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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/europefaith01bell 
 
Py 
 
 EUROPE 
 
 AND THE 
 FAITH 
 
SECOND rMPRESSION 
 
EUROPE 
 
 AND THE 
 FAITH BY 
 H. BELLOC 
 
 CONSTABLE AND 
 COMPANY LIMITED 
 LONDON 1921 
 
90 JEspfcaos ift$p w%£ 
 
 
 APR2S 
 
TO MY COLLEAGUES OF THE 
 ST. THOMAS'S HISTORICAL SOCIETY 
 
 " Sine audoritate nulla vita " 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 fNTRODUOTION THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF His 
 
 TORY . . . . ... 
 
 [. What was the Roman Empire? . 
 II. What was the Church in the Roman Empire? 
 
 III. What was the "Fall" op the Roman Empire? 
 
 IV. The Beginnings op the Nations 
 V. What happened in Britain ? 
 
 VI. The Dark Ages . 
 VII. The Middle Ages 
 VIII. "What was the Reformation 1 
 
 IX. The Defection of Britain . 
 X. Conclusion .... 
 
 1 
 
 29 
 53 
 91 
 125 
 161 
 221 
 245 
 265 
 287 
 315 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 
 
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 
 
4 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 5 
 
 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 under- 
 stand. 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 civilisation, 
 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 
 
6 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 which presents itself to them partially and dis- 
 connectedly, 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 Judaea) 
 were, 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. 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 7 
 
 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 know- 
 ledge 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 
 
8 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 analyse (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 Canter- 
 bury, 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 hesitation of the Pope, the 
 anomaly 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 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 9 
 
 or even sceptical — 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 appear- 
 ances, 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 un- 
 developed barbarians against developed lands, no 
 plan of exploitation, nor of men organised attempt- 
 ing 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 
 judgement on the superficial test of religious differ- 
 ences 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, 
 
10 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 organisation 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, 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 11 
 
 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 evangelisation 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, 
 
12 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 pro- 
 digiously. The weed patch overran first Poland 
 and the Germanies, then half Europe. When it 
 challenged civilisation 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. 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 13 
 
 Small wonder that the Cabinet at Westminster 
 hesitated ! 
 
 We used to say during the war that if Prussia 
 conquered civilisation failed, but that if the Allies 
 conquered civilisation was re-established. 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 them- 
 selves ; 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 Civilisa- 
 tion 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 civilisation, and did not lose that 
 character by the momentary use of civilised 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 give Russia 
 a national discipline ; because the Byzantine 
 
14 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 judgements of the war made nonsense. 
 You had, on the allied side, the most vulgar pro- 
 fessional politicians and their rich paymasters 
 shouting for " Democracy " ; pedants mumbling 
 about "Race." On the side of Prussia (the nega- 
 tion 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 j[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. 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 15 
 
 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 a 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 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 con- 
 temporary accounts. Its comprehension is of vast 
 interest to history. The Catholic may well ask : 
 " How is it 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 
 
16 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 re- 
 conciled 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 recognised at last. To-day it 
 appears to be plain justice. The chief of St. 
 Thomas's contentions, for instance, that men in 
 Orders should be exempt from the ordinary courts, 
 seems as remote as chain armour. 
 
 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 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 17 
 
 offered by an old organisation to a new develop- 
 ment. 
 
 Of course it was ! It is equally true to say of 
 a man who objects to an aeroplane smashing in the 
 top of his studio that it is the resistance of an old 
 organisation 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's 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 to-day? — ); that "the Papacy 
 engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm." 
 As though the Papacy were a secret society like 
 Modern Freemasonry, with some hidden machinery 
 
18 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 interference was there 
 to rouse the whole populace of Europe to such a 
 pitch ! 
 
 As to the miracles which undoubtedly took 
 place at St. Thomas's 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 (taken as an isolated action) not a little un- 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 19 
 
 reasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads, 
 and as he notes the rapid and profound transforma- 
 tion of all civilisation 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 application : 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 action 
 was everything, whether his symbol were well or 
 ill chosen. The particular customs might go. But 
 to challenge the new claims of civil authority at 
 that moment was to save the Church. A move- 
 ment 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 dogma- 
 tic point ; he fought for no point to which the 
 Church of nine 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 
 
20 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 recently been the guarantee of the Church's liberty, 
 but which were in his time upon the turn of be- 
 coming 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 natur- 
 ally 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 that yet he saved through- 
 out 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 : and 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 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 21 
 
 wholly possessed of a firm and living Faith that 
 no marvellous 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 sceptic with his empty, un- 
 proved, 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 civilisation 
 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 
 
22 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 comprehends. He grasps the connection between 
 that enthusiasm and the miracles which attended 
 St. Thomas's 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 countryside 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 violence 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 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 23 
 
 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 a Becket 
 business was like the struggle of a man who is 
 fighting for his liberty and is compelled to 
 maintain it (such being the battle-ground chosen 
 by his opponents) upon a privilege inherited from 
 the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot under- 
 stand 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 dis- 
 
24 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 persed, 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 civilisation in its old age by some 
 small (and mainly servile) infiltration of barbaric 
 blood ; if civilisation so attacked did not per- 
 manently 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 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 25 
 
 divinely instituted would have broken down. The 
 Mohammedan came within three clays' march of 
 Tours, the Mongol was seen from the walls of 
 Tournus on the Saone — -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 re- 
 florescence 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 o£ 
 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 andjjto the 
 Rhine. He sees the new Universities, a product 
 of the soul of Europe reawakened ; he sees the 
 marvellous new civilisation of the Middle Ages 
 rising as a transformation of the old Roman 
 society, a transformation wholly from within, and 
 motived by the Faith. 
 
26 EUROPE AND 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 civilisation 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 civilisation 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 ' 
 
CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 27 
 
 nobles and merchants victorious, and the people cut 
 off, apparently for ever, 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 civilisation 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 south- 
 eastern coasts of England in the sixth century the 
 origin of the English people. He perceives that 
 the success of these small lowland settlements upon 
 the eastern shores, and the spread of their language 
 westward over the island dated from their accept- 
 ance of Roman discipline, organisation, 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 
 
28 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Moham- 
 medans ; 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 
 to-day. 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. 
 
I 
 
 WHAT WAS THE EOMAN EMPIRE? 
 
 29 
 
I 
 
 WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 
 
 The history of European civilisation 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 
 organised 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 physic- 
 ally 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 res public a : we call it to-day " The Roman 
 Empire." The Religion which informed and saved 
 it was then called, still is called, and will always be 
 called "The Catholic Church." 
 
 31 
 
32 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civilisation will therefore be wholly alien, 
 would each, in proportion to his science, grasp as 
 clearly as it is grasped to-day 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, 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 33 
 
 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 civilisation ; 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 mood but a determinate 
 and highly organised corporation ; to present in 
 the first centuries some non-existent "Christianity" 
 in place of the existent 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 institu- 
 tion ; to fail to identify that institution with the 
 institution still here to-day 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 preten- 
 sions are parts of one historical falsehood. 
 
 In all by which we Europeans differ from the 
 
 D 
 
34 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 imple- 
 ments : 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 com- 
 munication between them, the universities, the 
 Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their juris- 
 prudence ; 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 civilisation 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 35 
 
 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 arisen under divine provi- 
 dence 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 civilisations, 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 
 
36 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 compared to the violent, continual, but inchoate 
 attack of barbarians upon some civilised 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. To-day there is attack from 
 the North, to-morrow 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. 
 
WHAT WAS THE EOMAN EMPIRE? 37 
 
 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 our- 
 selves to-day) first devastated, then occupied, and 
 at last, of their sole genius, developed a land which 
 Roman civilisation 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 civilisation. 
 
 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 
 
38 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 to-day 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 Inde- 
 pendence, 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 39 
 
 general civilisation which is common to both 
 Americans and Europeans, and which in its vigour 
 has extended garrisons, as it were, into Asia and 
 Africa. We cannot understand it to-day 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 civilisation, 
 the prime characteristic of which was the accepta- 
 tion, 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 coloured, as it 
 were, by different customs, a different language, 
 and often a different religion. Thus the modern 
 man sees France French speaking, with an archi- 
 tecture, 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 
 to-day, 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 
 
40 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 differen- 
 tiation 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 com- 
 munities outside the boundaries from doing harm 
 to a vast, rich, thickly populated, and highly 
 organised state within. 
 
 The members of these communities (principally 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 41 
 
 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 every- 
 where. 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 labour, 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 civilisation, 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 
 
42 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 a common frontier with another civilisation, 
 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 civilisation lay beyond, that civilisation 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 Judaea, 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 Caesar 
 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 
 civilisation 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 43 
 
 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 depart- 
 ment 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 con- 
 
44 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 sciously 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 
 completed — say from an unknown and 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 Govern- 
 ment, 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 sub- 
 sistence, but all of them remarkable for this, that 
 their citizens drew their civic life, 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 45 
 
 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 Mediter- 
 ranean wherever it was habitable by man. Even 
 the little oasis of the Cyrenaean land with sand on 
 every side, but habitable, developed its city forma- 
 tions. 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 littorals 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, and much more were turned 
 into one Hellenised (that is, " Greecifled " ) civilisa- 
 tion. The separate cities, of course, survived, and 
 
46 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civilisation 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 Hellenisa- 
 tion 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 47 
 
 in some places beyond the Apennines) a society 
 in which the City State, though of course 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 cunningly, by commerce, and by the 
 exploitation of contract. 
 
 The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in 
 Spain, and harbours 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 
 
48 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 military type, but, true to the type of every 
 commercial empire, from his own time to our own, 
 the Carthaginian built up a scattered hotch-potch 
 of dominion, bound together by what is to-day 
 called the " Command of the Sea." 
 
