Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/216

 the facts which make the eleventh century a turning-point in the history of society,—whether we look to the intellectual movement or to the consolidation of the feudal system, to the arousing of a national force in France and England under stress of northern invaders, or to the restoration of the imperial or the ecclesiastical dignity;—among the incidents in this general change, none was attended with such wide-reaching consequences as the new position claimed for the catholic church. It might seem as though, just at the moment when nations were beginning to realise their strength and to some extent acquiring even an individual consciousness, the church intervened and sought to merge them all in one confused mass, subject and submissive to her will. Yet evidently the churchmen were only doing their duty when they felt and confessed that the work of repairing society belonged of right to them; nor could they discover any secret for the efficiency of the church's action more natural than a lofty assertion of her right to control the secular state and make her counsels the guide of the world. The enunciation of this policy opened a new channel of thought and discussion quite independent of that stream of which we have observed the rise in the foregoing chapters: from it flowed a literature appropriated to the exposition of the theory of politics, and in special of the relations of church and state. It is not our purpose here to examine