c. One would think there
might be no more than a date and a number between the white mystery
of Louis the Ninth and the black mystery of Louis the Eleventh.
This is the very real historical mystery; the more realistic is our study
of medieval things, the more puzzled we shall be about the peculiar
creeping paralysis which affected things so virile and so full of hope.
There was a growth of moral morbidity as well as social inefficiency,
especially in the governing classes; for even to the end the guildsmen
and the peasants remained much more vigorous. How it ended we all know;
personally I should say that they got the Reformation and deserved it.
But it matters nothing to the truth here whether the Reformation
was a just revolt and revenge or an unjust culmination and conquest.
It is common ground to Catholics and Protestants of intelligence
that evils preceded and produced the schism; and that evils
were produced by it and have pursued it down to our own day.
We know it if only in the one example, that the schism begat
the Thirty Years' War, and the Thirty Years' War begat the
Seven Years' War, and the Seven Years' War begat the Great War,
which has passed like a pestilence through our own homes.
After the schism Prussia could relapse into heathenry and erect
an ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom.
But it can still be reasonably asked what begat the schism; and it can
still be reasonably answered; something that went wrong with medievalism.
But what was it that went wrong?

When I looked for the last time on the towers of Zion I had a
fixed fancy that I knew what it was. It is a thing that cannot
be proved or disproved; it must sound merely an ignorant guess.
But I believe myself that it died of disappointment.
I believe the whole medieval society failed, because the heart
went out of it with the loss of Jerusalem. Let it be observed
that I do not say the loss of the war, or even the Crusade.
For the war against Islam was not lost. The Moslem was overthrown
in the real battle-field, which was Spain; he was menaced in Africa;
his imperial power was already stricken and beginning slowly to decline.
I do not mean the political calculations about a Mediterranean war.
I do not even mean the Papal conceptions about the Holy War.
I mean the purely popular picture of the Holy City.
For while the aristocratic thing was a view, the vulgar thing was
a vision; something with which all stories stop, s