drawing correct conclusions from the premises submitted to him fails, and
we have all sorts of crude experiments in sociology attempted, which end
in that form of chaos which we call a violent revolution. The ordinary
result is infinite waste fomented by fallacious hopes; in a word,
financial disaster, supplemented usually by loss of life. The experience
is an old one, and the result is almost invariable.

For example, during the Middle Ages, men like Saint Hugh and Peter the
Venerable, and, most of all, Saint Francis, possessed by dreams of
attaining to perfection, by leading lives of inimitable purity, self-
devotion, and asceticism, inspired the community about them with the
conviction that they could work miracles. They thereby, as a reward, drew
to the Church they served what amounted to being, considering the age they
lived in, boundless wealth. But the effect of this economic phenomenon was
far from what they had hoped or expected. Instead of raising the moral
standard of men to a point where all the world would be improved, they so
debased the hierarchy, by making money the standard of ambition within it,
that, as a whole, the priesthood accepted, without any effective protest,
the fires of the Council of Constance which consumed Huss, and the
abominations of the Borgias at Rome. Perfectly logically, as a corollary
to this orgy of crime and bestiality, the wars of the Reformation swept
away many, many thousands of human beings, wasted half of Europe, and only
served to demonstrate the futility of ideals.

And so it was with the Puritans, who were themselves the children of the
revolt against social corruption. They fondly believed that a new era was
to be ushered in by the rule of the Cromwellian saints. What the
Cromwellian saints did in truth usher in, was the carnival of debauchery
of Charles II, in its turn to be succeeded by the capitalistic competitive
age which we have known, and which has abutted in the recent war.