elaborated by Gregory in order to save the church from international anarchy and make it an instrument of international unification. Incidentally Gregory was neither the first nor the last great statesman who preferred autocracy to anarchy, and the preference is supported by more than one lesson of history. Free coöperation between individuals and groups is a high and rare political and moral achievement, and where men’s capacities are unequal to it there are occasions when it may be better to sacrifice freedom than to destroy social cohesion. At any rate the medieval church revealed both political shrewdness and spiritual idealism in its attempt to dominate the life of nations. Naturally its efforts did not result in any ideal society. The ambition of the Cæsar haunted the life of the popes and in many respects the work of their hands approximated the dominion of an Augustus more nearly than the kingdom of God of Christian dreams. The Christian ideal of an ethical international society was thus corrupted by imperial ambition in its very inception, and the historical realities which sprang from it diverged even farther from any conceivable ideal. Yet the whole political policy of the medieval church is in marked contrast to the easy capitulation of historic Protestantism before the force of economic and political groups. If Catholicism’s treatment of the moral problems of the individual represents the relaxation of the tension between religion and life, and its social and political policy represents the compromise which follows inevitably upon the conflict of the ideal with the moral inertia of life, its monasticism represents the strategy of religion when it seeks to maintain an absolute tension between its ideal and historic reality.