unity, he let in what he
loathed. Not, so long as he lived, could those doctrines of the Reformers
triumph here: but he had compromised with their spirit, and at his death a
strong minority--perhaps a tenth of England, more of London--was already
hostile to the Creed.

It was the same thing with the suppression of the monasteries. Henry meant
no effect on religion by that loot: he, none the less, destroyed it.
He intended to enrich the Crown: he ruined it. In the matter of their
financial endowment, an economic crisis, produced by the unequal growth of
economic powers, had made the monastic foundation ripe for re-settlement.
Religious orders were here wealthy without reason--poor in spirit and
numbers, but rich in land; there impoverished without reason--rich in
popularity and spiritual power, but poor in land. The dislocation, which
all institutions necessarily suffer on the economic side through the mere
efflux of time, inclined every government in Europe to a re-settlement
of religious endowment. Everywhere it took place; everywhere it involved
dissolution and restoration.

But Henry did not re-settle. He plundered and broke. He used the
contemporary idolatry of executive power just as much at Reading or in the
Blackfriars of London, where unthinking and immediate popular feeling was
with him, as at Glastonbury where it was against him, as in Yorkshire where
it was in arms, as in Galway where there was no bearing with it at all.
There was no largeness in him nor any comprehension of complexity, and
when in this Jacobin, unexampled way, he had simply got rid of that which
he should have restored and transformed, of what effect was that vast act
of spoliation? It paralyzed the Church. It ultimately brought down the
Monarchy.

From a fourth to a third of the economic power over the means of
production in England, which had been vested top-heavily in the religious
foundations--here, far too rich, there, far too poor--Henry got by one
enormous confiscation. Yet he made no permanent addition to the wealth of
_the Crown_. On the contrary, he started its decline. _The land passed by
an instinctive multiple process--but very rapidly--to the already powerful
class which had begun to dominate the villages_. Then, when it was too
late, the Tudors attempted to stem the tide. But the thing was done. Upon
the indifference which is always common to a society long and profoundly
Catholic and ignorant of heresy, or, having conquered heresy, ignorant at
any rate of struggle for the Faith, two ardent minorities converged: the
small minority of confused enthusiasts who really did desire what they
believed to be a restoration of "primitive" Christianity: the much larger
minority of men now grown almost invincibly powerful in the economic
sphere. The Squires, twenty years after Henry's death, had come to possess,
through the ruin of religion, _something like half the land of England_.
With the rapidity of a fungus growth the new wealth spread over the
desolation of the land. The enriched captured both the Universities, all
the Courts of Justice, most of the public schools. They won their great
civil war against the Crown. Within a century after Henry's folly, they had
established themselves in the place of what had once been the monarchy and
central government of England. The impoverished Crown resisted in vain;
they killed one embarrassed King--Charles I., and they set up his son,
Charles II., as an insufficiently salaried puppet. Since their victory over
the Crown, they and the capitalists, who have sprung from their avarice and
their philosophy, and largely from their very loins, have been completely
masters of England.

Here the reader may say: "What! this large national movement to be
interpreted as the work of such minorities? A few thousand squires and
merchants backing a few more thousand enthusiasts, changed utterly the mass
of England?" Yes; to interpret it otherwise is to read history backwards.
It is to think that England then was what England later became. There
is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, nor any illusion to
which the human mind is more prone. To read the remote past in the light
of the recent past; to think the process of the one towards the other
"inevitable;" to regard the whole matter as a slow inexorable process,
independent of the human will, still suits the materialist pantheism of our
time. There is an inherent tendency in all men to this fallacy of reading
themselves into the past, and of thinking their own mood a consummation
at once excellent and necessary: and most men who write of these things
imagine a vaguely Protestant Tudor England growing consciously Protestant
in the England of the Stuarts.

That is not history. It is history to put yourself by a combined effort of
reading and of imagination into the shoes of Tuesday, as though you did
not know what Wednesday was to be, and then to describe what Tuesday was.
England did not lose the Faith in 1550-1620 because she was Protestant
then. Rather, she is Protestant now because she then lost the Faith.

