dy, the new
influence, the Roman Church, which began to show itself in the
coronation of Charlemagne, first takes up its inheritance of the
oecumenical power of the Empire. The ninth century saw the climax of
"the gradual despair of the civil power; the new dream of the Church
which meant to build a city of God on the shifting sands of the
invasions."[4]

The new dream was but beginning to take on reality and the civil power
had in all fullness despaired. The old civilization, which had lasted so
long and changed so gradually, required to be refreshed by catastrophe:
even as some men believe of our own times. The catastrophe came, and,
through the struggle with the North and with Asia, the transformation
took place unseen in that lowest ebb of humanity. Europe had reached the
crest of one wave in the height of the Empire under the power of the
Roman government. It was to reach another in the thirteenth century
under the influence of the Roman Church.

The most of Mr. Belloc's conception of the Middle Ages is to be found in
his book _Paris_, where it is really incidental though profoundly
important. We cannot too often insist upon this fact, that the brief and
insufficient historical sketch presented in this chapter is a piecing
together often of mere indications as well as of detached statements.
The reader will do well to bear in mind that in this exposition we are
laying before him to the best of our powers what we take to be the
definite scheme of events undoubtedly present in our author's mind, but
never as a whole expressed by him. It is frequently necessary to infer
from what he states, the precise curve of his thought: this skeleton of
history is deduced only from a few bones.

In the book _Paris_, then, we find the best guide to his conception of
the Middle Ages. It is naturally in principle a work of topographical
and architectural purpose. But architecture is a guide to history. It
is the capital art of a happy society. (And, incidentally, an art that
is, in a definite and positive manner, dead in the present age.) Athens,
at her climax, built: and the grandeur of Rome has been preserved in
arches and aqueducts. For Mr. Belloc, the progress of the upward curve
from the ninth century to the thirteenth reaches its culmination in the
best of the Gothic. He sees in that structural time one of humanity's
periods of achievement, and he will not assent to the common theory of a
gradual upward curve from the Dark A