nd died; that remained and even rose steadily, to be the noblest
pride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism had been
involved in that image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart had
dedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. The conception
of a patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages one very unique and
as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism.
The Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by seventy times
seven in the patrons of towns, trades and social types; but the very
idea that they were all saints excluded the possibility of ultimate
rivalry in the fact that they were all patrons. The Guild of the
Shoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, carrying the badges of St.
Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might fight each other in the streets; but
they did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were fighting
each other in the skies. Similarly the English would cry in battle on
St. George and the French on St. Denis; but they did not seriously
believe that St. George hated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St.
Denis. Joan of Arc, who was on the point of patriotism what many modern
people would call very fanatical, was yet upon this point what most
modern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religious
schism, it cannot be denied, a deeper and more inhuman division
appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the followers of saints who
were themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of gods who
were themselves at war. That the great Spanish ships were named after
St. Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to the
new England; soon it was to mean something almost cosmically
conflicting, as if they were named after Baal or Thor. These are indeed
mere symbols; but the process of which they are symbols was very
practical and must be seriously followed. There entered with the
religious wars the idea which modern science applies to racial wars; the
idea of _natural_ wars, not arising from a special quarrel but from the
nature of the people quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism first
fell across our path, and far away in distance and darkness something
moved that men had almost forgotten.

Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire lay that outer land, as loose
and drifting as a sea, which had boiled over in the barbarian wars.
Most of it was now formally Christian, but barely civilized; a faint awe
of the cu