Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/53

II] interest than Flavian or Optatus, and you will have made one step towards believing that there is a gradation of importance in the several controversies in which the Church has been engaged. Believe that the invasion and conversion of the barbarians was the great crisis and work of mediæval religion, and you will have made a step towards believing that the Church of Christ has higher aims than the disputes respecting the observance of Easter, or the shape of the clerical tonsure.

Secondly, this combination of study round one main object solves, in part, the difficulty which I noticed in my first Lecture, respecting the relations of Civil and Ecclesiastical History. The subordinate persons and events of each may be easily divided from one another. But the greater characters of necessity combine both elements; they are the meeting-points of the two spheres of human life; they rise above the point of divergence; they shew that in the most important moments of social and individual action, all the influences of life, physical, intellectual, political, moral, come together: in these cases, whatever we may do elsewhere, we cannot disentangle the web without breaking it. Those divisions of history which we sometimes see under the heads of "civil and military," "political" and "religious," though convenient for common wars or common controversies, yet utterly fail when they touch an age like the Reformation,—though possible in the case of Melancthon or Jeremy Taylor, break down