ven on outer things without shame. From the roads of Caesar to
the churches of Lanfranc, it had sought its meat from God. But now the
eagles were on the wing, scenting a more distant slaughter; they were
seeking the strange things instead of receiving them. The English had
stepped from acceptance to adventure, and the epic of their ships had
begun. The scope of the great religious movement which swept England
along with all the West would distend a book like this into huge
disproportion, yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss it
in the distant and frigid fashion common in such short summaries. The
inadequacy of our insular method in popular history is perfectly shown
in the treatment of Richard Coeur de Lion. His tale is told with the
implication that his departure for the Crusade was something like the
escapade of a schoolboy running away to sea. It was, in this view, a
pardonable or lovable prank; whereas in truth it was more like a
responsible Englishman now going to the Front. Christendom was nearly
one nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was of
an adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is not
unreasonably romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best.
But the point of the argument against insular history is particularly
illustrated here by the absence of a continental comparison. In this
case we have only to step across the Straits of Dover to find the
fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard's contemporary in France, had the name
of a particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesman; yet
Philip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The reason was, of course,
that the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans, things of the
highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit.

Some six hundred years after Christianity sprang up in the East and
swept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same eastern
lands and followed it like its gigantic shadow. Like a shadow, it was at
once a copy and a contrary. We call it Islam, or the creed of the
Moslems; and perhaps its most explanatory description is that it was the
final flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the
accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more
European, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. Its highest
motive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itself an
idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being