Put yourself into the shoes of a sixteenth century Englishman in the midst
of the Reformation, and what do you perceive? A society wholly Catholic in
tradition, lax and careless in Catholic practice; irritated or enlivened
here and there by a few furious preachers, or by a few enthusiastic
scholars, at once devoted to and in terror of the civil government;
intensely national; in all the roots and traditions of its civilization,
Roman; impatient of the disproportion of society, and in particular of
economic disproportion in the religious aspect of society, because the
religious function, by the very definition of Catholicism, by its very
Creed, should be the first to redress tyrannies. Upon that Englishman comes
first, a mania for his King; next, a violent economic revolution, which, in
many parts, can be made to seem an approach to justice; finally, a national
appeal of the strongest kind against the encroaching power of Spain.

When the work was done, say by 1620, the communication between England and
those parts of the ancient West, which were still furiously resisting the
storm, was cut. No spiritual force could move England after the Armada and
its effect, save what might arise spontaneously in the many excited men
who still believed (they continued to believe it for fifty years) that the
whole Church of Christ had gone wrong for centuries; that its original
could be restored and that personal revelations were granted them for their
guidance.

These visionaries were the Reformers; to these, souls still athirst for
spiritual guidance turned. They were a minority even at the end of the
sixteenth century, the last years of Elizabeth, but they were a minority
full of initiative and of action. With the turn of the century (1600-1620)
the last men who could remember Catholic training were very old or dead.
The new generation could turn to nothing but the new spirit. For authority
it could find nothing definite but a printed book: a translation of the
Hebrew Scriptures. For teachers, nothing but this minority, the Reformers.
That minority, though remaining a minority, leavened and at last controlled
the whole nation: by the first third of the seventeenth century Britain was
utterly cut off from the unity of Christendom and its new character was
sealed. The Catholic Faith was dead.

The governing class remained largely indifferent (as it still is) to
religion, yet it remained highly cultured. The populace drifted here, into
complete indifference, there, into orgiastic forms of worship. The middle
class went over in a solid body to the enemy. The barbarism of the outer
Germanies permeated it and transformed it. The closer-reasoned, far
more perverted and harder French heresy of Calvin partly deflected the
current--and a whole new society was formed and launched. That was the
English Reformation.

Its effect upon Europe was stupendous; for, though England was cut off,
England was still England. You could not destroy in a Roman province the
great traditions of municipality and letters. It was as though a phalanx
of trained troops had crossed the frontier in some border war and turned
against their former comrades. England lent, and has from that day
continuously lent, the strength of a great civilized tradition to forces
whose original initiative was directed against European civilization and
its tradition. The loss of Britain was the one great wound in the body of
the Western world. It is not yet healed.

Yet all this while that other island of the group to the Northwest of
Europe, that island which had never been conquered by armed civilization
as were the Outer Germanies, but had spontaneously accepted the Faith,
presented a contrasting exception. Against the loss of Britain, which had
been a Roman province, the Faith, when the smoke of battle cleared off,
could discover the astonishing loyalty of Ireland. And over against this
exceptional province--Britain--now lost to the Faith, lay an equally
exceptional and unique outer part which had never been a Roman province,
yet which now remained true to the tradition of Roman men; it balanced the
map like a counterweight. The efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland have
exceeded in violence, persistence, and cruelty any persecution in any part
or time of the world. They have failed. As I cannot explain why they have
failed, so I shall not attempt to explain how and why the Faith in Ireland
was saved when the Faith in Britain went under. I do not believe it capable
of an historic explanation. It seems to me a phenomenon essentially
miraculous in character, not _generally_ attached (as are all historical
phenomena) to the general and divine purpose that governs our large
political events, but _directly_ and _specially_ attached. It is of great
significance; how great, men will be able to see many years hence when
another definite battle is joined between the forces of the Church and her
opponents. For the Irish race alone of all Europe has maintained a perfect
integrity and has kept serene, without internal reactions and without their
consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe which is the Catholic Church.

I have now nothing left to set down but the conclusion of this disaster:
its spiritual result--an isolation of the soul; its political result--a
consequence of the spiritual--the prodigious release of energy, the
consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few under
a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the ruin of
happiness, the final threat of chaos.




X

CONCLUSION


The grand effect of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul.

This was its fruit: from this all its consequences proceed: not only those
clearly noxious, which have put in jeopardy the whole of our traditions
and all our happiness, but those apparently advantageous, especially in
material things.

The process cannot be seen at work if we take a particular date--especially
too early a date--and call it the moment of the catastrophe. There was a
long interval of confusion and doubt, in which it was not certain whether
the catastrophe would be final or no, in which its final form remained
undetermined, and only upon the conclusion of which could modern Europe
with its new divisions, and its new fates, be perceived clearly. The breach
with authority began in the very first years of the sixteenth century.
It is not till the middle of the seventeenth century at least, and even
somewhat later, that the new era begins.