 That command was long absolute and Cartha- 
 ginian 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-civilised 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE ? 49 
 
 Roman confederation, with its ideas of law and 
 government, was supreme in the Western Medi- 
 terranean, 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 Dot yet 
 complete, the centre of the whole Mediterranean 
 world. The men whose sons lived to be con- 
 temporary 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 
 
50 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 Mediterranean thing, but for that capital ex- 
 periment which has determined all future history — 
 Julius Caesar'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 
 civilised (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 civilisation. 
 
 It was all done 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 civilisation in a manner 
 so final and so immediate that no historian has 
 ever 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. 
 
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 51 
 
 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 in- 
 corporated 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 con- 
 ceptions 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? 
 
 53 
 
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 stand- 
 point in time is the generation which lived through 
 the close of the second century and on into the 
 
 65 
 
56 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 150 to 240 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 Catholi- 
 cism (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 find himself one of a comparatively small 
 class of very wealthy men to whom was confined 
 the municipal government of the city. Beneath 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 57 
 
 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 numer- 
 ous, while senators were certainly a very small 
 body (they were the great landowners of the 
 neighbourhood) ; 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 strengthening. 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 
 
58 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 re- 
 garded 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's 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 re- 
 pression — 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 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 59 
 
 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 services 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 
 
60 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 to-day upon the mark of an 
 alien colony in some great modern city. He knew 
 it to be the symbol of a small, reserved, unsym- 
 pathetic 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 other- 
 wise. 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 adminis- 
 trator (and this would more concern him — for the 
 possession of property by so important a body 
 would seem natural enough), that to this building 
 
THE CHUECH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 61 
 
 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 : (1) In the first place it 
 was certainly growing ; (2) in the second place it 
 was certainly, even after so many generations of 
 growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel ; (3) 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 unin- 
 telligent spectator, he would recognise 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 
 
62 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 propa- 
 gated a knowledge of its customs. He knew (and 
 it would disturb him to know) that its organisation, 
 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 organ- 
 isation, 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 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 63 
 
 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 con- 
 gregation. 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 con- 
 viction. 
 
 By this I do not mean that the Senator so walk- 
 ing 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 organisation of its hierarchy, did 
 differ from everything round it in this double 
 
64 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 character of precision and conviction. There was 
 no certitude left and no definite spirit or mental 
 aim, no " dogma " (as we should say to-day) 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 per- 
 manent force and, what is more, a state within the 
 state. 
 
 If he were like most of his kind in that genera- 
 tion 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 
 
THE CHUECH IN THE EOMAN EMPIEE 65 
 
 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 com- 
 plaints 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, segre- 
 gated 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 con- 
 cerned 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. 
 
66 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 There might possibly, even at that distance 
 from the frontiers, be rumours of some little in- 
 cursion 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 
 neighbouring barbarians ; or perhaps they were 
 attempting to live by pillage in the neighbour- 
 hood 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 organised along all the great highways, 
 telling him what had been done to the marauders 
 or the suppliants ; how to 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. 
 
THE CHUECH IN THE EOMAN EMPIRE 67 
 
 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 round 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 civilisation 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 sceptical, but interested 
 
68 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 particu- 
 larly in this, that at bottom it thought of man as 
 sufficient to himself and of all belief as mere 
 opinion. 
 
 Here was the great antithesis between the 
 Church and her surroundings. It is an antithesis 
 which has been revived to-day. To-day, 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 pos- 
 session of those keys which would open the doors 
 on 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. 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 69 
 
 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 organised 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 emphasised 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 con- 
 notes 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 organised body instituted for a definite end, 
 disciplined in a definite way, and remarkable for 
 
70 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 the possession of definite and concrete doctrine. 
 One can talk, in speaking of the first three 
 centuries, of stoicism, or epicureanism, or neo- 
 platomsm ; but one cannot talk of " Christiamsm " 
 or " ChrisU'sm." 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 inter- 
 ested in the problems and half-solutions of their 
 sceptical time. One will profess himself Materialist, 
 and will find another to agree with him ; there is 
 no personal God, certain moral duties must be 
 recognised 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, symbol- 
 ical plays showing the fate of the soul and per- 
 formed in high seclusion before members of a 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 71 
 
 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." 
 
72 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 Let us call the man who has so spoken, 
 Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have been a Christian 1 * 
 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 these 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 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 73 
 
 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 
 
74 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 75 
 
 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 im- 
 probable 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 creating Cod. There you have an 
 
76 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 was also 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. 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 77 
 
 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 practised 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 enquiring pagan would have been 
 acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and 
 onwards. 
 
78 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 " demon- 
 strably" 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 
 Eeform 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 generation 
 contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the 
 generation of Gladstone, Bismarck, and Manning. 
 Early as he is, he testifies fully to the organisation 
 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 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 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 79 
 
 (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 those 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 organisation 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, unmistakable. 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 griev- 
 ously distorted by religious bias. 
 
 The task upon which we are engaged is the 
 judgement 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 
 
80 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 organisation of contem- 
 porary 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 organisation may 
 have been a clumsy human thing. That would 
 not affect the historical facts. 
 
 By the year 200 the Church was — everywhere, 
 manifestly, and on ample evidence throughout the 
 Roman world — what I have described, and taught 
 the doctrines I have just enumerated : but it 
 stretches back 170 years before that date, and it 
 has evidence to its title throughout that era of 
 growth. 
 
 To see that the state of affairs everywhere and 
 widely apparent in a.d. 200 was rooted in the very 
 origins of the institution 170 years before, to see 
 that all this mass of ritual doctrine and discipline 
 start long before the first third of the first century, 
 and that 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 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 81 
 
 authorised 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 dis- 
 believe 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's 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 
 
 G 
 
82 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 the modern 
 United Italy. 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 quota- 
 tions 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 organisation were : 
 evidence to the way in which the Church was con- 
 stituted, 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 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 83 
 
 as the moment in which we can first take a full 
 historical view of the Catholic Church in being, and 
 this picture is full 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 there- 
 fore 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 dis- 
 cover how false these suggestions are. 
 
 The period was not one favourable to the inter- 
 ruption of record. It was one of a very high 
 culture. The proportion of curious, intellectual, 
 and sceptical men which that society contained was 
 
84 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 perhaps greater than in any other period with which 
 we are acquainted. It was certainly greater than 
 it is to-day. Those times were certainly less sus- 
 ceptible 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, travelled, discussed, 
 and, above all, criticised, 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. Any one 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 preach- 
 ing of the Gospel in Grecian, Italian, and perhaps 
 African cities. We are often told that changes 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 85 
 
 " 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, travelled, 
 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 coustitution 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 to-day : 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. 
 
86 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Judaea 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 to-day remembers well men who 
 saw the French Revolution and the Napoleonic 
 war. The old people who had surrounded his child- 
 hood 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 
 Burke. They could have seen and talked to 
 that first generation of the Church as the corre- 
 sponding 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 
 
THE CHUECH IN THE ROMAN EMPIEE 87 
 
 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, uncriticised 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 
 
88 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 1 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 in 
 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 In- 
 carnation 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 State" by the year 
 200 already profoundly affected the Empire : in the 
 next generation it permeated the Empire. It was 
 
 1 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 CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 89 
 
 already transforming European civilisation. By 
 the year 300 the thing was done. As the Empire 
 declined the Catholic Church caught and pre- 
 served 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 
 official 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 every- 
 where 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, 
 
90 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 ? 
 
Ill 
 
 WHAT WAS THE "FALL" OF THE 
 EOMAN EMPIRE? 
 
 91 
 
Ill 
 
 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 arose, after another six hundred 
 years of adventures and perils, the great harvest 
 of mediaeval civilisation. 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 any 
 society is what one must expect 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 
 
 93 
 
94 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 most fruitful, falls quickly. So, one might imagine, 
 should the long story of Mediterranean civilisation 
 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 civilisation 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 philo- 
 sophies, 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 civilisation 
 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 
 civilisations remain, but remain immovable ; or if 
 they change, can only vulgarly copy external models. 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 95 
 
 But the civilisation of Europe — the civilisation, 
 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 
 
96 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 — to-day nearly atheist 
 and very soon to be wholly so. 
 
 A generic term has been invented by these 
 modern and false historians (whose version I am 
 here giving) for the process they have imagined. 
 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 civilisation 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 colonising it with their superior 
 stock. 
 
 " It was inevitable" (the anti-Catholic historian 
 proceeds to admit) " that the presence of uncultured 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 97 
 
 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 glamour of romantic stories, 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 civilisation 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 mediaeval civilisation. 
 
 "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, 
 
 H 
 
98 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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, Scandi- 
 navia, and England had developed the Protestant 
 civilisation : 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 hypothesis 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 of civilisation 
 which filled these false historians, the hatred of 
 Roman tradition and of the Church, showed itself 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 99 
 
 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 triumphal instrument, the Inquisition, which 
 saved Spain from a Moorish revenge, was made out 
 a monstrosity. Every revolt, however obscure, 
 against the unity of European civilisation 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-praising 
 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 to-day, 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 now discredited 
 
100 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 theory presented is based upon a certain con- 
 ception of what happened at the break-down 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 civilisation, 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 what- 
 soever. 
 
 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 
 civilisation 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 civilisation 
 shall attain to a supremacy which it certainly has 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 101 
 
 not yet reached. 1 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 exaggera- 
 tions (though, for instance, it could not connect 
 representative institutions with the German bar- 
 barians), 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 thence- 
 forward (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. 
 
 1 I wrote that phrase before the break-up of Prussia and at a moment 
 when Prussia was still the Idol of Oxford. 
 
102 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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, presupposed. 
 
