I have said that it died young; but perhaps it would be truer to say that it suddenly grew old.  Like Godfrey and many of its great champions in Jerusalem, it was overtaken in the prime of life by a mysterious malady.  The more a man reads of history the less easy he will find it to explain that secret and rapid decay of medieval civilisation from within.  Only a few generations separated the world that worshipped St. Francis from the world that burned Joan of Arc.  One would think there might be no more than a date and a number between the white mystery of Louis the Ninth and the black mystery of Louis the Eleventh.  This is the very real historical mystery; the more realistic is our study of medieval things, the more puzzled we shall be about the peculiar creeping paralysis which affected things so virile and so full of hope.  There was a growth of moral morbidity as well as social inefficiency, especially in the governing classes; for even to the end the guildsmen and the peasants remained much more vigorous.  How it ended we all know; personally I should say that they got the Reformation and deserved it.  But it matters nothing to the truth here whether the Reformation was a just revolt and revenge or an unjust culmination and conquest.  It is common ground to Catholics and Protestants of intelligence that evils preceded and produced the schism; and that evils were produced by it and have pursued it down to our own day.  We know it if only in the one example, that the schism begat the Thirty Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War begat the Seven Years’ War, and the Seven Years’ War begat the Great War, which has passed like a pestilence through our own homes.  After the schism Prussia could relapse into heathenry and erect an ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom.  But it can still be reasonably asked what begat the schism; and it can still be reasonably answered; something that went wrong with medievalism.  But what was it that went wrong?

When I looked for the last time on the towers of Zion I had a fixed fancy that I knew what it was.  It is a thing that cannot be proved or disproved; it must sound merely an ignorant guess.  But I believe myself that it died of disappointment.  I believe the whole medieval society failed, because the heart went out of it with the loss of Jerusalem.  Let it be observed that I do not say the loss of the war, or even the Crusade.  For the war against Islam was not lost.  The Moslem was overthrown in the real battle-field, which was Spain; he was menaced in Africa; his imperial power was already stricken and beginning slowly to decline.  I do not mean the political calculations about a Mediterranean war.  I do not even mean the Papal conceptions about the Holy War.  I mean the purely popular picture of the Holy City.  For while the aristocratic thing was a view, the vulgar thing was a vision; something with which all stories stop, something where the rainbow ends, something over the hills and far away.