It would be too long to discuss here the Crusades, which merely saved us from the fate now enjoyed by Islamic countries, or the alleged persecution of the Manichæans, who, under the name of Albigenses, menaced to disrupt the incipient civilization of Europe by their subversive tenets of anarchy and collectivism, equally opposed as they were to ecclesiastical and to civil government. The “semi-religious wars,” or the so-called “wars of investiture,” which both he and Montesquieu disingenuously confound with the wars of Italian independence, eminently contributed to the cause of civil liberty in England, not less than in Italy, and elsewhere. Anselm, Becket, and Stephen Langton were worthy coadjutors of the policy of St. Gregory VII and the pioneers of political liberty. No one understands this better than Mr. Wakeman, the Anglican author of a recent History of the English Church. “It is true,” he says, “that Anselm could not have maintained the struggle [against clerical investiture by laymen] at all if he had not had the power of Rome at his back. Englishmen quickly saw that the question between Anselm and Henry was part of a far wider question. They felt that bound up with the resistance of the archbishop was the sacred cause of their own liberty. The Church was the one power in England not yet reduced under the iron heel of the Norman kings. The clergy was the one body which still dared to dispute their will. To them belonged the task of handing on the torch of liberty amid the gloom of a tyrannical age. The despotism of the crown was the special danger to England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the Church that, in that time of crisis, rescued England from slavery. Had there been no Becket, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of York, would have failed to inspire the barons to wrest the Charter from John” (p. 105). And on page 108 he continues: “From the Conquest to the time of Simon de Montfort two great dangers threatened England, the uncontrolled will of unjust, wicked kings and the grinding administrative despotism of the government. From both she was saved by the Church. In her own canon law she opposed to the king’s laws a system which claimed a higher sanction, was based on principles not less scientific, and was already invested with the halo of tradition.” It is this same canon law that the Church in France is, to-day, opposing to the tyranny of an omnipotent State or parliamentary majority, _alias_ Grand Orient, which has, since four years, crushed out two of the most sacred liberties--the right to live in community and the right to educate one’s children in the Christian faith, the faith of our fathers, “once delivered to the saints.”