 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 mis- 
 fortune — 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 
 efforts. 
 
 They were not numerous ; on the contrary they 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 103 
 
 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 civilisation to the Dark Ages, that 
 the rise of legend and of the romantic and ad- 
 venturous spirit (the sowing of the modern seed) 
 coincides with places where the great mass of bar- 
 baric 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 civilisation 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 mediaeval civilisa- 
 tion repose on purely Roman origins. 
 
 In a word, the gradual cessation of central 
 Imperial rule in Western Europe, the failure of the 
 
104 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 power and habit of one united organisation, seated 
 in Rome, to colour, 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. 
 
 All that happened was that Roman civilisation, 
 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 in- 
 dependence ; and sundry soldiers benefited by the 
 slow (and enormous) change, occupied the local 
 " palaces," as they were called, of Roman adminis- 
 tration, 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 civilisation 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 
 imaginations of men. The tremors and the 
 occasional local cataclysms which were the symptoms 
 of this change of base from the old high civilisation 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 105 
 
 to the Dark Ages singularly impressed the numer- 
 ous and prolific writers of the time. Their terrors, 
 their astonishment, their speculations as to the 
 result, have come down to us highly emphasised. 
 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 " Visigoth " 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-civilised bias which 
 would represent the ancient civilisation as con- 
 quered by men of another and of a better stock who 
 have since developed the supreme type of modern 
 civilisation, and whose contrast with the Catholic 
 world and Catholic tradition is at once applauded 
 as the principle of life in Europe and emphasised 
 as the fundamental fact in European history. 
 
 The reader will not be content with a mere 
 affirmation of historic truth, 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 
 
106 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 (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 any one 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 civilisa- 
 tion 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 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 107 
 
 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 founda- 
 tion 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 civilisation of many millions) self-govern- 
 ment had broken down, and when it was necessary, 
 after the desperate faction fights which that break- 
 down 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 uncivilised world 
 without — upon the edge of the Sahara and of the 
 
108 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 Arabian desert ; upon the edge of the Scotch 
 mountains ; upon the edge of the poor, wild lands 
 between 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 con- 
 ditions 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 civilisation 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 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 109 
 
 beginning to grow, the Roman Army was still 
 theoretically an army of true Roman citizens. 1 
 
 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 Caesar raising a Gallic legion 
 almost contemporaneously 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 
 remodelled 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 
 
 1 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. 
 
110 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 honours, 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 con- 
 scription was very light compared with modern 
 systems, and was made lighter by re-enlistment, 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 remade, the Imperial Court. But it was ex- 
 ternal, at the close of the Empire, to general society. 
 
 Recruiting was meanwhile becoming difficult, 
 and the habit grew up of offering the hungry tribes 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 111 
 
 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 con- 
 ception 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 organisation, yet possessed of con- 
 siderable 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 Eennes in Brittany. And, 
 again, within the legions (who were all technically 
 of Roman citizenship and in theory recruited from 
 the full civilisation of Rome) the barbarian who 
 happened to find himself within that civilisation 
 tended more than did his non -barbarian fellow- 
 citizen (or fellow-slave) to accept military service. 
 He would nearly always be poorer ; he would, 
 
112 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 unless his experience of civilisation 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 dis- 
 tinguished 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 but 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 Latin-speaking 
 or Greek-speaking, and we're certainly regarded 
 both by themselves and by their Roman masters 
 as non-Roman in manners and in blood. 
 
 It must most clearly be emphasised 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 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE EOMAN EMPIRE 113 
 
 section of the Army should fight against a particular 
 claimant to the Empire (and therefore and neces- 
 sarily in favour 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 civilisation 
 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 targe 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 racial customs. It was a dis- 
 tinction between the Imperial Service on the one 
 side, against the outer, unrecognised savage on the 
 other. 
 
 I 
 
114 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 per- 
 mission 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 
 neighbourhood. 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 bauds 
 on land, the ceaseless attempts to enjoy or to loot 
 (but principally to enjoy) the conditions that 
 civilisation offered grew more and more persistent. 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 115 
 
 It must not be imagined, of course, that civilisa- 
 tion 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 organised barbaric 
 armies. 1 Thus in the year 406, driven by the pres- 
 sure of an Eastern invasion upon their own forests, 
 a vast barbaric host under one Radagaisus 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 frag- 
 mentary 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, 
 
 1 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. 
 
116 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 docu- 
 ments 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 Radagaisus, 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 irruptions into the 
 Empire failed wholly as soon as Imperial troops 
 could be brought up to oppose them. 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 117 
 
 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 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 Imperial 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 Theo- 
 dosius, 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 these few 
 original auxiliaries — mainly Goths by race — were 
 nearly all destroyed in the campaign. Alaric 
 survived. The remnant of his division was 
 
118 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 there- 
 upon begins to plot with Alaric and suggests to 
 him that he might gather other auxiliary troops 
 under his command, and make things uncomfort- 
 able for his superiors. Alaric rebels, marches 
 through the Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and 
 Greece, and down into the Peloponnesus ; 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. 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 119 
 
 He Dext 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 Radagaisus 
 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 
 
120 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 popula- 
 tion. 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, w T hose 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 
 
THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 121 
 
 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, re-enters 
 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 
 
122 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIEE 123 
 
 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 for ever 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 per- 
 mission to settle. Clovis, the Belgian Fleming, 
 fights no Imperial Army. His forbears were 
 Roman officials ; his little band of perhaps 8000 
 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. 
 
124 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 centralised Imperial Government, and how, 
 in consequence, there slowly grew up the modern 
 nations, we will next examine. 
 
IV 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 
 
 125 
 
IV 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 
 
 European civilisation, 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 un wounded, 
 is still the mark of Christendom. 
 
 That unity to-day falls into national groups. 
 Those of the West in particular are highly dif- 
 ferentiated. Gaul (or France as we now call it) 
 is a separate thing. The Iberian or Spanish 
 Peninsula (though divided into five particular, 
 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 
 reoccupied by European civilisation. Italy has 
 quite recently appeared as another united national 
 
 127 v 
 
128 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 civilisation ? 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 civilisation has been con- 
 tinuous (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 parcelled 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. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 129 
 
 We have seen that the barbarians who burst 
 through the defences of civilisation 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 
 civilisation 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." Dread- 
 ful as the irruption of barbarians into civilised 
 places must always be, even on a small scale, the 
 conquest of civilisation by barbarians is always and 
 necessarily impossible. Barbarians may have the 
 weight to destroy the civilisation they enter, and 
 in so doing to destroy themselves with it. But it 
 is inconceivable that they should impose their view 
 and manner upon civilised men. Now to impose 
 one's view and manner, dare leges (to give laws), 
 is to conquer. 
 
 Moreover, save under the most exceptional con- 
 ditions, a civilised army with its training, discipline, 
 and scientific traditions of war can always ulti- 
 mately have the better of a horde. In the case of 
 the Eoman Empire the armies of civilisation 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 
 
 K 
 
130, EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Radagaisus, 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 con- 
 tinued 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 civilisa- 
 tion that they had that importance, or that their 
 officers and generals, acting as Romayi officers and 
 generals, could play the part they did. 
 
 The heads of these auxiliary forces were invari- 
 ably men trained as Romans. They knew of no 
 life save that civilised life which the Empire 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 131 
 
 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 architect- 
 ure, 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 
 Radagaisus, would have observed in middle age. 
 
 Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of 
 Clermont-Ferrand, lived and wrote his classical 
 stuff at such a date after Alaric's Roman adventure 
 and Radagaisus' 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 
 
132 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 of that generation might be born before the year 
 500. Such a man would have stood towards 
 Radagaisus' raid, the last futile irruption of the 
 barbarian, much as men, old to-day 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 travelled 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 dependants. 
 
 In every city, again, he would have found a 
 Bishop of the Catholic Church, a member of that 
 hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and head- 
 ship to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and 
 especially the settlement of divisions and doubts 
 in religion, would have been the main popular pre- 
 occupation. 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 
 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 133 
 
 sect in religion. They were called Avians ; heretics 
 who differed in religion from the mass of their 
 fellow - citizens very much as the minority of 
 Protestants in an Irish county to-day 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 Sacra- 
 ments, and all Christian things), were yet out of 
 communion with the bulk of their officials and all 
 their tax-payers. 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 accepted this 
 heresy. They had come, therefore, by family 
 tradition to regard their separate sect (with its 
 attempt to rationalise the doctrine of the Incarna- 
 tion) 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 first let us follow the state of society as our 
 supposed grandson of Sidonius would have seen it 
 at the beginning of the Dark Ages. 
 
134 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 The armed forces lie might have met upon the 
 roads as he travelled 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 traveller in a 
 distant British colony to-day, 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 sur- 
 rounding 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 civilisation 200 to 100 years 
 before. 
 
 The descendants of those officers who from 200 
 to 100 years before had only commanded regular 
 or auxiliary forces in the Roman Army were 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 135 
 
 now seated as almost independent local adminis- 
 trators 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 Eome. But there was now no positive Central 
 power remaining in Eome 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 traveller 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, 
 Aries. 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 civilisation still the same unaltered Roman 
 character ; has anything changed at all ? 
 
 Let us see. 
 
 To get his papers in the Capital he will be 
 
136 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 directed to the " Palatium." This word does not 
 mean " Palace." 
 
 When we say "palace" to-day we mean the 
 house in which lives the real or nominal ruler of 
 a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham 
 Palace, St. James's 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 Caesars had their private house. As 
 the mask of private citizenship was gradually 
 thrown off by the Emperors, 600 to 500 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 honours, in the whole of its official 
 life, the Palatium means the machine of govern- 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 137 
 
 ment, local or Imperial. Such a traveller \ as we 
 have imagined in the middle of the sixth 
 century comes, then, to that Spanish Palatiwm 
 from which, throughout the five centuries of 
 Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsula 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 formulae, 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. 
 
