was a creation of the protestantism of the Reformation, and had no
place in the practice at least of the mediaeval Church, which we
cannot too carefully remember is little more represented by modern
Catholicism than by modern Protestantism. The contest, therefore,
between the Crown and the Church was a mere bickering between two
bodies, without any essential antagonism between them, as to how far
the administration of either reached; neither dreamed of
subordinating one to the other, far less of extinguishing one by the
other.

The history of the Crusades, by-the-way, illustrates very
emphatically this position of the Church in the Middle Ages. The
foundation of that strange feudal kingdom of Jerusalem, whose very
coat of arms was a solecism in heraldry, whose king had precedence,
in virtue of his place as lord of the centre of Christianity, over
all other kings and princes; the orders of men-at-arms vowed to
poverty and chastity, like the Templars and Knights of St. John; and
above all the unquestioning sense of duty that urged men of all
classes and kinds into the holy war, show how strongly the idea of
God's Kingdom on the earth had taken hold of all men's minds in the
early Middle Ages. As to the result of the Crusades, they certainly
had their influence on the solidification of Europe and the great
feudal system, at the head of which, in theory at least, were the
Pope and the Kaiser. For the rest, the intercourse with the East
gave Europe an opportunity of sharing in the mechanical civilization
of the peoples originally dominated by the Arabs, and infused by the
art of Byzantium and Persia, not without some tincture of the
cultivation of the latter classical period.

The stir and movement also of the Crusades, and the necessities in