person could not enter either the Church or the law court; could not receive either the eucharist or a legacy; could not own either a cure of souls or an acre of soil.  Civil right and religious status implied one another; and not only was extra ecclesiam nulla salus a true saying, but extra ecclesiam nullum ius would also be very near the truth.  Here again is a reason for saying that the State as such can hardly be traced in the Middle Ages.  The State is an organization of secular life.  Even if it goes beyond its elementary purpose of security for person and property, and devotes itself to spiritual purposes, it is concerned with the development of the spirit in its mortal existence, and confined to the expansion of the mind in the bounds of a mortal society.  The Middle Ages thought more of salvation than of security, and more of the eternal society of all the faithful, united together in Christ their Head, than of any passing society of this world only.  They could recognize kings, who bore the sword for the sake of security, and did justice in virtue of their anointing.  But kings were not, to their thinking, the heads of secular societies.  They were agents of the one divine commonwealth—­defenders of the Faith, who wielded the secular sword for the furtherance of the purposes of God.  Thus there was one society, if there were two orders of ministering agents; and thus, though regnum and sacerdotium might be distinguished, the State and the Church could not be divided.  Stephen of Tournai, a canonist of the twelfth century, recognizes the two powers; but he only knows one society, under one king.  That society is the Church:  that king is Christ.

Under conditions such as these—­with the plurality of States unrecognized by theory, even if it existed in practice, and with distinction between State and Church unknown and unenforced—­we may truly say with a German writer, whose name I should like to mention honoris causa, Professor Troeltsch, that ’there was no feeling for the State; no common and uniform dependence on a central power; no omnicompetent sovereignty; no equal pressure of a public civil law; no abstract basis of association in formal and legal rules—­or at any rate, so far as anything of the sort was present, it was a matter only for the Church, and in no wise for the State’.[21] So far as social life was consciously articulated in a scheme, the achievement was that of the clergy, and the scheme was that of the Church.  The interdependencies and associations of lay life—­kingdoms and fiefs and manors—­were only personal groupings, based on personal sentiments of loyalty and unconscious elements of custom.  A mixture of uniformity and isolation, as we have seen, was the characteristic of these groupings:  they were at once very like one another, throughout the extent of Western Europe, and (except for their connexion in a common membership of the Church Universal) very much separated from one another.  But with one at any rate of these groupings—­the kingdom, which in its day was to become the modern State—­the future lay; and we shall perhaps end our inquiry most fitly by a brief review of the lines of its future development.