For more than a hundred years the conception of the struggle as an
oecumenical struggle, as something affecting the whole body of Europe,
continued. The general upheaval, the revolt, which first shook the West
in the early years of the sixteenth century--to take a particular year,
the year 1517--concerned all our civilization, was everywhere debated,
produced an universal reaction met by as universal a resistance, for three
generations of men. No young man who saw the first outbreak of the storm
could imagine it even in old age, as a disruption of Europe. No such man
lived to see it more than half way through.

It was not till a corresponding date in the succeeding century--or rather
later--not till Elizabeth of England and Henry IV. of France were dead (and
all the protagonists, the Reformers on the one side, Loyola, Neri, on the
other, long dead) not till the career of Richelieu in the one country and
the beginnings of an aristocratic Parliament in England were apparent, that
the Reformation could clearly be seen to have separated certain districts
of our civilization from the general traditions of the whole, and to
have produced, in special regions and sections of society, the peculiar
Protestant type which was to mark the future.

The work of the Reformation was accomplished, one may say, a little after
the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. England in particular was definitely
Protestant by the decade 1620-1630--hardly earlier. The French Huguenot
body, though still confused with political effort, had come to have a
separate and real existence at about the same time. The Oligarchy of Dutch
merchants had similarly cut off their part of the Low Countries from
imperial rule, and virtually established their independence. The North
German Principalities and sundry smaller states of the mountains (notably
Geneva), had definitely received the new stamp. As definitely France,
Bohemia, the Danube, Poland and Italy and all the South were saved.

Though an armed struggle was long to continue, though the North Germans
were nearly recaptured by the Imperial Power and only saved by French
policy, though we were to have a reflex of it here in the Civil Wars and
the destruction of the Crown, and though the last struggle against the
Stuarts and the greater general war against Louis XIV. were but sequels to
the vast affair, yet the great consequence of that affair was fixed before
these wars began. The first third of the seventeenth century launches a new
epoch. From about that time there go forward upon parallel lines the great
spiritual and consequent temporal processes of modern Europe. They have
yet to come to judgment, for they are not yet fulfilled: but perhaps their
judgment is near.

These processes filling the last three hundred years have been as follows:
(1) A rapid extension of physical science and with it of every other form
of acquaintance with demonstrable and measurable things. (2) The rise,
chiefly in the new Protestant part of Europe (but spreading thence in
part to the Catholic) of what we call today "Capitalism," that is, the
possession of the means of production by the few, and their exploitation
of the many. (3) The corruption of the principle of authority until it was
confused with mere force. (4) The general, though not universal, growth of
total wealth with the growth of physical knowledge. (5) The ever widening
effect of skepticism, which, whether masked under traditional forms or no,
was from the beginning a spirit of _complete_ negation and led at last to
the questioning not only of any human institutions, but of the very forms
of thought and of the mathematical truths. (6) With all these of course we
have had a universal mark--the progressive extension of despair.

Could anyone look back upon these three centuries from some very great
distance of time, he would see them as an episode of extraordinary
extension in things that should be dissociated: knowledge and wealth, on
the one hand, the unhappiness of men upon the other. And he would see that
as the process matured, or rather as the corruption deepened, all its
marks were pushed to a degree so extreme as to jeopardize at last the very
structure of European society. Physical science acquired such power, the
oppression of the poor was pushed to such a length, the reasoning spirit in
man was permitted to attain such a tottering pitch of insecurity, that a
question never yet put to Europe arose at last--whether Europe, not from
external foes, but from her own inward lesion may not fail.

Corresponding to that terrible and as yet unanswered question--the
culmination of so much evil--necessarily arises this the sole vital formula
of our time: "_Europe must return to the Faith, or she will perish._"

       *       *       *       *       *

I have said that the prime product of the Reformation was the isolation of
the soul. That truth contains, in its development, very much more than its
mere statement might promise.

The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the sane
balance produced by general experience, the weight of security, and the
general will. The isolation of the soul is the very definition of its
unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much more than
merely complete and confirm human misery.

In the first place and underlying all, the isolation of the soul releases
in a society a furious new accession of _force_. The break-up of any
stable system in physics, as in society, makes actual a prodigious reserve
of potential energy. It transforms the power that was keeping things
together with a power driving separably each component part: the effect
of an explosion. That is why the Reformation launched the whole series of
material advance, but launched it chaotically and on divergent lines which
would only end in disaster. But the thing had many other results.

