unclean mixtures of
creeds. Theology was divided between neo-Aristotelean logic, abstract
and arid, and Alexandrian esoteric mysticism, quietistic, nay, nihilistic;
and the Church had ceased to answer to any spiritual wants of the people.
Meanwhile, on all sides everywhere, heresies were teeming, austere and
equivocal, pure and unclean according to individuals, but all of them
anarchical, and therefore destructive at a moment when, above all, order
and discipline were wanted. The belief in the world's end, in the speedy
coming of Antichrist and the Messiah, was rife among all sects; and
learned men, the disciples of Joachim of Flora, were busy calculating
the very year and month. Lombardy, and most probably the south of France,
Flanders and the Rhine towns, were full of strange Manichean theosophies,
pessimistic dualism of God and devil, in which God always got the worst
of it, when God did not happen to be the devil himself. The ravening
lions, the clawing, tearing griffins, the nightmare brood carved on the
capitals, porches, and pulpits of pre-Franciscan churches, are surely
not, as orthodox antiquarians assure us, mere fanciful symbols of the
Church's vigilance and virtues: they express too well the far-spread
occult Manichean spirit, the belief in a triumphant power of evil.

Michelet, I think, has remarked that there was a moment in the early
Middle Ages when, in the mixture of all contrary things, in the very
excess of spiritual movement, there seemed a possibility of dead level,
of stagnation, of the peoples of Europe becoming perhaps bastard
Saracens, as in Merovingian times they had become bastard Romans; a
chance of Byzantinism in the West. Be this as it may, it seems certain
that, towards the end of the twelfth century, men's souls were shaken,
crumbling, and what was worse, excessively arid. There was as little
certainty of salvation as in the heart of that Priest saying Mass at
Bolsena; but the miracle came to mankind at large some seventy years
before it came to him. It had begun, no doubt, unnoticed in scores
of obscure heresies, in hundreds of unnoticed individuals; it became
manifest to all the world in the persons of Dominick, of Elizabeth of
Hungary, of King Lewis--above all, of Francis of Assisi. As in the
hands of the doubting priest, so in the hands of all suffering mankind,
the mystic wafer broke, proving itself true food for the soul: the
life-blood of hope and love welled forth and fertilised th