No clear statement of the Prohibitionist credo has ever been made and endorsed by even a majority of those engaged in the movement. An attempt has been made to say that “temperance” involves moderation in the use of that which is good and total abstinence from that which is harmful. But this attempt fails in two respects, inasmuch as it confuses temperance with the purely secular virtue of prudence which is nothing to a man’s salvation and therefore no possible part of the moral teaching of any Christian body, and inasmuch as it obviously conflicts with the corporate experience of mankind in calling the moderate use of fermented drinks “harmful.” The contrast here is as great as that between civilization and barbarism itself. Certainly definition, like any other activity, can be carried to excess, as Pope Leo XIII recognized in his Encyclical on Scholasticism, wherein he mentions the “too great subtlety” of certain of the mediæval doctors. But, as certainly, it is the essential intellectual difference between civilized and barbarous man that the barbarian willingly accepts vagueness of mind, whereas the civilized man is continually striving to seize and formulate the laws which govern the universe about him in so far as his reason is in any way capable of comprehending them. Secondly, there is another vast difference in the urgency of the social and political considerations making for the two movements. As we saw in the first chapter, mediæval man had built up a society in which all men had definite functions, and in which destructive competition between classes and individuals was reduced to a minimum. Despite insufficient checks upon cruelty and brutality, and despite the scantiness of its knowledge of history and of natural science, the time had produced a general level of craftsmanship as unknown since the sixteenth century as it was unequalled before the twelfth (the short best period of Greece only excepted). In promoting the happiness of mankind as a whole, mediæval society seems never to have been equalled. Certainly the cheerfulness of the memorials which the thirteenth century has left us is unique. And in this society the Church was central and indispensable. To the educated mediæval man (who, while inferior to his modern colleagues in range of information, at the same time surpassed us in clarity and rationality)—to the educated mediæval man, I say, it was evident that to shatter the Church by attacking her Faith and Morals would be to shatter his balanced society altogether, and set men preying wolfishly upon one another. The common man, by a sort of instinct, was equally determined upon the point. And what is more, their fear was justified, as the last three centuries have abundantly proved, although the age of expansion has postponed to our own day the fulness of the evil of strife between man and man. Therefore the men of the Middle Ages were correct in resisting attacks upon the