178), while its meaning was undefined. In time it came to mean obedience
to papal authority. Thus all the circumstances and streams of faith and
sentiment of the eleventh and twelfth centuries concentrated in the
hands of the hierarchy the control of society, because there was no
other organ to accept the deposit. The Cluny programme was a programme
of reform in the church such as everybody wanted. It gathered all "the
good men" in a common will and purpose. The ideals and the means were
selected, and the advocates of the same became the selected classes in
society. They remained such long after the movement was spent and lost,
but the notion remained that every good man, or would-be good man, ought
to stand with the church.

+225. The mediaeval church.+ In the crusades the church went to war with
Islam, another aspirant to rule mankind. It undoubtedly drilled and
disciplined its own adherents by the crusades and thus confirmed its
power. It is also certain that the crusades were popular and only put
into effect the wish of the great body of Christians. It was the masses,
therefore, who made the mediaeval church. It possessed a corporate
organization and hierarchy which was a body of personal interests, in
which ambition, cupidity, and love of power were awakened. The church
was venal, sensual, gross, and inhuman, because the mores of the age
were such. How could the church be other than the age was? Where was it
to find inspiration or illumination from without which should make
ecclesiastics anything but men of their age? The men of that age left on
record their testimony that the church was in no way better than the
society.[474] From the end of the twelfth century man after man and sect
after sect arose, whose inspiration was moral indignation at the vices
and abuses in the church. Wycliffe denied transubstantiation on
rationalistic grounds, but his work all consisted in criticism of
hierarchical abuses and of the principles which made the abuses
possible. The church never was on the level of the better mores of any
time. Every investigation which we make leads us not to the church as
the inspirer and leader, but to the dissenting apostles of
righteousness, to the great fluctuations in the mores (chivalry, woman
service, city growth, arts, and inventions), to the momentum of
interests, to the variations in the folkways which travel (crusades and
pilgrimages), commerce, industrial arts, money, credit, gunpowder, the