138 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 relied 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 formulae of administration 
 were personal formulae. Now and then he men- 
 tioned his great officials, but he only mentioned 
 them if he chose. 
 
 This new local person, who had been very 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 139 
 
 gradually and almost unconsciously substituted 
 for the old Eoman Governors, the Rex, was on 
 the contrary a part of his own Council, and all 
 his formulae of administration mentioned the 
 Council as his coadjutors and assessors in adminis- 
 tration. 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 formulae, all of 
 which are based upon this idea of the Council, and 
 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 
 
140 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 to-day — 
 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 Koman 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 neighbouring 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 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 141 
 
 originally the commander (hereditary, or chosen, 
 or nominated by the Emperor) of an auxiliary 
 force serving as part of the Roman Army. Later, 
 when the 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, perhaps 
 with hereditary position, and would be called u Rex 
 Batavorum." Afterwards, when the recruiting 
 was mixed, he still kept that title, and later still, 
 when the Batavi 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 : 
 
142 EUKOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 the Imperator being, as we remember, the Com- 
 mander-in-Chief of the Roman Army, upon which 
 institution the Roman state or Empire or civilisa- 
 tion 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 
 Hispaniae " — that was altogether a later idea. 
 The Rex in Northern France was not " Rex 
 Galliae," he was " Rex Francorum " ; in each 
 case he was the Rex of the particular auxiliary 
 troop from which his ancestors — sometimes genera- 
 tions before — had originally drawn their Imperial 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 143 
 
 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, a.d. 700. Not because any 
 body of " Franks " still survived as a separate 
 corps — they had been but a couple of regiments 
 or so l 200 years before and had long disappeared 
 — but because the original title had derived from 
 a Eoman 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 
 
 1 We have documentary record. The greater part of the Frankish 
 auxiliaries under Olovis were baptized with their General. They came 
 to only 4000 men. 
 
144 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 indeed. Many a slave or broken Roman freedman 
 would enlist, for it had privileges and advantages 
 of great value ; * 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, 
 
 1 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 be. There is a trace of old barlaric 
 
 customs in some of these, sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage, 
 
 hut the mass of them are obviously Roman privileges. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 145 
 
 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 civilisation of the old 
 Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Eoman 
 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 Aries, Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild 
 later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them men 
 who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken 
 
 L 
 
146 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 1 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 to-day we call " annexation " or 
 " partition " of states. It simply means; that the 
 honour and advantage of administration are divided 
 between the two heirs, who take, the one the one 
 
 1 The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely 
 latinised through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and 
 of course what we call "Teutonic Languages" are in reality half 
 Roman, long before wo got our first full documents in the eighth and 
 ninth centuries. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 147 
 
 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 administered, 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. 1 
 
 The Rex, by the way, called himself always 
 by some definite inferior Roman title, such as 
 Vir Inluster, never anything more, as an English- 
 man to-day might be called " Sir Charles So-and- 
 so," or " Lord So-and-so " ; 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 
 
 1 Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education 
 by their way of colouring 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. 
 
148 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civilisation was one, and we wonder, at first, 
 why its moral unity did not continue to be re- 
 presented by a central Monarch. Though the 
 civilisation continued to decline, its forms should, 
 one would think, have remained unchanged, and 
 the theoretic attachment of each of these sub- 
 ordinates 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 they 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 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 149 
 
 that novel feature, the standing Council of Great 
 Men round the Rex, with whom everything is 
 done. 
 
 This standing Council expressed three forces, 
 which between them were transforming society. 
 Those three forces were : first, certain vague 
 underlying national feelings older than the Empire, 
 Gallic, Britannic, Iberian ; secondly, the economic 
 force of the great Roman landowners ; and, lastly, 
 the living organisation of the Catholic Church. 
 
 On the economic or material side of society 
 the great landowners were the chief 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 exceed- 
 ingly few men. A few hundred men and women, 
 a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal 
 sees) had come to own much the most of the land 
 on which these millions and millions lived ; and, 
 with the land, much the 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 
 
150 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 through the decline of population or the effect of 
 the interminable wars and the plagues r 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 dependants of the " chieftain " of the auxiliary 
 forces benefited largely ; but the thing that really 
 concerns the story of civilisation 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 direc- 
 tion — 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 to-day. 
 
 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 adminis- 
 trators, each new Bex, 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 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 151 
 
 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 con- 
 sisted in 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 any one 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 favour of the latter. The Catholic 
 Church, from a small but definite and very 
 tenacious organisation 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 
 (a.d. 200) ; next, to be the official religion (a.d. 
 300) ; finally, to be the cohesive political principle 
 of the great majority of human beings (a.d. 400). 
 
152 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 The modern man can distinctly appreciate the 
 phenomenon, if for " creed" he will read " capital," 
 and for the " Faith," " industrial civilisation." For 
 just as to-day 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 preoccupa- 
 tion. 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 centralised power. They do so 
 unconsciously but none the less strongly. The 
 second factor is Arianism : to which I now 
 return. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 153 
 
 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 tradi- 
 tion 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 civilised 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 
 
154 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 the little local court 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 imagina- 
 tion 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 adminis- 
 trators 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 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 155 
 
 whom his parents probably called by some such 
 sound as Clodovig (they had no written language), 
 succeeded ' his father, a Roman officer, 1 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 
 civilisation 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 
 Avians — in the midst of that enormous struggle. 
 
 Clodovicus— known in history as Clovis— came 
 from a remote corner of civilisation. His men were 
 
 1 He was presumably head of Auxiliaries. His tomb has been found 
 It is wholly Roman. 
 
156 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Eeges 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 adminis- 
 trative 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 favour 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. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 157 
 
 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 civilisation 
 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 civilisa- 
 tion as a highly denned 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 
 
158 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 overlapping divisions. The things that are older 
 than, and lie beneath, all exact political institu- 
 tions, 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 Western 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. l 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 
 
 1 We have evidence that it survived in the fifth century. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 159 
 
 and Dalmatia, and what to-day we call Switzerland 
 and a part of what to-day we call Bavaria and 
 Baden ; bo with what to-day 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. 1 There was here 
 a real breach of continuity with Boman 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 f " 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 ? " 
 
 1 What happened on the Danube was similar but not so sharply cut 
 off. There also the Church decayed. 
 
V 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 
 
 161 M 
 
V 
 WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 
 
 I have now carried this essay 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 it accepted in its 
 maturity caused it to survive, and was, in that 
 origin of Europe, and has since remained, the soul 
 of our Western civilisation. 
 
 In the first chapter I sketched the nature of 
 1 the Roman Empire ; in the second the nature of 
 the Church within the Roman Empire before that 
 civilisation 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. 
 
 163 
 
164 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 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 leader- 
 ship upon the world. 
 
 Its original seat — long before history begins — 
 lay perhaps in Ireland, later in Britain, and was 
 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 vigour. Everywhere 
 is that doctrine of immortality the note of superior 
 intelligence and will, especially in its contrast with 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 165 
 
 the thin pantheism and negations of Asia. Every- 
 where does it accompany health and decision. 
 
 Its only worthy counterpart (equally European 
 but rare, unrooted and private) is the bold affirma- 
 tion 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 care- 
 lessness for the plastic arts and for much in letters, 
 the continued growth in holiness, and all that 
 " salting," as it were, which preserved civilisation 
 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 civilisation 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 
 
166 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 fate of Britain at that critical moment when the 
 provinces of the Roman Empire became inde- 
 pendent 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 this country, Freeman, Green, and the 
 rest, have done) 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, to-day — for in- 
 stance, 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 know- 
 ledge 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 civilisation — was "cooquered" 
 by barbarians cannot to-day, in the light of modern 
 research, prove his case in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 167 
 
 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. Having made it out the tale of a German 
 and barbaric England, this false result will power- 
 fully affect modern and immediate conclusions 
 upon our common civilisation, 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 ithing, 
 cut off at the roots from the rest of civilisation, 
 then those who desire to believe that the institu- 
 tions 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 
 civilisation is bad or that the Faith is untrue; 
 
168 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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. 1 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 civilisation. 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 to-day the only 
 part of the Roman world in which a conscious 
 antagonism to the ancient and permanent civilisa- 
 tion of Europe exists. The Northern Germanies 
 and Scandinavia, which have had, since the 
 
 1 I wrote and first printed these words in 1912. I leave theni standing 
 with greater force in 1919. 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 169 
 
 Reformation, a religious agreement with all that 
 is still politically powerful in Britain, lay outside 
 the old civilisation. They would not have sur- 
 vived 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 uni- 
 versal persecution, directed in the main by the 
 wealthier classes against the religion of the English 
 populace and the funds which endowed it, just 
 happened to succeed. In little more than a 
 hundred years the newly enriched had won the 
 battle. By the year 1630 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 lament- 
 able and tragic a loss. 
 
 Let us state the factors in the problem. 
 
 The main factor in the problem is that the 
 
170 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 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 false 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 civilisation. 
 
 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 171 
 
 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. 
 
 I 
 
 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 
 
172 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 into such rare contemporary records as may illus- 
 trate 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 guesswork. 
 
 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 civilised 
 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 173 
 
 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 experi- 
 ence 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. 1 
 
 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 south-east was— 
 whether on account ol 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. 
 
 i 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 com- 
 plete abandonment it was laboriously cleared by a totally new race 
 men and as laboriously rebuilt on exactly the same site ! The thm is 
 not physically impossible, but it is so exceedingly improbable that 
 common sense laughs at it. 
 
