Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/24

16 ; on a war, like the Crusades; on a person, like Luther. In some periods, as in the middle ages, the combination of the secular and religious elements will be effected by the political or the intellectual influence of the clergy. The lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury and the lives of the Prime Ministers of England are for five hundred years almost indivisible. The course of European revolution for nearly a thousand years moves round the throne of the Papacy. Or again, the rise of a new power or character will, even in these very ages, suddenly transfer the spiritual guidance of men to some high-minded ruler or gifted writer, who is for the time the true arbiter or interpreter of the interests and the feelings of Christendom. In the close of the thirteenth century, it is not a priest or a pope, but a king and an opponent of popes, who stands forward as the acknowledged representative of the Christian Church in Europe: St. Louis in France, not Gregory IX. at Rome. In the fourteenth century, it is not a schoolman or a bishop that we summon before us as the best exponent of mediæval Christianity; it is not the "seraphic" or the "angelic doctor," but the divine poet Dante, who reveals to us the feelings and thoughts of the whole age respecting this world and the next. And if we pass to our own country, he must be a blind guide who would take us through the English Reformation without seeing on every stage of it the impress of the iron will and broad aims of