Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been lost was never regained. Speaking with a certain geographical freedom, the northern half of Europe remained Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic. But when we translate the result of the Reformation into the language of pictures, the actual changes which took place in Europe become more clearly revealed. During the Middle Ages there had been one universal spiritual and intellectual prison-house. The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building and out of part of the available material it had constructed a jail of its own. After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons, one reserved exclusively for the Catholics, the other for the Protestants. At least that had been the original plan. But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage of centuries of training along the lines of persecution and repression, failed to make their lockup dissenter-proof. Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large number of the unruly inmates escaped. Ere long the entire building was a wreck. At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads of stones and beams and iron bars which they used the next morning to build a little fortress of their own. But although this had the outward appearance of that original jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory the Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner strength. No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline (excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened to suit their temporary convictions. This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they pleased without hindrance or molestation. And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause of tolerance. It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man. CHAPTER XIII ERASMUS In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There probably is something the matter with it.