Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability. But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have been. The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham priest, covered with an ass’s false head burlesqued the mass before the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay. So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia, religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross and some refined. I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned. Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will be active. Accordingly we find the moral and intellectual forces opposed to the Church clearly defined.