ABSTRACT
IT is a common mistake to attribute to an institution the merits and defects which belong not to the institution itself, but to the times in which it existed. The Catholic priesthood is credited with cruelty, bigotry and tyranny, evils which it shared with a rude and ignorant laity. The lukewarmness, often objected to, of the Church of England in the eighteenth century is paralleled by a lax rule of political morality; for sinecures and pluralities in the Church did not offend the moral sense of a laity who received and spent public money without service done. The licence of the stage in the seventeenth century is not to be charged upon actors and dramatic writers, but upon a society rejoicing in the reaction from Puritan strictness. Gothic churches were beautiful, not only because they were built by men of genius, and in the ages of faith, but because all craftsmen lived in an atmosphere of beauty, and felt rightly about form anJ
colour. St. Francis and St. Clare soared high above the pitch of their time: but it was a time when the lights and shadows of life were strongly marked, and originality naturally took an extravagant expression. In the same way, much that is put down to the account of chivalry should be attributed to the common ideas of the Middle Ages. If the rules which bound the brotherhood of chivalry had never been formulated, prowess in war, splendour in peace, and the love of ladies would still have been features of the age; and we must separate as far as possible what is accidental and common to the time from what is special and essentially connected with the order of knighthood.