174 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Brittaniae 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 
 south-eastern 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 the rich. It is a homily. The 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 175 
 
 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 in 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 Eoman 
 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 Aetius (whom he calls " Agitius "), that is, after 
 a.d. 446. 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 civilised 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 
 
176 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 companies followed," and we know what that 
 means in the case of the Eoman auxiliaries through- 
 out 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 accom- 
 paniment of escaped slaves and local ne'er-do- 
 weels, 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 177 
 
 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 civilisation. 
 
 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 Eomano-British 
 of the province organised themselves under one 
 Ambrosius Aurelianus, and stood their ground, he 
 tells us that "sometimes the citizens" (that is, the 
 Roman and civilised 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 any one 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 
 
 N 
 
178 EUBOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 to-day with all the advantages of full record. 
 How much greater would the contrast between 
 things really known and hearsay be when there 
 was none ! 
 
 This defeat of the Pagan Pirates at Mt. Badon 
 Gi-ildas 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 this booh 
 — 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 Boman civilisation 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 179 
 
 auxiliaries summoned from across the North Sea 
 in true Roman fashion to help a Roman province 
 against uncivilised 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 
 
180 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Eoman 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 south-east coast) ; 
 and (d) — what is of capital importance because it 
 is really contemporary, the settling down of the 
 whole matter, apparently during Gildas' s own 
 lifetime in the sixth century — from, say, a.d. 500 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. 1 There are 
 interesting fragments about it in the various 
 documents known (to us) collectively to-day as 
 TJie Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — but these docu- 
 ments were compiled many hundreds of years 
 afterwards and had nothing better to go on than 
 St. Gildas himself and possibly a few vague legends. 
 
 1 The single sentence in Prosper is insignificant, and, what is more, 
 demonstrably false as it stands. 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 181 
 
 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 civilisation, written in a 
 spirit of wide judgement 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 
 Eoman civilisation had come back to Eastern 
 Britain with St. Augustine : but certain funda- 
 mental 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 favour 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 tribes, German and 
 Danish, called Saxons, Jutes, and Angles. 
 
182 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 The first name " Saxon " 1 was at that time the 
 name of certain pirates inhabiting two or three 
 small islands on the coast between the Elbe and 
 the Rhine. 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 inland 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 has nothing to do with the general term 
 " Saxon " applied to all north - west of the 
 Germanies two hundred years or more afterwards. 
 
 These Pirates, then, provided small bands of 
 fighting men under chieftains who founded small 
 organised governments north of the Thames 
 Estuary, at the head of Southampton Water, and 
 on the Sussex coast, where 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. Their chiefs very 
 probably captured the Roman fiscal organisation 
 of the place, but seem rapidly to have degraded 
 
 1 The name has retained a vague significance for centuries and is now 
 attached to a population largely Slavonic and wholly Protestant south of 
 Berlin — hundreds of miles from its original seat. 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 183 
 
 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 guesswork 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 Traveller's tale that their barren country still 
 looked " depopulated." How many boatloads of 
 
184 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 thero., 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 Eoman 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 185 
 
 before St. Gildas's birth. It would be valuable if 
 it told us anything about the Pirate settlements on 
 the coast — whether these were but the confirma- 
 tion 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} 
 
 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 
 
 1 On such a body of evidence — less than a morning's reading — did 
 Green build up for popular sale his romantic Making of England. 
 
186 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 known as " the Saxon shore " even during 
 Imperial times ; that the savages from Scotland 
 and Ireland disturbed the civilised 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 where 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 southern- 
 most coasts. Their numbers must have been very 
 small as 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 civilisation. 
 
 Secondly, that the sparse raiders, Pagan (as 
 were also some few of those on the Continent) and 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 187 
 
 incapable of civilised effort, obtained, as also did 
 some 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 civilised 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 uncivilised 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 communica- 
 tions between Britain and Europe were narrow 
 — and the barbarian had been established across 
 them. 
 
 The circulation of men, goods, and ideas was 
 
188 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 Eoman ports, destroyed communication with 
 Europe from Southampton Water right north to 
 beyond the Thames. 
 
 It seems possible 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 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 sup- 
 position 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 civilisa- 
 tion, 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 189 
 
 shall know what Britain continued to be until the 
 catastrophe of the Eeformation. 
 
 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 
 some time 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 oi what happened in the 
 United States between 1862 and 1880 to be wiped 
 
190 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 191 
 
 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 position 
 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 conse- 
 quence and contemporary effect of the struggle. 
 He would be equally right in rejecting any theory 
 of the colonisation 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 organised 
 Roman province. Therefore we know that it had 
 
192 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 genera- 
 tions 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 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 com- 
 mission, 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 civilisation. The other petty kings and 
 courts speak various " Teutonic " dialects, that is, 
 dialects made up of a jargon of original German 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BEITAIN 193 
 
 words and Latin words mixed. The population of 
 the little settlements under these eastern chiefs 
 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 G-ildas 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 neighbourhood, 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 
 
 o 
 
194 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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. 1 
 
 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 Hamp- 
 shire 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. 
 
 1 A century and a half from the very last Roman evidence, the A-isit 
 of St. Germanus in 447 to the landing of St. Augustine exactly 150 years 
 later (597) ; nearly two centuries from the withdrawal of the expedition- 
 ary Roman Army to the landing of St. Augustine (410-597). 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 195 
 
 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 civili- 
 sation, and those of the kinglets who had lost 
 that tradition. This mixed borderland tended 
 apparently to coalesce (the facts on 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 differ- 
 entiated 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 Christian ; 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 in- 
 teresting 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 
 
196 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 of the more fertile Midlands and south and east, 
 which it called " Logrians." 
 
 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 titular headship. But — and this 
 must be especially noted — there was no conscious 
 or visible cohesion ; among the little courts of the 
 east and south-east 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, organised 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 and southern 
 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 197 
 
 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 civilisation re-entered 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 a language, for indeed it has no relation to 
 the facts of the time. 
 
198 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 1 Of 
 Roman government, of Roman order, of true Roman 
 civilisation, of that palatium of which we spoke in 
 a previous article, nothing had anywhere survived. 
 The disappearance of the Roman taxing and judicial 
 machinery is the mark of Britain's great wound. 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 199 
 
 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 1 and the North Sea pirates, 
 since they could not read or write, or build or 
 make a road or do anything appreciably useful — 
 interrupted civilised 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 organisation 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 
 
 1 The "Scots"— that is, the Irish— were, of course, of a higher 
 civilisation 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. 
 
200 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 guesswork, that its chief aliment came from the 
 spiritual fervour, 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. Oversea 
 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 201 
 
 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 con- 
 tinuity of civilisation. Exeter (perhaps Norwich), 
 Chester, Manchester, Lancaster, Carlisle, York, 
 Canterbury, Lincoln, Rochester, Newcastle, Col- 
 chester, Bath, Winchester, Chichester, Gloucester, 
 Cirencester, Leicester, Old Salisbury, Great London 
 itself — these pegs upon which the web of Roman 
 
202 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 civilisation 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 coalfields, 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 suffer- 
 ing grievously from the Angle, Saxon, Scotch, and 
 Irish raids, and though cut off for a time from 
 civilisation, 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 ivorse 
 than the fiction they put forward with regard to 
 the story of the English towns. 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 203 
 
 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 
 reoccupied 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 a biggish place for centuries 
 after the first troubles with the pirates, though 
 to-day 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 genera- 
 tion 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 
 
204 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 mediaeval 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 wide- 
 spread 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, 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 205 
 
 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 civilisation 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 establish- 
 ment. 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 return- 
 ing 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 im- 
 portance in the later Dark Ages — had no Roman 
 root simply because the modern antiquary is not 
 
206 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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, 
 Dover, 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 Richborough, an 
 island right on the pirate coast itself, has similarly 
 decayed ! As with destruction, so with decay ; 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 207 
 
 there is no increasing proportion as we go from 
 the west eastward towards the pirate settlements. 
 
 But the point need not be laboured. 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 breakdown 
 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 
 
208 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 every- 
 where when the central power of Rome decayed — 
 the meetings of armed men to decide public affairs, 
 money compensation for injuries, the organising 
 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 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 209 
 
 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 civilisation 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 in- 
 stitutions — for which all these various Latin, 
 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, 
 
210 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 avid of combat, jealous of independence, organised 
 under a military aristocracy and reverent of 
 custom. 
 
 Everywhere, and particularly in Britain, the 
 Imperial measurements survived : the measure- 
 ment 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 simula- 
 crum, and a simulacrum only. It is neither a 
 proof nor a product of true unity. Language 
 passes from conqueror to conquered, from con- 
 quered to conqueror, almost indifferently. Con- 
 venience, accident, and many a mysterious force 
 which the historian cannot analyse, propagate it, 
 or check it. Gaul, thickly populated, organised 
 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 colonised 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 — 700 years after 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 211 
 
 the fall of Carthage : 400 after the end of the 
 Roman Republic ! 
 
 Spain, conquered and occupied by the 
 Mohammedan, and settled in very great numbers 
 by a highly civilised Oriental race, talks to-day 
 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 Moun- 
 tains are a tessellated pavement of languages quite 
 dissimilar — Mongolian, Teutonic, Latin, 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 
 civilised 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. 
 
212 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civilisations 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 civilisation 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 1 dialects 
 which may have taken root before the withdrawal 
 of the Roman legions in the East of Britain, and 
 
 1 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 civilised 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. 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 213 
 
 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 in 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 civilised man ; the 
 pagan does not mould 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 
 civilisation 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 to-day. 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 Northumber- 
 land 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 
 
214 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 got 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 little Eastern courts. It used them. 
 It backed their tongue, their arms, their tradition. 
 The terms of Roman things were carefully trans- 
 lated by the Priests into the Teutonic dialects of 
 these courts ; the advance of civilisation 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 Western 
 Celtic tongues and in favour of the Eastern 
 Teutonic ones. 
 
