an association
between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been
full of the notion of "A Good Time Coming." Now the whole culture of the
Dark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time Going." They looked
backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our
time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope--which perhaps must
be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped--but
it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make
a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he
could keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free state;
the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance
and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And
this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all
the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the
most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be
an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was
left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic.

We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left free
cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance towards
a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because it
was really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the Roman
roads, but also because there has always been associated with forests
another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of the
forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things being
double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men and not
merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like beasts. But it is
precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age of
reason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has
sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been the
idea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantments; the
adventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad.

The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time
none of the _heroes_ are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are
anti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became
omnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into the
faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proporti