Institutional Christianity is even more variable than dogmatic Christianity. It has varied greatly, is still changing, and its history shows that it is subject to the same influences as fashion the changing social order. This illuminating principle helps us to understand the past and to forecast the future of the Church.
During the last twelve hundred years or more, the Christian Church and the social order in Western lands have developed on parallel lines. Each has passed through two great phases and is now entering on a third.
I. The aristocratic or feudalistic phase, A.D. 700-1500.
The three centuries (roughly reckoning) from, let us say, A.D. 400 to A.D. 700 were, probably, the darkest in the history of civilization--darker even than the struggle of the last five years. They were the centuries of a struggle not so colossal in its apparatus of destruction, but seeming, even more than this struggle in its darkest hours, to threaten the extinction of civilization.
The Northern barbarians that had been pressing against the defences of the Roman Empire, as the yellow tides of the North Sea against the dykes of Holland, from the time of the inroads of the Cimbri and Teutons in the last decade of the second century before Christ, at last found entrance A.D. 378 when the Visigoths, who had been permitted to cross the Danube to find an asylum from the Huns, defeated the Roman armies and slew the Emperor in the great battle of Adrianople. From that year, with varying intervals of quiet, armies, or rather hordes, of men from the inexhaustible forests of Germany and Scandinavia, from the steppes of Russia and Central Asia, swept over lands for centuries accustomed to peace and weakened by bureaucratic despotism, inequitable and crippling systems of taxation, and, most debilitating of all, the essentially demoralizing influence of slavery. The mighty legions that had so long kept the frontiers inviolate vanished like a dream. The superb Roman roads and bridges fell into ruins. Fertile fields relapsed into wilderness. Towns decayed. Laws were forgotten. Cultivated languages with great literatures were replaced by barbarous jargons.
It was as when a country-side is devoured by a flood, and trees are uprooted, houses and barns dissolved or swept away.
Only one institution of the old Greco-Roman world withstood the waves, uprose above the yeasty flood in indestructible sovereignty--the Roman Catholic Church.
Out of the welter of overrunning barbarism--no law, no government, no protection except by superior force--the feudal system arose. The deep instinct for order and peace asserted itself. The strong man found a following. His tribe or clan, if he were a chieftain, his neighborhood, in any case, gave him service and maintenance, and he on his part gave the fullest measure of protection he was able to furnish. He became the feudal lord of a district. Through those stormy centuries that followed, when the savage people fought each other, and western Europe as it slowly struggled into order again was assailed by the Viking pirates on the North and West, by Hun-like Magyars on the East, and by the Saracens on the South, the feudal system was the only method by which over large areas any measure of security could be achieved. The strong man with his fighting force lived in his castle, and huddled under its walls lived the tillers of the soil, whom he at once in varying ratio protected and oppressed.
Some kind of relationship established itself among these feudal lords. One who by conquest or marriage had secured possession of specially large territories might out of these allot subordinate holdings to faithful followers, or by the same methods establish an overlordship over other lords. Eventually the deep and irrepressible instinct for unity and order lifted one of these families to the kingship of a group of feudal districts.
The feudal system was a varying system, the theory of which was never fully carried out, a system that had different origins in different countries and underwent different developments. The chief characteristic of it, as far as this reference to it is concerned, was its aristocratic character. Those men only counted who had enough land to support themselves and a body of fighting men. Whatever authority there was lay in their hands. The men who tilled the soil and practised the rude handicrafts of the age and carried on such beginnings of commerce as were possible, could find such imperfect security as there was only in accepting the despotic rule of one of these lords, knight or baron or count or duke as it might be, or more happily for them, in some respects, a bishop or monastery abbot. All sovereignty was in the mailed hands of these men or in those of the king, who in most of the countries slowly but surely established his control over his turbulent and recalcitrant feudatories.