ted in the processions of Flagellants, chaunted in the Pacts of
Peace after internecine town wars; above all, perhaps, muttered in
the cell of the friar, in the den of the weaver; if we sum up, however
inadequately, the state of things whence it arose, and whence it helped
to deliver us, we may think that the greatest music is scarcely reverent
enough to accompany these poor blundering rhymes.

The Feast of the Most Holy Sacrament, to whose liturgy this hymn, "O Res
Mirabilis," belongs, was instituted to commemorate the miracle of Bolsena,
which, coming late as it did, in the country of St. Francis, and within
two years of the birth of Dante, seems in its significant coincidences,
in its startling symbolism, the fit material summing up of what is
conveniently designated as the Franciscan revival: the introduction into
religious matters of passionate human emotion. For in the year 1263, at
Bolsena in Umbria, the consecrated wafer dropped blood upon the hands of
an unbelieving priest.

This trickery of a single individual, or more probably hallucination--this
lie and self-delusion of interested or foolish bystanders--just happened
to symbolise a very great reality. For during the earlier Middle Ages,
before the coming of Francis of Assisi, the souls of men, or, more
properly, their hearts, had been sorely troubled and jeopardised.

The mixture of races and civilisations, southern and northern and
eastern, antique and barbarian, which had been slowly taking place ever
since the fall of the Roman Empire, had seemed, in its consummation of
the twelfth century, less fertile on the whole than poisonous. The old
tribal system, the old civic system, triumphant centralising imperialism,
had all been broken up long since; and now feudalism was going to pieces
in its turn, leaving a chaos of filibustering princelets, among whom
loomed the equivocal figures of Provencal counts, of Angevin and Swabian
kings, brutal as men of the North, and lax as men of the South; moreover,
suspiciously oriental; brilliant and cynical persons, eventually to be
typified in Frederick II., who was judiciously suspected of being
Antichrist in person. In the midst of this anarchy, over-rapid industrial
development had moreover begotten the tendencies to promiscuity, to
mystical communism, always expressive of deep popular misery. The Holy
Land had become a freebooter's Eldorado; the defenders of Christ's
sepulchre were turned half-Saracen, infected with