“Like a mad fire the hope spread over Europe that the year 1000 would see the return of the Redeemer.” Yes, the word is “Redeemer.” So Brown does know what “Savior” means. And we were right in thinking that he intends to say that the spark so long all but quenched by a religion about Jesus proved, when it revived, to be itself a religion about Jesus, a belief in Him as a supernatural Being, able, if he liked, to return--in short, the Logos, as had been taught by the “abnormal” St. Paul. And Browne appears to be utterly unconscious that he has stultified his whole argument. The fact that he has in effect said that the world expected a helpless teacher of ethics to return after a thousand years; and has also said that belief in this helpless ethical teacher constituted a belief in a miraculous Savior and Redeemer, which belief had been for hundreds of years all but stifled by the doctrine that he was indeed a miraculous Savior and Redeemer--all this troubles the Browne mind not at all. “The year 1000 passed, and no Redeemer came--but Europe was a little redeemed nevertheless.” By the ethical Huns and Saracens, apparently. “Men turned from what the Church of Christ insisted on offering them, and instead began to grope after the gospel of Jesus for themselves. They took to reading the Scriptures in their original tongues.” (The people did? Or does he mean in the vernacular? In either case it must have exposed them to what Browne gives us to understand is a mass of silly fables.) “And reading them they began to see at last how far the Church had wandered from the pristine truth.” (A truly wonderful feat of discriminating literary criticism. Were the people so familiar with Zoroastrian tales that they were able at once to discard all passages having a suspicious resemblance to them?) “They discovered at last how shamelessly the priests had substituted rite for right, how flagrantly they had ritualized all morality.... The clerical authorities took alarm. Despotically they issued proclamations prohibiting the laity from even glancing at the bible.” Browne owes it to the world to publish those despotic proclamations, so that we may know their authors. I have myself seen the Bible in chains in Italian churches, and I understand that chains were much more common in the middle ages than now. But if the object was not to keep the books from being stolen but to keep them from being read, the riveters of the chains were indeed stupid people. For they chained the books by the backs and in a manner which permitted them always to lie open. So--“the Bible was read nevertheless.... The flame of heresy burned on.” But why, if the Church was so opposed to it, did it gather the Bible together in the first place? Browne does not say. What he does say is that “In the fourteenth century, Wycliffe did godly mischief in England; in the fifteenth John Huss carried on in Bohemia; in the sixteenth Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin led the Protestant revolt.”[211]