reign to
Christianity to allow Christian germs to flourish in their soil. And the
new nations, accepting what Rome offered to them, were completely
unproductive in their adolescence. The achievement of this fatal first
millenary might be formulated as follows: "The civilised world of
Western Europe was united under the government of the Church of Rome; on
all nations it had been impressed in the same combination of words and
similes that they were living in a sinful world; they knew when this
world had been created and when its Saviour had appeared; they knew that
its end would come together with the bodily resurrection of the dead and
the terrible day of the Last Judgment; they knew that demons were
lurking everywhere, seeking to destroy man's soul, and that the Church
alone could save him. All these facts were as unalterable as the return
of the seasons."

The fundamental sources of antiquity had been sensuality and asceticism,
the elements of the Middle Ages abstract thought and historical faith;
now emotion was to become the principal factor. It welled up in the soul
and soon dominated all life. The fountain which had been dried up since
the dawn of the Christian era, began to flow again in a small country in
the south of France. The civilising centre had again shifted westwards,
as in the past it had shifted from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to
Rome. In the course of the first thousand years Greece and Asia Minor
had separated themselves from Europe, and founded a distinct culture,
the Byzantine, which exerted no influence on the development of Europe.
But not even Italy, the scene of the older civilisation, was destined to
give birth to the new; maybe the memory of the antique, ante-Christian,
period was too powerful here. Its cradle stood on virgin ground, in
Provence, a country wrested from Celts and Teutons by the Roman eagles,
ploughed by the Roman spirit, preserving in some of its coast towns,
notably in Marsilia, the rich remains of Greek settlements, something of
Moorish influence in race and language, and fusing all these
heterogeneous elements into a splendid whole. But why this important
spiritual centre should have been formed just here it is difficult to
say.

For the first time the system of ecclesiastical values was confronted by
something novel, which was not--like the old Teutonic ideal of the
perfect warrior--tainted by barbarism, but may be described as the
system of mundane court values. Th