Thus, we next notice that the new isolation of the soul compelled the
isolated soul to strong vagaries. The soul will not remain in the void.
If you blind it, it will grope. If it cannot grasp what it appreciates by
every sense, it will grasp what it appreciates by only one.

On this account in the dissolution of the corporate sense and of corporate
religion you had successive idols set up, worthy and unworthy, none of
them permanent. The highest and the most permanent was a reaction towards
corporate life in the shape of a worship of nationality--patriotism.

You had at one end of the scale an extraordinary new _tabus_, the erection
in one place of a sort of maniac god, blood-thirsty, an object of terror.
In another (or the same) a curious new ritual observance of nothingness
upon every seventh day. In another an irrational attachment to a particular
printed book. In another successive conceptions: first, that the human
reason was sufficient for the whole foundations of human life--that
there were no mysteries: next, the opposite extravagance that the human
reason had no authority even in its own sphere. And these two, though
contradictory, had one root. The rationalism of the eighteenth century
carried on through the materialism of the nineteenth, the irrational doubts
of Kant (which included much emotional rubbish) carried on to the sheer
chaos of the later metaphysicians, with their denial of contradictions, and
even of being. Both sprang from this necessity of the unsupported soul to
make itself some system from within: as the unsupported soul, in an evil
dream, now stifles in strict confinement and is next dissolved in some
fearful emptiness.

All this, the first interior effect of the Reformation, strong in
proportion to the strength of the reforming movement, powerful in the
regions or sects which had broken away, far less powerful in those which
had maintained the Faith, would seem to have run its full course, and to
have settled at last into universal negation and a universal challenge
proffered to every institution, and every postulate. But since humanity
cannot repose in such a stage of anarchy, we may well believe that there
is coming, or has already begun, yet another stage, in which the lack of
corporate support for the soul will breed attempted strange religions:
witchcrafts and necromancies.

It may be so. It may be that the great debate will come up for final
settlement before such novel diseases spread far. At any rate, for the
moment we are clearly in a stage of complete negation. But it is to be
repeated that this breaking up of the foundations differs in degree with
varying societies, that still in a great mass of Europe, numerically the
half perhaps, the necessary anchors of sanity still hold: and that half is
the half where directly by the practice of the Faith, or indirectly through
a hold upon some part of its tradition, the Catholic Church exercises an
admitted or distant authority over the minds of men.

The next process we note is--by what some may think a paradox--also due to
the isolation of the soul. It is the process of increasing knowledge. Men
acting in a fashion highly corporate will not so readily question, nor
therefore so readily examine, as will men acting alone. Men whose major
results are taken upon an accepted philosophy, will not be driven by such a
need of inquiry as those who have abandoned that guide. In the moment, more
than a thousand years ago, when the last of the evangelizing floodtide was
still running strongly, a very great man wrote of the physical sciences:
"Upon such toys I wasted my youth." And another wrote, speaking of divine
knowledge: "All the rest is smoke."

But in the absences of faith, demonstrable things are the sole consolation.

There are three forms in which the human mind can hold the truth: The form
of Science, which means that we accept a thing through demonstration,
and therefore cannot admit the possibility of its opposite. The form of
Opinion, which means that we accept a thing through probability, that is
through a partial, but not complete demonstration, and therefore we do not
deny the possibility of the opposite. The form of Faith, where we accept
the thing without demonstration and yet deny the possibility of its
opposite, as for instance, the faith of all men, not mad, in the existence
of the universe about them, and of other human minds.

When acknowledged and defined Faith departs, it is clear that of the
remaining two rivals, Opinion has no ground against Science. That which
can be demonstrated holds all the field. Indeed, it is the mark of modern
insufficiency that it can conceive of no other form of certitude save
certitude through demonstration, and therefore does not, as a rule,
appreciate even its own unproved first principles.

Well, this function of the isolated soul, inquiry and the necessity for
demonstration for individual conviction through measurement and physical
fixed knowledge, has occupied, as we all know, the three modern centuries.
We all are equally familiar with its prodigious results. Not one of them
has, as yet, added to human happiness: not one but has been increasingly
misused to the misery of man. There is in the tragedy something comic also,
which is the perpetual puzzlement of these the very authors of discovery,
to find that, somehow or other, discovery alone does not create joy, and
that, somehow or other, a great knowledge can be used ill, as anything else
can be used ill. Also in their bewilderment, many turn to a yet further
extension of physical science as promising, in some illogical way, relief.

