Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without regret. This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use of Latin, made for understanding and community of feeling between localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality” and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together. This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one of another. We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in so many schoolbooks. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly. Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent— “Half devil and half child ...”