hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies,
like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority.
And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe
apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together.
The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity
at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor
creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they
were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal
of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this
as the first and most evident case of the general truth:
that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived
(which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough.
Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind
has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
It has been found difficult; and left untried.

It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution.
A great part of our present perplexity arises from the fact
that the French Revolution has half succeeded and half failed.
In one sense, Valmy was the decisive battle of the West,
and in another Trafalgar. We have, indeed, destroyed the largest
territorial tyrannies, and created a free peasantry in almost all
Christian countries except England; of which we shall say more anon.
But representative government, the one universal relic,
is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea.
The theory of the French Revolution presupposed two things
in government, things which it achieved at the time, but which it
has certainly not bequeathed to its imitators in England, Germany,
and America. The first of these was the idea of honorable poverty;