ges to the Renaissance.

The progress of the Middle Ages was a progress towards unity, less
successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the
compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and
threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by
religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of
Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the Republic
against Carthage, now gathered under the flag of the Church and
expressed itself in the Crusades.

The levying of Europe for a common and a noble purpose began the process
which was continued by the intellectual stimulation of these wars. It
flowered briefly but exquisitely in the Gothic, in the foundation of the
universities and the teaching of philosophy, and in the establishment of
strong, well-ordered central governments in the feudal scheme.

The merits of the Middle Ages, to Mr. Belloc, lie not only in their
artistic and philosophical achievements, but also and especially in
their security. He has the French, the Latin attachment to a vigorous
central power, and, of all political forms, he most fears and hates an
oligarchy. To others, to Dr. Johnson and to Goldsmith, for example, it
has seemed very clear that the interests of the poor lie with the king
against the rich. Mr. Belloc sees in the feudal system strongly
administered from a centre, with the villein secured in his holding and
the townsman controlled and protected by his guild, if not a perfect, at
least a solidly successful polity. He applauds therefore those ages in
which central justice was effective, the ages of Edward I in England and
St. Louis in France.

But [he says] the mediaeval theory in the State and its effect on
architecture, suited as they were to our blood, and giving us, as
they did, the only language in which we have ever found an exact
expression of our instincts, ruled in security for a very little
while; it began--almost in the hour of its perfection--to decay;
St. Louis outlived it a little, kept it vigorous, perhaps, in his
own immediate surroundings, when it was already weakened in the
rest of Europe, and long before the thirteenth century was out the
system to which it has given its name was drying up at the
roots.[5]

Why, then, was this crest of the curve so much less durable than that on
which the Empire rode safely through four ordered centuries? To th