THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them
by the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been
defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite
clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which
might have saved the world. If a man says that the Young Pretender
would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him.
If anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we all know
what to answer. That which was prevented is always impregnable;
and the only perfect King of England was he who was smothered.
Exactly be cause Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure.
Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot
say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief
or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts,
the facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full
design and come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only
space to allude to the two largest facts of modern history:
the Catholic Church and that modern growth rooted in
the French Revolution.

When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas
of Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort
of black admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished
even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain forever
unintelligible unless we realise what the brains of St. Thomas were
thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor.
They were thinking about the great mediaeval conception that the church
is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being
tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was simple: