clesiastical;
all the arts were in the service of the Church. It had, during the Dark
Ages, won the Barbarians to its fold by the gorgeous solemnity of its
ritual; and, to protect itself against secular interference, it had
declared the spiritual power to be independent of the temporal--the
first great assertion, in the history of European civilisation, of the
liberty of thought.

In one set of respects the Church during the feudal epoch satisfied the
conditions of good government; in another, it did not. Its power was
uniformly distributed, it drew its recruits from all classes, and
entrusted the rule to the most capable. It was in close touch with every
grade of mankind; every colony of serfs, even, had its priest. It was
the most popular and most accessible society of the time, the most open
to all talents and all noble ambitions. But, on the other hand, it
failed in that all-important requisite of good government, respect for
liberty. It denied the rights of individual reason in spiritual matters,
and it claimed the right to compel belief--a claim that placed it in
some dependence upon the temporal powers, since as a purely spiritual
body, governing by influence and not by force, it could not persecute
without the aid of the secular arm.

To sum up, the Church exerted an immense and on the whole a beneficent
influence on ideas, sentiments, and conduct; but from the political
point of view the Church was nearly always the interpreter and defender
of the theocratic system and the Roman Imperial system--that is, of
religious and civil despotism.

_IV.--The Towns_

Like the Church, the municipalities survived the downfall of the Roman
empire. Their history varied greatly in different parts of Europe, but
none the less some observations can be made that are broadly accurate
with respect to most of them.

From the fifth to the tenth century, the state of the towns was a state
neither of servitude nor of liberty. They suffered all the woes that are
the fate of the weak; they were the prey of continual violence and
depredation; yet, in spite of the fearful disorders of the time, they
preserved a certain importance. When feudalism was established, the
towns lost such independence as they had possessed; they found
themselves under the heel of feudal chiefs. But feudalism did bring
about a sort of peace, a sort of order; and with the slightest gleam of
peace and order a man's hope revives, and on the revival of hope