" should be punished by the State or the Church. And this was
indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realise it we must
reiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand--the nature
of the Catholic Church when it was itself a government, and the
permanent sense in which it was itself a revolution.

It is always the first fact that escapes notice; and the first fact
about the Church was that it created a machinery of pardon, where the
State could only work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be a
divine detective who helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty.
It was, therefore, in the very nature of the institution, that when it
did punish materially it punished more lightly. If any modern man were
put back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn
in two; for if the King's scheme was the more rational, the Archbishop's
was the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened religious
disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk the
historic character of Church government. It is admitted, for instance,
that things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, was
practically unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principle
lingered into more evil days in the form by which the Church authorities
handed over culprits to the secular arm to be killed, even for religious
offences. In modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but
the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a
hypocrite about his own inconsistencies.

Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St.
Francis, without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantastic
charity, by which the great Archbishop undoubtedly stands for the
victims of this world, where the wheel of fortune grinds the faces of
the poor. He may well have been too idealistic; he wished to protect the
Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to
him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the King as
capricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic,
the King was really too practical; it is intrinsically true to say he
was too practical to succeed in practice. There re-enters here, and
runs, I think, through all English history, the rather indescribable
truth I have suggested about the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly
impersonal enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediaeval