In dealing with this subject it is difficult to bring home to the mind the vast range of the great calamity, and to duly appreciate how deep was the break with then existing institutions. The plague of 1349 simply shattered them; and it is, as already pointed out, only by perpetual reiteration and reconsideration of the same phenomena that we can bring ourselves to understand the character of such a social and religious catastrophe. But it is at the same time of the first importance thoroughly to realise the case if we are to enter into and to understand the great process of social and religious re-edification, to which the immediately succeeding generations had to address themselves. The tragedy was too grave to allow of people being carried over it by mere enthusiasm. Indeed, the empiric and enthusiast in the attempts at social reconstruction, as may be found in the works of Wycliff, could only aggravate the evil. It was essentially a crisis that had to be met by strenuous effort and unflagging work in every department of human activity. And here is manifested a characteristic of the middle ages which constitutes, as the late Professor Freeman has pointed out, their real greatness. In contradistinction to a day like our own, which abounds in every facility for achievement, they had to contend with every material difficulty; but in contradistinction, too, to that practical pessimism which has to-day gained only too great a hold upon intelligences otherwise vivacious and open, difficulties, in the middle ages, called into existence only a more strenuous and more determined resolve to meet and surmount them. And here is the sense in which the hackneyed, and in a sense untrue, phrase, "the Ages [p218] of Faith," has a real application, for nothing can be more contrary to the spirit and tone of mind of the whole epoch than pessimism, nothing more in harmony with it than hope. In this sense the observation of a well-known modern writer on art, in noting the inability of the middle ages to see things as they really are and the tendency to substitute on the parchment or the canvas conventional for actual forms, has a drift which, perhaps, he did not perceive. In itself unquestionably this defect is a real one, but in practice it possessed a counterbalancing advantage by supplying the necessary corrective to that bare literalism and realism which, in the long run, is fatal no less to sustained effort than it is to art. The great mortality, commonly called the Black Death, was a catastrophe sudden and overwhelming, the like of which it will be difficult to parallel. Many a noble aspiration which, could it have been realised, and many a wise conception which, could it have attained its true development, would have been most fruitful of good to humanity, was stricken beyond recovery. Still no time was wasted in vain laments. What had perished was perished. Time, however, and the power of effort and work belonged to those that survived.