No period has had better reason than our own to know how successes and conquests can intoxicate warlike kings; but Philip, whose valor, on occasion, was second to none, had no actual inclination towards war or towards conquest for the sole pleasure of extending his dominion.  “Liking better, according to his custom,” says William the Breton, “to conquer by peace than by war,” he hasted to put an end by treaties, truces, or contracts to his quarrels with King John, the Count of Flanders, and the principal lords made prisoners at Bouvines; discretion, in his case, was proof against the temptations of circumstances, or the promptings of passion, and he took care not to overtly compromise his power, his responsibility, and the honor of his name by enterprises which did not naturally come in his way, or which he considered without chances of success.  Whilst still a youth, he had given, in 1191, a sure proof of that self-command which is so rare amongst ambitious princes by withdrawing from the crusade in which he had been engaged with Richard Coeur de Lion; and it was still more apparent in two great events at the latter end of his reign—­the crusade against the Albigensians and his son Louis’s expedition in England, the crown of which had, in 1215, been offered to him by the barons at war with King John in defence of Magna Charta.

The organization of the kingdom, the nation, and the kingship in France was not the only great event and the only great achievement of that epoch.  At the same time that this political movement was going on in the State, a religious and intellectual ferment was making head in the Church and in men’s minds.  After the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks, the Christian clergy, sole depositaries of all lights to lighten their age, and sole possessors of any idea of opposing the conquerors with arguments other than those of brute force, or of employing towards the vanquished any instrument of subjection other than violence, became the connecting link between the nation of the conquerors and the nation of the conquered, and, in the name of one and the same divine law, enjoined obedience on the subjects, and, in the case of the masters, moderated the transports of power.  But in the course of this active and salutary participation in the affairs of the world, the Christian clergy lost somewhat of their primitive and proper character; religion in their hands was a means of power as well as of civilization; and its principal members became rich, and frequently substituted material weapons for the spiritual authority which had originally been their only reliance.  When they were in a condition to hold their own against powerful laymen, they frequently adopted the powerful laymen’s morals and shared their ignorance; and in the seventh and eighth centuries the barbarism which held the world in its clutches had made inroads upon the Church.  Charlemagne essayed to resuscitate dying civilization, and sought amongst the clergy