Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about “the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of to-day. Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders, Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is, in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” ... was ... “laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”[4] Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation was strained. Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for it a different, hostile body of doctrine. In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine which has usually been called Albigensianism (inasmuch as one of its chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next chapter shall consider. FOOTNOTES: [1] “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905. [2] By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.