other aspects, higher in essence and more impalpable in quality, but it
is this first aspect I shall deal with, because I am not now speaking of
religion as a purely spiritual power but only of its quality as the
great coordinator of human action, the power that establishes a right
ratio of values and gives the capacity for right control. Whether we
accept the religion of the Middle Ages or not; whether we look on the
period as one of high and edifying Christian civilization, or as a time
of ignorance and superstition, we are bound to admit that society in its
physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects was highly organized, and
coordinated after a most masterly fashion. It was more nearly an unit,
functioning lucidly and consistently, than anything the world has known
since the Roman Empire. Whatever its defects, lack of coherency was not
one of them. Life was not divided into water-tight compartments, but
moved on as a consistent whole. Failures were constant, for the world
even then was made up of men, but the ideal was perfectly clear-cut, the
principles exactly seen and explicitly formulated; life was organic,
consistent, highly articulated, and withal as full of the passion of
aspiration towards an ultimate ideal as was the Gothic cathedral which
is its perfect exemplar.

The reason for this coherency and consistency was the universal
recognition and acceptance of religion as the one energizing and
standardizing force in life, the particular kind of religion that then
prevailed, and the organic power which this religion had established;
that is to say, the Church as an operative institution. So long as this
condition obtained, which was, roughly speaking, for three hundred
years, from the "Truce of God" in 1041 to the beginning of the
"Babylonian Captivity" of the Papacy at Avignon in 1309, there was
substantial unity in life, but as soon as it was shaken, this unity
began to break up into a diversity that accomplished a condition of
chaos, at and around the opening of the sixteenth century, which only
yielded to the absolutism of the Renaissance, destined in its turn to
break up into a second condition of chaos under the influence of
industrialism, Puritanism and revolution.

Since the accomplishment of the Reformation, this function of religion
has never been restored to society in any degree comparable with that
which it maintained during the Middle Ages. The Counter-Reformation
preserved the institution itse