tative, which dominated the intellects and
imaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The visible
church and the invisible world of which the church held the
interpretation and the key,--this concrete fact, and this faith the
counterpart of the fact, were the bases and pillars of the religion of
Europe for many centuries.

We are not required to balance the merits and faults of this mediaeval
religion. It was a mighty power, so long as it commanded the
unquestioning intellectual assent of the world, and so long as upon the
whole it exemplified and enforced, beyond any other human agency, the
highest moral and spiritual ideals men knew.

Its supremacy was favored by the complete subordination of all
intellectual life which was an incident of the barbaric conquest and the
feudal society which followed. Even before those events the human
intellect seemed to flag. The old classicism and the new Christianity
never so wedded as to produce either an adequate civic virtue or a great
intellectual movement. In the Dark Ages which followed, learning shrank
into the narrow channels of the cloister, and literature almost ceased as
a creative force. For almost a thousand years--from Augustine to
Dante--Europe scarcely produced a book which has high intrinsic value for
our time. When intellectual energy woke again in Italy and then in the
North, the ecclesiastical conception had inwrought itself in human
thought.

Along with authority and dogmas there developed an elaborate ceremonial,
appealing through the senses to the imagination and the spiritual sense.
For the multitude it involved a habitual confusion of the symbol with the
substance of religion. In an age when the highest minds lived in an
atmosphere of profound ignorance, and philosophy was childish, there was
wrought out the full doctrine of the Mass and its accompaniments,--a
literal transformation of the bread and wine of the sacrament into the
body and blood of Christ, powerful to impart a saving grace. The power
to work this miracle was the supreme weapon of the priesthood.

We may glance at the mediaeval religion in its culmination in the three
figures of Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas a Kempis. A Kempis shows
religion fled from the active world with its strifes and temptations,
sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue; feeding on the
contemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal horrors; self-centred
and inglorious.