and enlightenment was represented by thus
passing from a chronicle to a romance.

In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I
have just read in a newspaper controversy: "Salvation, like other good
things, must not come from outside." To call a spiritual thing external
and not internal is the chief mode of modernist excommunication. But if
our subject of study is mediaeval and not modern, we must pit against
this apparent platitude the very opposite idea. We must put ourselves in
the posture of men who thought that almost every good thing came from
outside--like good news. I confess that I am not impartial in my
sympathies here; and that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me as a
blunder about the very nature of life. I do not, in my private capacity,
believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb;
nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying
its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks
are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled
by wonder. But this faith in receptiveness, and in respect for things
outside oneself, need here do no more than help me in explaining what
any version of this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothing is
the modern German more modern, or more mad, than in his dream of finding
a German name for everything; eating his language, or in other words
biting his tongue. And in nothing were the mediaevals more free and sane
than in their acceptance of names and emblems from outside their most
beloved limits. The monastery would often not only take in the stranger
but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like Bruce was enthroned and
thanked as if he had really come as a knight errant. And a passionately
patriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a patron
saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not an
Irishman. Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they left the
numberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over by
comparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred,
and invoked a half mythical hero, striving in an eastern desert against
an impossible monster.

That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romance
and reality they were the first English experience of learning, not only
from the external, but the remote. England, like every Christian thing,
had thri