 Once civilisation 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 organised clerical officialdom, and of its courts 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 215 
 
 of law, was immediately strengthened. It soon 
 and rapidly swamped all but the western hills. 
 But of colonisation, of the advance of a race, there 
 was none. What advanced was the Eoman organi- 
 sation once more, and with it the dialects of the 
 courts it now favoured. 
 
 What we know, then, of Britain when it was 
 recivilised 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 organisation in England when 
 it is recivilised ; not an eglywys but a church 1 is the 
 name of the building in which the new civilisation 
 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, 2 not a 
 plds. We get our whole picture of renovated 
 
 1 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. 
 
 2 And "hall" is again a Roman word adopted by the Germans. 
 
216 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 Britain (after the Church is restored) coloured by 
 this half-German speech. But the Britain we see 
 thus coloured 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 
 civilisation whose root is in Rome. 
 
 This clear historical conclusion sounds so novel 
 to-day that I must emphasise 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 Christians whom it relieved. It 
 decided for the courts of the South and East, 
 taught them organisation, and carried their dialects 
 with it through the Island which it gradually 
 recovered for civilisation. 
 
 We are now in a position to sum up our 
 conclusions upon the matter : 
 
 Britain, connected with the rest of civilisation 
 by a narrow and precarious neck of sea-travel over 
 the Straits of Dover had, in the last centuries of 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 217 
 
 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 a.d. 410 — 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 
 overrunning of barbarian bands, small but destruc- 
 tive, Britain suffered like the rest. 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-Grerman 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 
 
218 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civili- 
 sation 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 civilisation had been cut off, and it was 
 through them that civilisation came back. On 
 this account : 
 
 (1) The little kingdoms tended to coalesce 
 under the united discipline of the Church. 
 
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN 219 
 
 (2) The united British civilisation so forming 
 was able to advance gradually westward across the 
 island. 
 
 (3) Though the institutions of Europe were 
 much the same wherever Roman civilisation 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 ivere given, over a wider and 
 wider area of Britain, eastern, half-German 
 names because it was through the courts of the 
 eastern kinglets that civilisation had returned. 
 The kinglets of the East, as civilisation grew, were 
 continually fed from the Continent, strengthened 
 with the 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 
 North-western mountains was more or less adminis- 
 tered 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 rearises as an ordered Christian land in 
 the eighth century, its records are kept not only in 
 
220 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 300 years (450- 
 500 to 750-800). 
 
 Britain is reconquered for civilisation 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 civilised 
 Christendom England was to remain for 800 years. 
 
VI 
 
 THE DARK AGES 
 
 221 
 
VI 
 THE DARK AGES 
 
 So far we have traced the fortunes of the Roman 
 Empire (that is of European civilisation and of the 
 Catholic Church with which that civilisation 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 a.d. 400 to 500) 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 administra- 
 tion 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. 
 
 223 
 
224 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civilisation, 
 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 civilisation 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 civilisation were set and 
 crystallised in a few very simple, traditional and 
 easily appreciated types. The whole standard of 
 Europe was lowered to the level of its funda- 
 mentals, 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 the funda- 
 mental necessities of our race. History became no 
 more than a simple chronicle. Letters, in the finer 
 sense, almost ceased. Four hundred years more 
 
THE DARK AGES 225 
 
 were to pass before Europe was to re-awaken from 
 this sort of sleep into which her spirit had retreated, 
 and the passage from the full civilisation of Rome 
 through this period of simple and sometimes barbar- 
 ous things is properly called the Dark Ages. 
 
 It is of great importance for any one 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 
 leaf-soil of a forest. They are formed by the dis- 
 integration 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 civilisation as something much more com- 
 parable 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 
 
226 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 be- 
 sieged from all around. It was held like a strong- 
 hold, and in those centuries of struggle its institu- 
 tions were moulded 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 Mahommedan, from the North, 
 from the East, and from the South ; attacks not 
 comparable to the older raids of external hordes 
 eager only to enjoy civilisation 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 crises of the eighth, ninth, and 
 especially the tenth centuries — of the Dark Ages — 
 were a very different matter. Had the military 
 
THE DARK AGES 227 
 
 institutions of Europe failed in that struggle, our 
 civilisation would have been wiped out ; and indeed 
 at one or two critical points, as in the middle of 
 the eighth against the Mahommedan, and at the 
 end of the ninth century against the Northern 
 pirates, all human judgement 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 Mahommedan 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 re- 
 maining 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 
 
228 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 Mahommedan 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, crumbled, politic- 
 ally 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 north-western corner of the Spanish 
 square, individual communities of soldiers held out. 
 From these the gradual re-conquest 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 Mahommedan 
 host poured up into its very centre far beyond 
 Poitiers, half-way 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 
 
THE DARK AGES 229 
 
 of northern Spain and the chiefs of the un- 
 conquered 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 valour 
 for three hundred years. The Basques were the 
 unyielding basis of all the advance. 
 
 This Mahommedan 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 effort seemed in- 
 defatigable. 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 chief- 
 tains 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 which they had attacked. - 
 
 This critical moment when Europe seemed 
 
230 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 NortWr 
 barbarism remained a material menace fed? 
 hundred years, there was no further dang* r ! 
 destruction. &$' i - 
 
 Finally, less noticed W'^iyyOry but-aquib. 
 grievous and needing a "defence as^v-^.int, Was the 
 Pagan advance over the North German Plain^nu 
 up the valley of the Danube. 
 
 All the frontier of Christendom upon this line 
 from Augsburg and the Lech to t] course of the 
 Elbe and the North Sea was but a line of fortresses 
 and continual battlefields. It was but recently 
 organised land. Until the generations before the 
 year 800 there was no civilisation beyond the 
 Rhine save the upper Danube partially reclaimed 
 and a very scanty single extension up the valley of 
 the lower Maine. 
 
THE DARK AGES 231 
 
 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 those 
 new boundaries and organised them as a sort of 
 rampart in the East — a thing the Pagan-Roman 
 Empire had not doue. 
 
 The Church was the cement of this new belt of 
 defence — the imperfect populations of which were 
 evangelised from Ireland and Britain. It was an 
 experiment, this creation of the Germanies by 
 Western culture, this spiritual colonisation of a 
 ~*/[arch beyond the limits of the Empire. It did 
 "'etely succeed, as the Reformation proves ; 
 ^d at least the strength in the century 
 after Charlerr its founder, to withstand the 
 
 I& o^rn, attack uy jxi ^.ristendom. 
 
 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, gainst the civilised man, and it 
 remained a pcsil 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 
 
232 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 im- 
 perilled 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 country, who would 
 
THE DARK AGES 233 
 
 be the overlord of all the other lords, great and 
 small. 
 
 Side by side with this growth of local independ- 
 ence 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 
 viceroy 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, 
 
234 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 to a society of fighting nobles and their descendants, 
 organised 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 rationalise 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 civilisation originally 
 sprang from a soil in which custom was equally 
 permanent. 
 
 We know that in the great civilisations 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, 
 
THE DAEK AGES 235 
 
 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 
 Christmas he celebrates in northern Gaul, another 
 in Eome. 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 idea of learning is repetitive and con- 
 servative : its passion is to hold what was, not to 
 create and 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 
 
236 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civilisation 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 Mahommedan raiding of southern Italy 
 and the islands, the Mediterranean was no longer a 
 vehicle of Western civilisation 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 Danu> x±ad 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 
 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 
 
THE DARK AGES 237 
 
 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 inactivity 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 nj®b increased, and the whole of the 
 work that men uLocwith 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 vigour. The wheel of European life had 
 settled to one slow rate of turning. 
 
238 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 recognisable, 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 breakdown 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 
 
THE DARK AGES 239 
 
 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 any one of our Strettons, 
 Stanfords, Stamfords, Staffords, etc., which every- 
 where mark the crossing of a Roman 'road over a 
 watercourse. 
 
 But much more than in material things the 
 Dark Ages set a mould 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 
 civilisation ; 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 un- 
 consciously developed into the famous Donation. 
 
 The Dark Ages gave us that wealth of story 
 colouring and enlivening all our European life, 
 and, what is more, largely preserving historical 
 truth ; for nothing is more valuable to true history 
 than legend. They also gave us our order in 
 speech. Great host of words unknown to an- 
 tiquity sprang up naturally among the people 
 
240 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 when the forces 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 
 " epe\" 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, 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 
 crystallised 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 civilisation 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 DAEK AGES 241 
 
 The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that 
 which has most engrossed, puzzled, and warped the 
 judgement of non-Catholic historians when they 
 have attempted a conspectus of European develop- 
 ment ; it was the segregation, the homogeneity, 
 and the dominance of clerical organisation. 
 
 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 
 on which was stretched the moral life of Europe. 
 The vast and increasing endowments of great and 
 fixed religious houses formed the economic fly- 
 wheel 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 institu- 
 tion — I have already called it by a violent metaphor 
 
 R 
 
242 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 a civil institution — at any rate as a political in- 
 stitution — 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 
 centralised 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 organisation 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 civilisation was to re -arise 
 out of the soil of the Dark Ages, it was certain 
 first to show a full organisation of the Church 
 under some Pope of exceptional vigour, and next 
 
THE DARK AGES 243 
 
 to show that Pope, or his successors in this 
 tradition, at issue with new civil powers. When 
 ever central government should rise again, and in 
 whatever form, a conflict would begin between the 
 new kings and the clerical organisation 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 person- 
 ality of St. Gregory VII., the appearance (by a 
 happy accident of slight cross-breeding — a touch 
 of Scandinavian blood added to the French strain) 
 of the Norman race, finally the Crusades — drew 
 out of the darkness the enormous vigour of the 
 early Middle Ages. They were to produce an 
 intense and active civilisation of their own : a 
 civilisation 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 man. 
 
