human soul ever understood--red caps and black, white hoods and grey,
Hooks and Kabbeljaws, dealing destruction, building castles and burning
them, tilting at tourneys, stealing bullocks, roasting Jews, robbing the
highways, crusading--now upon Syrian sands against Paynim dogs, now in
Frisian quagmires against Albigenses, Stedingers, and other heretics--
plunging about in blood and fire, repenting, at idle times, and paying
their passage through, purgatory with large slices of ill-gotten gains
placed in the ever-extended dead-hand of the Church; acting, on the
whole, according to their kind, and so getting themselves civilized or
exterminated, it matters little which. Thus they play their part, those
energetic men-at-arms; and thus one great force, the force of iron, spins
and expands itself, century after century, helping on, as it whirls, the
great progress of society towards its goal, wherever that may be.

Another force--the force clerical--the power of clerks, arises; the might
of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force
embodied, as often before, as priestcraft--the strength of priests: craft
meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue. This great force,
too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes
malignant. Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing
penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing
the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an, age of rapine and
homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure
and forsaken--deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a
leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel's book; hiving precious
honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling
wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring
in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become
visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the
gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other