the Middle Ages.

I do not continue to develop this aspect of the progress of western
civilization, not because it is unimportant, for indeed it is perhaps
the greatest and most significant aspect of mediaeval life, but because
it is well known to you, and indeed, it has generally been insisted on
to such a degree as to obscure the other aspects of progress in the
Middle Ages, with which we must deal.

* * * * *

And first I would ask you to observe that it was in these centuries that
there were laid over again the foundations of the social and political
order of civilization, and that there were devised those forms of the
political order upon which the structure of modern society is founded.

We are familiar with the conception of the divine nature of political
authority, the normal and fundamental mediaeval view of the State. If we
translate this into more general terms we shall find that its meaning is
that the State has an ethical or moral purpose or function; the State
exists to secure and to maintain justice. You must not, indeed, confuse
this great conception with that foolish perversion of it which was
suggested, I think, by some characteristically reckless phrases of St.
Augustine, stated in set terms by St. Gregory the Great, almost
forgotten in the Middle Ages, and unhappily revived by the perversity of
some Anglicans and Gallicans in the seventeenth century. This foolish
perversion, which we know as the theory of the 'Divine Right of Kings',
is indeed the opposite of the great Pauline and mediaeval conception of
the divine nature of political authority, for to St. Paul, to the more
normal Fathers like St. Ambrose, and to the political theory of the
Middle Ages authority is divine just because, and only in so far as, its
aim and purpose is the attainment and maintenance of justice. Indeed, it
is not only the notion of the 'Divine Right' which was inconsistent with
the mediaeval conception of the State, but the notion of an absolute
sovereignty inherent in the State, that notion with which some eccentric
or ignorant modern political theorists, ignorant of Rousseau as well as
of Aristotle, have played, to the great danger of society; we have,
indeed, got beyond the theory of the sovereignty of the king, but we are
in some danger of being hag-ridden by the imposture of the sovereignty
of the majority. Whatever mistakes the people of the Middle Ages may
have made, they were, with