modern as contrasted with mediaeval history seems at first
sight to demonstrate the futility of any such inquiry.

Since the Reformation, religion has made for division rather than
co-operation. The modern period of European history begins in
disruption. Not only was Europe rent by the conflict of Catholic and
Protestant, but the dream of an international reformed Church which at
one time floated before the mind of Cranmer was dissipated by the
strength of nationalism and the cleavage in the ranks of the reformers
themselves. In our own country, what is euphemistically termed the
Elizabethan Settlement proved to be the source of further dissension,
and reform appeared as the prolific mother of sects and schisms. The
Protestant Churches were organized on national and state lines. They
ceased to retain any international character in their constitution,
while international intercourse became a diminishing influence. The
Church of Rome in the conflict with Gallicanism found herself at grips
with the spirit of nationalism, and to-day the strength of national
feeling within Roman Catholicism hinders the Pope from exerting a moral
authority over sovereign states that would parallel the judicial
functions successfully asserted by Innocent III. No Christian Church
to-day so rises above the national states of Europe, as to control or
even adequately to criticize the claims of those states. The Churches no
longer serve to embody and express an European conscience.

The break-up of a common ecclesiastical organization was not perhaps the
most serious loss of unifying power which religion in the West suffered
at the time of the Reformation. If it be true that the Bible and the
Greek spirit are the great common factors of Western civilization, then
we must recognize that these two great influences tended to fall apart
and even to oppose each other in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The humanist element in the Reform-movement grew less and
less, while humanism itself became more definitely secular. The European
mind has ever since been conscious of a disturbing division between
religion and culture. A development of religion which should render to
Western civilization services comparable to those rendered by the
mediaeval Church demands not only a heightened international
consciousness among Christians, which shall be able to find organized
expression, but also some fresh synthesis of religion and culture, some
reunion of th