at
there are many possible answers. Some might suppose that the binding
spiritual force of the Roman Church was weaker than the physical force
of the Roman army. Mr. Belloc suggests that the mediaeval system came
too suddenly into flower and had not enough strength to deal with new
problems. He offers also other reasons, such as these[6]:

First, the astounding series of catastrophes ... especially in the
earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the
first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years'
war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great
schism--these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can
find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and
defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea
odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its
beauty with associations of evil.

So for two hundred years the curve continued evilly downwards, and at
last, after a period of horror, rose in the lesser crest of the
Renaissance, a time more splendid than solid, more active than
beneficent. In this period occurred the Reformation, an event which Mr.
Belloc, a Catholic, frankly regards as evil.

He thinks that it tore in two the still expanding body of Christendom.
But, with the exception of one province, it left to the See of Rome all
those Western countries which the Empire of Rome had governed. Britain
was torn away in the process, but the remainder of the Western races was
left, if not united, at least with a bond of unity.

So the course of history went into the welter of religious wars which
gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of
these divisions of time came the Revolution.

This event is the third of the three pillars on which Mr. Belloc
supports his notion of Western history: the Roman Empire, the thirteenth
century, and the Revolution. He sees in it the principle result of the
Reformation, but an event which also undid and increasingly nullified
the effects of that schism.

He regards the Reformation as having not only disturbed the unity of
Europe, but also having encouraged the growth of those wealthy and
selfish classes of whom he has a particular dread. He speaks--in his
_Marie Antoinette_, which becomes for some little distance here our
principal guide--of how "the att