 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 Reforma- 
 tion, 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 
 
 245 
 
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 ; 
 and 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 speak- 
 ing, 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 
 
 247 
 
248 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 generation. He was a young man when the Norman 
 effort began. He died, full of an enormous achieve- 
 ment, in 1085. As much as one man could, he, 
 the heir of Cluny, had re-made Europe. Immedi- 
 ately after his death there was heard the march of 
 the Crusades. From these three the vigour of a 
 fresh, young, renewed Europe proceeds. 
 
 Much might be added. The perpetual and suc- 
 cessful chivalric charge against the Mahommedan 
 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 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 Mahommedans 
 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 un- 
 discovered fields. That watching scepticism which 
 flanks and follows the march of the Faith when the 
 Faith is most vigorous had also begun to speak. 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 249 
 
 There was even some expansion beyond the 
 boundaries eastward, so that something of the un- 
 fruitful 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, Colour and Stone. 
 Humour fully returned ; wide travel ; vision. In 
 general, the moment was one of expectation and 
 of advance. It was spring. 
 
 For the purpose 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 re- 
 sembled in history those mirae 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 organiser 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 
 
250 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 of their remote ancestry had drawn ancestral 
 names. 
 
 But, on the other hand, any one who should pre- 
 tend 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 w T hat 
 Normandy did ; nor could any other French 
 province show, as Normandy showed, immediate, 
 organised, 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 (small 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 Nordnianni," of " 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 with- 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 251 
 
 out against Civilisation ; and they were but a part 
 of it. They were few, as Pirates always must be. 
 It was on the estuaries of a half-dozen 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 Koman Empire that 
 the quieting of invading hordes by their settlement 
 (by intermarriage 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 " 1 
 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 
 
 1 The delimitation of this province dated from Diocletian. It was 
 already 600 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. 
 
252 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Eoman 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 arrange- 
 ment 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 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 253 
 
 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 govern- 
 ment 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, numeric- 
 ally 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, 
 
254 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 sea-faring) 
 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 organised it ; they conquered and 
 organised 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 en- 
 dured 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 govern- 
 ment of men, he had also provided the sword of 
 the new Papacy, and he had furnished the frame- 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 255 
 
 work 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 
 recreative 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 centralised 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 organised 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 
 
256 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 who, for the most part, see in the man a sporadic 
 phenomenon, by such a misconception betray the 
 source of their anaemia 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 en- 
 counter 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 them- 
 selves defeated, as did St. Gregory when he died. 
 Always they prove themselves before posterity to 
 have done much more than any other mould 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 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 257 
 
 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 plateaux 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 2000 miles upon the Holy Land. The 
 consequences of this last and third factor in the 
 reawakening 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 civilised 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 Parliaments, monastic 
 
258 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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, 1 
 begin to take on new creative powers and to 
 produce a new literature. That fundamental in- 
 stitution of Europe, the University, arises ; first in 
 Italy, immediately after in Paris — which last be- 
 comes the type and centre of the scheme. 
 
 The central civil governments begin to corre- 
 spond 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 ; 
 
 1 I mean, in both 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 only sur- 
 vived 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 unali'ected by the Imperial laws 
 and speech. 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 259 
 
 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 vigour, 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 any one 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 for ever among Christian 
 men. 
 
 No such permanence and no such good is per- 
 mitted to humanity ; and the great experiment, as 
 I have called it, was destined to fail. 
 
 While it flourished, all that is specially character- 
 istic 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 crafts- 
 man ; we founded co-operative industry. In arms 
 that military type arose which lives upon the 
 virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms 
 
260 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 may breed. Above all, an intense and living 
 appetite for truth, a perception of reality, in- 
 vigorated 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 civilisation 
 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 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 261 
 
 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 
 analysed. 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 : 
 
262 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 the new great voyages — India to the East, America 
 to the West — had (in the one lifetime of a man 1 
 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, dis- 
 turbed 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 for ever its cargo of letters, of 
 philosophy, of the arts, and of all our other 
 powers. 
 
 That disaster is commonly called " The Reforma- 
 tion." I do not pretend to analyse 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 civilised boundaries 
 of Europe stood firm, though shaken, under the 
 
 1 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. 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 263 
 
 tempest ; how that tempest might have ravaged 
 no more than those outlying parts newly in- 
 corporated — 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 account 
 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 KEFORMATION? 
 
 265 
 
VIII 
 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 
 
 It 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 
 civilisation 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 
 
 267 
 
268 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 to-day we can — the nature and the magnitude 
 of that central 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 mystic ex- 
 plain, but with which positive external history 
 cannot deal, and which the mere historian cannot 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 269 
 
 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 know- 
 ledge of the past and a judgement 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. Eead Gibbon's attempt to 
 account for " why " the Catholic Church arose in 
 the Roman Empire, and mark his empty failure. 1 
 
 Mark also how all examination of the causes of 
 the French Revolution are coloured 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 Reforma- 
 tion came, my reply would not be historic but 
 
 1 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. 
 
270 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 co-operative 
 partnerships for the proper distribution of the 
 means of production and for the prevention of a 
 proletariat with its vile cancer of capitalism, tended 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 271 
 
 to become privileged bodies. Even the heart of 
 Christian Europe, the village, showed faint signs 
 that it might become an oligarchy of privileged 
 farmers holding land and keeping men down. 
 The monastic orders were tainted in patches, up 
 and down Europe, with worldliness, with an abandon- 
 ment 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 symbol- 
 ism of which very soon no one could make head or 
 tail. 
 
 The temporal and visible organisation of the 
 Church did not escape in such a welter. The 
 lethargy, avarice, and routine from which that 
 organisation suffered has been both grossly ex- 
 aggerated and set out of perspective. A wild 
 picture of it has been drawn by its enemies. But 
 in a degree the temporal organisation 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 
 
272 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 colour. 
 
 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 organisation 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 organisation 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 
 canalised the exaltations, it would have humanised 
 the discoveries. But things were moving at a rate 
 more and more rapid, the whole society of Western 
 Christendom raced from experience to experience. 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 273 
 
 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 move- 
 ment of the spirit in Europe was repressed hap- 
 hazard, and quite as much haphazard encouraged ; 
 but there seemed no one corporate force present 
 throughout Christendom which could 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 theorising up and 
 
 T 
 
274 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 down Europe upon the nature of society and 
 morals, each with his special metaphysic of the 
 Sacrament ; each with his "system." Such sophists 
 have always abounded ; they abound to - day. 
 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 to-day. Indeed 
 that spirit and mental colour 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 organisation 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 : 
 
WHAT WAS THE KEFOKMATION? 275 
 
 now an ancient enforced 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 organisation 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 any one desire the cup 
 save to mark dissension from established custom ? 
 
 Here is another example. Prominent among 
 the later expressions of discontent you have the 
 
276 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 Adamites, 1 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 pre- 
 sentation of the general character of the time, and 
 that character was what I have described: an irre- 
 pressible, 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 
 
 1 The rise of these oddities is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe, and 
 is, like his caroer, about 100 years previous to the Reformation proper : 
 tho sects are of various longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have while 
 dwindling rapidly in numbers kept their full doctrines for now 400 years ; 
 others like the Joanna 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. 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 277 
 
 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 he 
 possible. 
 
 This flood of heretical movement was oecumeni- 
 cal ; it was not peculiar to one race or climate or 
 culture or nation. The numberless uneasy in- 
 novators 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 Eeal 
 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 
 
278 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 where the least instructed clown would have 
 laughed in your face at such nonsense. 
 
 The whole thing, the revolt, coupled with a first 
 ineffectual resistance to the revolt, was something 
 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 hand- 
 ling 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 Christianised : which was burnt in the 
 flame of a vile fanaticism, and has left us nothing 
 but ashes and incommunicable 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. 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 279 
 
 It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth 
 century that the coalescence 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 develop- 
 ment 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 
 
280 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 splendour, 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 281 
 
 a moment it hypnotised 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 organisation 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 many 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 friend- 
 ships, and which can never pretend to organisation 
 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, 
 
282 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 nay, that he could ever have imagined, a dis- 
 ruption 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 
 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 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 283 
 
 popular institutions of Christendom broke down : 
 the masses would have all swung round to solidify- 
 ing 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 at 
 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 
 
284 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 Reforma- 
 tion 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 Rhine (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. 
 
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 285 
 
 A general observer, ignorant of what was to 
 come, would have been certain at this moment 
 that the populace would rise. When it rose 
 intelligently the movement against the Church 
 and civilisation 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 civilisation, 
 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 
 
286 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 succour, 
 Ireland preserved the tradition of civilisation. 
 
 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 
 
 287 
 
IX 
 THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 
 
 One thing stands out in the fate of modern 
 Europe : the profound cleavage due to the Re- 
 formation. One thing made that wound (it was 
 almost mortal) so deep and lasting : the failure of 
 one ancient province of civilisation, and one only, 
 to keep the Faith : this province wherein 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 
 289 u 
 
290 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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, aud that 
 conclusion the Catholic Church. 
 
 To summarise 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 
 civilisation 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 
 organisation, the Imperial Court (which was 
 replaced first by provincial military leaders or 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 291 
 
 " 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 
 civilisation — and what is characteristic of that 
 culture, the power of thinking more clearly. 
 
