dered times nothing but a base and bloody habit. Thus again
Church powers and dues, which had been human when every man felt the
Church as the best part of himself, were mere mean privileges when the
nation was full of sects and full of freethinkers. This clearing away of
external symbols that no longer symbolised anything was an honourable
and needful work; but it was so difficult that to the men engaged in it
it blocked up the perspective and filled the sky, so that they slid into
a very natural mental mistake which coloured all their views of history.
They supposed that this particular problem on which they were engaged
was the one problem upon which all mankind had always been engaged. They
got it into their heads that breaking away from a dead past was the
perpetual process of humanity. The truth is obviously that humanity has
found itself in many difficulties very different from that. Sometimes
the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes
to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and
diffused; sometimes to prevent the growth in the State of great new
private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may
sometimes happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to
do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do. It may
be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can
find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking
into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. This was
exactly the position of all thinking men in what we call the dark ages,
say from the sixth to the tenth century. The cheap progressive view of
history can never make head or tail of that epoch; it was an epoch
upside down. We think of the old things as barbaric and the new things
as enlightened. In that age all the enlightened things were old; all
the barbaric and brutally ignorant things were new and up to date.
Republicanism was a fading legend; despotism was a new and successful
experiment. Christianity was not only better than the clans that
rebelled against it; Christianity was more rationalistic than they were.
When men looked back they saw progress and reason; when they looked
forward they saw shapeless tradition and tribal terror. Touching such
an age it is obvious that all our modern terms describing reform or
conservation are foolish and beside the mark. The Conservative was then
the only possible