Barbarians who have conquered it, imposing upon them its decretals, as it formerly imposed its laws, governing them by its cardinals as it once governed them by its legates and proconsuls. The kingdom of God and His Christ had almost become the kingdom of this world and of the Prince of its power.

But the Spirit of Christ was not left without witness even in those dark days. When the theologians and the schoolmen had failed, God spake to His people by His poets.

Dante Alighieri in Italy, William Langland in England, the one appealing to the intellect of the cultured classes as a philosopher in whose writings the sæva indignatio of the baffled Reformer is blended with the penetrative insight and the sublime optimism of the Poet; the other appealing to the hearts of the English people, as a popular preacher of social justice and practical common sense in religion, as a mystic apostle also of love and conscience, and holy poverty, succeeded for a time in reviving the memory of the lost ideal and the hope of an immediate realisation of the kingdom of God upon earth.10

In Dante's vision we see "the best thought of mediæval Christendom, enriched with all the secular and religious culture of the crowning century of the Middle Age, inspired with the undimmed religious fervour of the ages of faith,' keenly observant of the stirring life of Christian Europe, reflecting upon the very same problem that had busied the mind of Augustine amid the wreck of a falling empire nine centuries before."

But in the "De Monarchia" of Dante and in his "Divina Commedia," we find, as we do not find in the "De Civitate Dei" of Augustine, a belief in the essential consecration of secular government and of human society to a definite moral end as part of the distinct purpose of God. "Without the Civitas terrena," says Dante, "the Civitas Dei becomes unattainable, since only in the brotherhood of mankind can man develop all the capacities of the soul necessary for his entrance into the kingdom of heaven. It is not as a governing body, as a Societas Perfecta, that the Church will regenerate human nature, but as a brotherhood." Dante's vision, in fact, is saturated with the spirit, as we should say, of modern thought, of socialistic morality, of civic energy, of patriotism; above all, perhaps, of the supremacy of science. It is largely, no doubt, because of this, because in Dante's philosophy of civilisation we seem to see the Divine Right of the Church, and the Historical Right of the State, giving way to that higher principle of Law rooted in Liberty and of the moral ends of society (which we believe to be the parent of all that is best in modern civilisation), that so many of our leaders and teachers in Church and State to-day can still go to this fourteenth-century prophet to find an unfailing source of inspiration and solace in face of the perplexing social problems of the present.

The dream of the peasant poet of the Malvern hills is necessarily of a less wide scope than that of Dante. For Langland is a thoroughly typical Englishman, in all probability a descendant of one of the old

English yeoman families, using, for patriotic motives, as his poetical instrument the rude alliterative measure of the old English minstrelsy and the quaint dramatic forms of old English miracle plays, judging, no doubt rightly, that the popular audience for whom he wrote would be more deeply touched by the ancient rhythms of their race than by the meretricious attractions of the newly-imported foreign verse of France. Trained in the learning of the monastic schools, he embodies many of the virtues which distinguished the men of the Renaissance; but he shares in a still larger measure the virtues of the men of the Reformation-the Puritan earnestness of Bunyan and Milton, the practical commonsense and humour of Chaucer and Shakespeare. It is a characteristic feature of Dante's "Divina Commedia " that the constant guide of the poet should be either Virgil, the most learned of classic poets, or Theology, conceived as an abstract figure. It is equally characteristic of Langland that his guide to the Tower of Truth should be either Peterkin the humble Plowman, or Conscience regarded as a concrete personality, the Constable Inwit. While Langland, in common with the Franciscan friars, exalts the virtues of love and holy poverty, and exhorts his hearers, in almost Dante's words, to make " 'glad wonder and sweet looks the occasion of holy thought," * he is obviously in sympathy with the political doctrines of Wycliff, and even, perhaps, with the socialism of John Ball, the mad priest of Kent. fact, realised quite as clearly as did Christianity was a

res communissima.

* Paradiso, canto xi. 76.

Langland, in

Wycliff that
Certainly he

insists on the essential equality of all men, and the strongest denunciations of his satire are directed against the abuse of justice and the falsity and the hypocrisy which corrupt the very springs of social action. Langland is unlike Dante in this, however, that his conception of society is not quite symmetrical or logical, partly, no doubt, because he is less learned, partly because he is more practical. His social ideal is in many respects a reflection of the actual order of things under which he himself lived; but he, just as much as Dante, believed that the true ideal of social order was revealed in the doctrines of the Christian Church. Both men, in fact, find themselves face to face with practically the same social disease, and the ideal remedy suggested by each man proceeds from a similar method of imaginative reasoning."

But neither the future of Dante's vision or of Langland's came as quickly as they had hoped, or by the means which Dante, at least, thought he foresaw. Yet

"The old order changeth, giving place to the new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways."

Faith in the principle of historic continuity, in other words, the belief that society cannot make a fresh beginning because true progress must always be a development of order; faith in the richness and variety and complexity of human life always to be taken count of in all our endeavours to hasten the kingdom of God upon earth-which is the essential basis of Dante's philosophy-faith in the fellowship of human service,

1

by which the weak brother ought ever to have as champion and protector the public Christian conscience, because

"Jesus Christ of Heaven

In poor man's apparell pursueth us ever"

a prospective faith in ultimate social perfection, because Christ has proclaimed a Fatherly will to be the origin of all life and the root of humanity-which is the essential message of Langland's vision-have come to our modern age, but they have come by a God's way of which neither Dante nor Langland dreamed.

For they have come, on the one hand, as the result of that rebirth of literature and art and science which we know by the name of the Renaissance, and which we may sum up perhaps best in the splendid image of a great interpreter of history,-"Greece had risen from the dead with the New Testament in her hands;" and, on the other, as a reaction from that affirmation of Individualism which was the message of the Reformation and the systematic organ of emancipation, alike in the two great transformations of society, the one spiritual and ecclesiastical, the other economic and industrial, which belong respectively to the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

Yes, I repeat, the essential message of Langland's vision, the worship of a Christ, who "in poor man's apparell pursueth us ever," a Christ who is the ideal Son of God, and yet a Christ who reveals Himself to us "through the least of His brethren," the common