 It is centuries before this slow digestion of the 
 barbarian reaches longitude 10° 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 civilisation in the West and the schismatic 
 but Christian civilisation 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 civilisation 
 dominating and mastering in its material decline a 
 vastly greater area than it had known in the 
 
292 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 height of its material excellence — this sort of expan- 
 sion in the dark — the 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 invig- 
 oration 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 civilisation which we 
 call that of the Middle Ages : that high renewal 
 which gives Europe a second and most marvellous 
 life, which is a late reflowering of Rome, but of 
 Rome revivified with the virtue and the humour of 
 the Faith. 
 
 The second thing 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 barbauan. Then it was re- 
 Christianised almost as thoroughly as though even 
 its Eastern part had never lost the authority of 
 civilisation. The Mission of St. Augustine re- 
 captured Britain — but Britain is remarkable in the 
 history of civilisation for the fact that alone of 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BEITAIN 293 
 
 civilised 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 civilisation of the 
 Boman 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 Beformation " 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 Beformation " was essentially 
 the reaction of the barbaric, the ill-tutored and the 
 isolated places external to the old and deep-rooted 
 Boman civilisation, against the influences of that 
 
294 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 civilisation. 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 seven 
 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 civilised, 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 en- 
 joying the sincere motive which accompanies such 
 risings, but deprived of unity and of organising 
 power. There has never been a fixed Protestant 
 creed. The common factor has been, and is, reaction 
 against the traditions of Europe. 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 295 
 
 Now the point to seize is this : 
 
 Inimical as such a revolt was to souls or (to 
 speak upon the mere historical plane) to civilisation, 
 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 civilised 
 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, beaten when Richelieu stepped in and 
 saved them from their southern superiors. But 
 perhaps they would not have been reconquered. 
 Perhaps they would have lapsed quite soon into their 
 original paganism. At any rate European culture 
 would have continued undivided and strong with- 
 out 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 founda- 
 tions of Europe, to the ancient provinces of the 
 Empire, yet an internal consequence of that revolt 
 arose within the ancient provinces. It may be 
 
296 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 briefly told. The wealthy took advantage within 
 the heart of civilisation itself of this external 
 revolt against order; for it is always to the 
 advantage of the wealthy to deny general con- 
 ceptions of right and wrong, to question a popular 
 philosophy, and to weaken the drastic and immedi- 
 ate power of the human will, organised 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 mer- 
 chants 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 mer- 
 chants 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 civilisation, the outer barbarian had allies. 
 
 These rich men, whose avarice betrayed Europe 
 from within, had no excuse. Theirs was not any 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BEITAIN 297 
 
 dumb instinctive revolt like that of the Outer 
 Germanies, the Outer Slavs, or 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 Montpellier 
 and Nimes, 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 an ti- Christian turmoil. That unit was 
 the Iberian Peninsula. It is worthy of remark — 
 especially on the part of those who realise 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 
 
298 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 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 to-day 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 re-emerge triumphant from 
 the struggle. 
 
 I say, then, that there was present in the field 
 against the Church a powerful ally for the Re- 
 formers : and that ally was the body of immoral 
 rich who hoped to profit by a general break in the 
 popular organisation 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 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 299 
 
 would shave failed, the Reformation would to-day 
 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 civilisation, 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 perpetration 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 
 
300 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 com- 
 munity ; 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 civilisation 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 Hainault, or Brabant, is to 
 show great ignorance of the European past. 
 
 Well, then, how did Britain break away ? 
 
 I beg the reader to pay 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. 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 301 
 
 Secondly, England was, more than any other 
 part of Western Europe (save the Batavian 
 March), 1 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 phenomenon 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 
 
 1 I mean Belgium : that frontier of Roman influence upon the lower 
 Rhine which so happily held out for the Faith and just preserved it. 
 
302 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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, was both 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 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BKITAIN 303 
 
 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 favour of the rich. But no one who can 
 even pretend to know mediaeval England will say 
 that the English consciously desired or willingly per- 
 mitted such a state of affairs to grow up. Successful 
 foreign wars, dynastic trouble, a recent and vigorous 
 awakening of national consciousness, which con- 
 sciousness had centred in the wealthier classes — all 
 these combined to let the evil in without warning, 
 and, on the eve of the Keformation, 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 
 
304 EUEOPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 organic weakness which, in the absence of opposi- 
 tion, ruins things as effectively as any strength. 
 
 No executive power in Europe was less in 
 sympathy with the revolt against civilisation 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 hoarded, 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 
 tenacious purpose, stuff, and creative power. 
 
 Henry, urged by an imperious young woman 
 who had gained control of him, desired a divorce 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 305 
 
 from his wife Katherine of Aragon, grown old for 
 him. The Papal Court temporised 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 those recurrent 
 quarrels with the mundane power of Pome 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 
 fulness 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 Peformers triumph here : but he 
 had compromised with their spirit, and at his 
 
306 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 resettlement. 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 resettlement of religious 
 endowments. Everywhere it took place ; every- 
 where it involved dissolution and restoration. 
 
 But Henry did not resettle. 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 Gal way 
 where there was no bearing with it at all. There 
 was no largeness in him nor any comprehension of 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 307 
 
 complexity, and when in this Jacobin, crude 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 paralysed 
 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 unevenly in the religious founda- 
 tions — 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. Then, when it 
 was too late, the Tudors attempted to stem the 
 tide. But the thing was done. Upon the indiffer- 
 ence 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 
 combined : the small minority of confused en- 
 thusiasts who really did desire what they believed 
 to be a restoration of a supposed "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 
 
308 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 newly enriched captured both the Universities, 
 all the Courts of Justice, most of the public schools. 
 They won their great civil war against the Crown. 
 In little more than 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 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 309 
 
 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 your- 
 self 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 Reforma- 
 tion, and what do you feel and see? 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 civilisation, 
 Roman ; impatient of the disproportion of society, 
 
310 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 1620-30, 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 from birth ; 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 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 311 
 
 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. Its 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 or baser forms of 
 worship. The middle class went over in a solid 
 body to the enemy. The barbarism of the Outer 
 G-ermanies 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 on 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 
 
312 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 lent, the strength of a great civilised tradition to 
 forces whose original initiative was directed against 
 European civilisation 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 North-West of Europe, that island which 
 had never been conquered by armed civilisation as 
 were the Outer Germanies, but had spontaneously, 
 and, as it were, miraculously 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 counter-weight. 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, 
 
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN 313 
 
 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 or to-morrow, 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, and the final threat 
 of chaos. 
 
X 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 315 
 
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 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 un- 
 determined, and only upon the conclusion of which 
 could modern Europe, with its new divisions and 
 its new fates, be clearly perceived. 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. 
 
 317 
 
318 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 civilisation, was 
 everywhere debated, produced a universal reaction 
 met by as universal a resistance, for three genera- 
 tions 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 the Fourth 
 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 France 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 civilisation 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 
 
CONCLUSION 319 
 
 Thirty Years War. England in particular was 
 definitely Protestant by the decade 1620-1630 — 
 hardly ear]ier. 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, 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 greater general war against Louis XIV. were 
 but sequels to the vast affair, yet the great con- 
 sequence 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 
 judgement, for they are not yet fulfilled : but 
 perhaps their judgement is near. 
 
320 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 These processes, filling the last 300 years, have 
 been as follows : 
 
 (1) A rapid extension of physical science and 
 with it 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 to-day " 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 know- 
 ledge. 
 
 (5) The ever -widening effect of scepticism, 
 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 institution, 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 any one look back upon those 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 un- 
 
CONCLUSION 321 
 
 happiness 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 jeopardise 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 
 lesions may not fail ? 
 
 Corresponding to that terrible and as yet un- 
 answered 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 common experience, a public certainty, 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. 
 
322 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 trans- 
 forms the power that was keeping things together 
 into a power driving separately 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 could 
 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 bond 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 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 
 
CONCLUSION 323 
 
 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 final 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, 
 each 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 Reforma- 
 tion, 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 
 
324 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 
 enquiry as those who have abandoned that guide- 
 In the moment, more than a thousand years ago, 
 when the last of the evangelising flood-tide was 
 still running strongly, a very great man wrote of 
 
CONCLUSION 325 
 
 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 absence of faith, demonstrable things 
 are the sole consolation. 
 
 There are three forms in which the human mind 
 can hold a truth : The form of Science, which 
 means that we accept a thing through demonstra- 
 tion, 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, recognise even its own 
 unproved first principles. 
 
 Well, this function of the isolated soul, enquiry, 
 and the necessity for demonstration, for individual 
 
326 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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 destruc- 
 tion of that unity fatally accelerated the pace and 
 as fatally 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 endeavour in this field, not to that 
 
CONCLUSION 327 
 
 spring of endeavour, 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 con- 
 sequences are only evil through an evil use, that 
 is, through an evil philosophy. 
 
 In connection with this release of powerful 
 enquiry 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 recognised, 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 scepticism — 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, be- 
 cause it has been repeated in the daily press and 
 vulgarised in a hundred books. 
 
328 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 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, 
 recognising its universal evil, wrongly regard as 
 the prime obstacle to a 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 competi- 
 tion. 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 decrees throughout the 
 rest of Christendom, a system under which a few 
 possessed the land and the machinery of produc- 
 tion, and the many were gradually dispossessed. 
 The many thus dispossessed could only exist upon 
 
CONCLUSION 329 
 
 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 overseas, but 
 from the individual producers of foreign indepen- 
 dent 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 
 scepticism, two apparently contradictory things 
 have one root : Capitalism, and the ideal inhuman 
 system (not realisable) 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 through- 
 out Europe largely co-ordinate 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 
 
330 EUROPE AND THE FAITH 
 
 of the soil, either through complete 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 
 colours 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 civilisation 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 
 
CONCLUSION 331 
 
 upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, 
 was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, 
 and will stand only in the mould of, the Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 Europe will return to the Faith, or she will 
 perish. 
 
 The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith. 
 
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