Any one of them might have done so, and the Albigensian very nearly did so. Had not the Albigensian Crusade been tardily but successfully fought, and had not the Battle of Muret (which English boys are never allowed to hear about in their textbooks—it was as important as Marathon) saved European culture, the Albigensians would have swamped us all. At an enormous expense of energy and by a Providential good fortune that disaster was avoided.
But the general attack from many sides delivered in the sixteenth century was not repelled in time. There arose from it a division in Christendom, a wholly new culture, in which the ancient doctrines were but partially held, had but a partial effect upon social life and, by the very principle of the new departure, were destined slowly to be dissolved; so that to-day one may fairly say that nothing of doctrine remains for the mass of Protestant men and women save a certain respect for the personality of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity—regarded of course as only a man—some vague conception of a personal God, and some vague idea of a future life: but on condition that it shall minister to the individual’s certitude that so fine a fellow as he is bound to be happy in the long run.
It may be objected that the great heresy of Islam (for, I repeat, it was a heresy, not a new religion; it drew all its life and all its true doctrines by selection from the Catholic Church) had an effect as permanent or more permanent, than the Reformation: effects often similar to Protestantism, as, in its contempt of Sacraments and of Priesthood, of symbol in imagery and of all the best part of the supernatural; and its distaste for having to think hard and to appreciate Mystery.
But I distinguish between the two, and I call the Reformation the much greater event because it happened in what is at once the head and the heart of the world: Europe.
The Reformation broke up and degraded that culture of our race which has the leadership of mankind: Europe. Islam did not do that. It ruined whole provinces. It destroyed our complete hold upon the Mediterranean. It spread its blight over the edges of our civilization, Roman North Africa and the Greek East; but it did not set up a parody of Christian tradition. There came a time when it desired to destroy Christendom as an external thing, whereas the heirs of the Reformation have always attempted and are still doubtfully attempting to destroy it from within.
It may well be that we have lived out the disease. It may well be that we are on the threshold of a time when we shall be immune to it, and when Catholic unity shall return. Certainly that is the only hope for our civilization. But on the other hand there is a possibility of yet greater peril, of a yet increased decline in our culture. In that case the high tradition of Europe will have to stand at siege again, as it did in the Dark Ages: restricted to some small body which shall still maintain the unbroken Catholic culture.
One of these two futures lies before us.
At any rate the huge upheaval of the sixteenth century, ending in the final breakdown of the seventeenth, is what I have called it: the chief event in human history since the Incarnation. It may be compared to some geological upheaval in which the whole countryside bursts up into flame, eruption, and chaos, but instead of settling down again into one landscape as it was before, breaks asunder, leaving an impassable gulf between two now wholly separate districts.
Now Mr. Wells does not appreciate what the Reformation was, because he does not appreciate what it destroyed.
Those little sneers at the united Catholic civilization, that perpetual Tin Chapel talk about the “Teaching of Jesus of Nazareth,” that ceaseless use of the word “Christianity” in the sense of whatever is common to the Protestant sects of his acquaintance—as though the test of Being were not Unity!—all this shows that he does not appreciate what he is dealing with. He never sees the Catholic Church as a unique Institution, and a unique historical phenomenon.