ophy. The history of every such
attempt shows that dogmas do not make mores. Every revolution suffers a
collapse at the point where reconstruction should begin. Then the old
ruling classes resume control, and by the use of force set the society
in its old grooves again. The ecclesiastical revolution of the sixteenth
century resulted in a wreck whose discordant fragments we have
inherited. It left us a Christendom, half of which is obscurantist and
half scientific; half is ruled by the Jesuits and half is split up into
wrangling sects. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century was
reversed when it undertook to reconstruct the mores of the English
people. The French revolutionists tried to abolish all the old mores and
to replace them by products of speculative philosophy. The revolution
was, in fact, due to a great change in conditions, which called for new
mores, and so far as the innovations met this demand they became
permanent and helped to create a conviction of the beneficence of
revolution. Napoleon abolished many innovations and put many things in
the old train again. Many other things have changed name and face, but
not character. Many innovations have been half assimilated. Some
interests have never yet been provided for (see sec. 165).

+91. Possibility of modifying mores.+ The combination in the mores of
persistency and variability determines the extent to which it is
possible to modify them by arbitrary action. It is not possible to
change them, by any artifice or device, to a great extent, or suddenly,
or in any essential element; it is possible to modify them by slow and
long-continued effort if the ritual is changed by minute variations. The
German emperor Frederick II was the most enlightened ruler of the Middle
Ages. He was a modern man in temper and ideas. He was a statesman and he
wanted to make the empire into a real state of the absolutist type. All
the mores of his time were ecclesiastical and hierocratic. He dashed
himself to pieces against them. Those whom he wanted to serve took the
side of the papacy against him. He became the author of the laws by
which the civil institutions of the time were made to serve
ecclesiastical domination. He carried the purpose of the crusades to a
higher degree of fulfillment than they ever reached otherwise, but this
brought him no credit or peace. The same drift in the mores of the time
bore down the Albigenses when they denounced the church corporation, t