marrying,
and Charles I always having his head cut off; Alfred rapidly and in
rotation making his people's clocks and spoiling their cakes; and
King John pulling out Jews' teeth with the celerity and industry of
an American dentist. Anything is good that shakes all this stiff
simplification, and makes us remember that these men were once alive;
that is, mixed, free, flippant, and inconsistent. It gives the mind
a healthy kick to know that Alfred had fits, that Charles I prevented
enclosures, that Rufus was really interested in architecture, that Henry
VIII was really interested in theology.

And as these scraps of reality can startle us into more solid
imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are
on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a
Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they
were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think
that John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture of
him is all wrong. Whether he had any generous qualities or not, he had
what commonly makes them possible, dare-devil courage, for instance, and
hotheaded decision. But, above all, he had a morality which he broke,
but which we misunderstand.

The mediaeval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of Free Will. In
their social system the mediaevals were too much PARTI-PER-PALE, as
their heralds would say, too rigidly cut up by fences and quarterings
of guild or degree. But in their moral philosophy they always thought of
man as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest. While
they clad and bound the body and (to some extent) the mind too stiffly
and quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we have
of the freedom of the soul. For them the soul always hung poised like an
eagle in the heavens of liberty. Many of the things that strike a modern
as most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice.

For instance, the greatest of the Schoolmen devotes folios to the minute
description of what the world would have been like if Adam had refused
the apple; what kings, laws, babies, animals, planets would have been
in an unfallen world. So intensely does he feel that Adam might have
decided the other way that he sees a complete and complex vision of
another world, a world that now can never be.

This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either way
can be felt through