In the first of these points, he is right—though very restricted in vision. In the second, he is historically quite wrong: the Middle Ages were not a period in which a particular insufficient and later somewhat tyrannical institution called “The Papacy” was trying to achieve, or ought to have tried to achieve, a merely temporal unity, careless of Catholic doctrine. In the third, he is still more wrong historically. The Reformation was not an inevitable climax led up to by greater and greater weakness in Christendom and not to be avoided. It might have been avoided; and all that it did was very nearly undone again by the recovery of European sanity after the first delirium of a minority had passed. The destructive work of the Reformation would have been repaired altogether but for the shortsightedness (from a European point of view) of Richelieu in backing up the defeated Protestant Principalities of Germany against the Empire; due to his considering nothing but the advantages of the French Royal house and forgetting Christendom. Mr. Wells is genuinely impressed by the first Crusade. He uses in connection with it the novel German idiom “will to” crusade, and that is the highest compliment he can pay it. He is impressed by these great masses of men going eastward. He calls it a spectacle such as “had never before been seen in the whole history of the world.” He does not, indeed, appreciate that the thing was a vast French movement (for he would not like any great movement to be French); he prefers to think of it as Norman, under the old Victorian superstition that the Normans, being vigorous, could not be really French at all. But he admires it, because it was popular, because it was spontaneous, and, above all, because it was big. He sees in just perspective the gradual “officializing” of the Crusades, and he appreciates the fact that the violent Moslem feeling of the later twelfth century was a reaction corresponding to the Christian enthusiasm of eighty years before. He puts the episode of Saladin well. But what I think he does not appreciate is the way in which medieval civilization continued to hold the crusading idea. He says in so many words that (by the third Crusade) the “magic and wonder had gone out of these movements” and that “the common people had found them out.” He ought to have been told by those who coached him that, though changing conditions had made united popular support more and more difficult, yet, right on into the fifteenth century, the Holy Sepulchre was the ideal goal. Even in England (a country which had little to do with the Crusades), you have Henry IV dreaming of it all his life, and you have Henry V, 230 years after the time when Mr. Wells thinks the ideal had been lost, complaining, as he died, that he had not retaken the holy places. However, he does appreciate and feels the Crusades, especially the first one.