A progression in physical science and in the use of instruments is so
natural to man (so long as civic order is preserved) that it would, indeed,
have taken place, not so rapidly, but as surely, had the unity of Europe
been preserved. But the destruction of that unity totally accelerated the
pace and as totally threw the movement off its rails.

The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European thing, was much older than
the Reformation, which was its perversion and corruption. The doors upon
modern knowledge had been opened before the soul, which was to enter them,
had been cut off from its fellows. We owe the miscarriage of all our
great endeavor in this field, not to that spring of endeavor, but to its
deflection. It is a blasphemy to deny the value of advancing knowledge, and
at once a cowardice and a folly to fear it for its supposed consequences.
Its consequences are only evil through an evil use, that is, through an
evil philosophy.

In connection with this release of powerful inquiry through the isolation
of the soul, you have an apparently contradictory, and certainly
supplementary effect: the setting up of unfounded external authority. It is
a curious development, one very little recognized, but one which a fixed
observance of the modern world will immediately reveal; and those who
come to see it are invariably astonished at the magnitude of its action.
Men--under the very influence of skepticism--have come to accept almost any
printed matter, almost any repeated name, as an authority infallible and to
be admitted without question. They have come to regard the denial of such
authority as a sort of insanity, or rather they have in most practical
affairs, come to be divided into two groups: a small number of men, who
know the truth, say, upon a political matter or some financial arrangement,
or some unsolved problem; and a vast majority, which accepts without
question an always incomplete, a usually quite false, statement of the
thing because it has been repeated in the daily press and vulgarized in a
hundred books.

This singular and fantastic result of the long divorce between the
non-Catholic mind and reason has a profound effect upon the modern world.
Indeed, the great battle about to be engaged between chaos and order will
turn largely upon this form of suggestion, this acceptation of an unfounded
and irrational authority.

Lastly, there is of the major consequences of the Reformation that
phenomenon which we have come to call "Capitalism," and which many,
recognizing its universal evil, wrongly regard as the prime obstacle
to right settlement of human society and to the solution of our now
intolerable modern strains.

What is called "Capitalism" arose directly in all its branches from
the isolation of the soul. That isolation permitted an unrestricted
competition. It gave to superior cunning and even to superior talent an
unchecked career. It gave every license to greed. And on the other side
it broke down the corporate bonds whereby men maintain themselves in
an economic stability. Through it there arose in England first, later
throughout the more active Protestant nations, and later still in various
degrees throughout the rest of Christendom, a system under which a few
possessed the land and the machinery of production, and the many were
gradually dispossessed. The many thus dispossessed could only exist upon
doles meted out by the possessors, nor was human life a care to these. The
possessors also mastered the state and all its organs--hence the great
National Debts which accompanied the system: hence even the financial hold
of distant and alien men upon subject provinces of economic effort: hence
the draining of wealth not only from increasingly dissatisfied subjects
over-seas, but from the individual producers of foreign independent states.

The true conception of property disappears under such an arrangement, and
you naturally get a demand for relief through the denial of the principle
of ownership altogether. Here again, as in the matter of the irrational
_tabus_ and of skepticism, two apparently contradictory things have one
root: Capitalism, and the ideal inhuman system (not realizable) called
Socialism, both spring from one type of mind and both apply to one kind of
diseased society.

Against both, the pillar of reaction is peasant society, and peasant
society has proved throughout Europe largely coördinate with the remaining
authority of the Catholic Church. For a peasant society does not mean a
society composed of peasants, but one in which modern Industrial Capitalism
yields to agriculture, and in which agriculture is, in the main, conducted
by men possessed in part or altogether of their instruments of production
and of the soil, either through ownership or customary tenure. In such
a society all the institutions of the state repose upon an underlying
conception of secure and well-divided private property which can never be
questioned and which colors all men's minds. And that doctrine, like every
other sane doctrine, though applicable only to temporal conditions, has the
firm support of the Catholic Church.

       *       *       *       *       *

So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that
catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure
and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework,
such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to
continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up
of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of
knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life,
loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have
inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash
down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live
may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a
final, thing.

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European
structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was
formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold
of, the Catholic Church.

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.