t of kings like
Henry II. to rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman Law was not only,
of course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies and
feelings in themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned by
what was the corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happen
not only with but within the Church. For a Church was to these men
rather a world they lived in than a building to which they went. Without
the Church the Middle Ages would have had no law, as without the Church
the Reformation would have had no Bible. Many priests expounded and
embellished the Roman Law, and many priests supported Henry II. And yet
there was another element in the Church, stored in its first foundations
like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy and renew the world.
An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its
political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off of
innumerable Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as
was proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting
poor quickly; a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of
revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assissi and stripped
him of his rich garments in the street. The same wind of revolution
suddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henry's brilliant and luxurious
Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory and a bloody end.

Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is really very
practical to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore him from his
friend's side cannot be appreciated in the light of those legal and
constitutional debates which the misfortunes of the seventeenth century
have made so much of in more recent history. To convict St. Thomas of
illegality and clerical intrigue, when he set the law of the Church
against that of the State, is about as adequate as to convict St.
Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and
moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that
much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with
visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great
visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned
his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore
told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King
about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether "criminous
clerks