which have served the cause of unity in the
moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect
and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and
the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy
and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge
and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a
more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed
in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love
of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences
of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to
Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit
at the feet of some world-famous teacher.

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many of
the trade-routes surprise us by the length and adventurousness of their
course. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy and
Spain, while small boats from Ireland were brought into the mouths of
the Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were impassable
through barbarians from the North.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern
traveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of the
Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and
when a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the
sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined
abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one
organized body which represents the old united culture of Christendom
and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and
disorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted
that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity
of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were
extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose
his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth
century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the
turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope,
disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet
been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the nature
of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more
fully in