, of
course, the highest use of all; but it has nowadays many other uses.
Sometimes a Christian means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and more
recently, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means a
modest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But it
has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people, and it
means a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not
actually say to Jim Hawkins, "I feel myself out of touch with a certain
type of civilization"; but he did say, "I haven't tasted Christian
food." The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair and
trousers do not indeed say, "We perceive a divergence between her
culture and our own"; but they do say, "Why can't she dress like a
Christian?" That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest and
even stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was a
very real thing. But it was also, as we have seen, a very localized
thing, especially in the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism the
Christian faith and affections encouraged led at last to an excessive
and exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saint,
and a sort of duel between two statues of the same divinity. By a
process it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real estrangement
between European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreigners did
not eat or drink like Christians, and even, when the philosophic schism
came, to doubt if they were Christians.

There was, indeed, much more than this involved. While the internal
structure of mediaevalism was thus parochial and largely popular, in the
greater affairs, and especially the external affairs, such as peace and
war, most (though by no means all) of what was mediaeval was monarchical.
To see what the kings came to mean we must glance back at the great
background, as of darkness and daybreak, against which the first figures
of our history have already appeared. That background was the war with
the barbarians. While it lasted Christendom was not only one nation but
more like one city--and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall or
Paris one tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might have
chronicled the siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. What
followed was a conquest and a conversion; all the end of the Dark Ages
and the dawn of mediaevalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism.
And it is the paradox of the Crusades that