at tourneys, stealing bullocks, roasting Jews, robbing the highways, crusading—­now upon Syrian sands against Paynim dogs, now in Frisian quagmires against Albigenses, Stedingers, and other heretics—­ plunging about in blood and fire, repenting, at idle times, and paying their passage through, purgatory with large slices of ill-gotten gains placed in the ever-extended dead-hand of the Church; acting, on the whole, according to their kind, and so getting themselves civilized or exterminated, it matters little which.  Thus they play their part, those energetic men-at-arms; and thus one great force, the force of iron, spins and expands itself, century after century, helping on, as it whirls, the great progress of society towards its goal, wherever that may be.

Another force—­the force clerical—­the power of clerks, arises; the might of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force embodied, as often before, as priestcraft—­the strength of priests:  craft meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue.  This great force, too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes malignant.  Priesthood works out its task, age after age:  now smoothing penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an, age of rapine and homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure and forsaken—­deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel’s book; hiving precious honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other ruffians, bandying blows in the thickest of the fight, blasting with bell, book, and candle its trembling enemies, while sovereigns, at the head of armies, grovel in the dust and offer abject submission for the kiss of peace; exercising the same conjury over ignorant baron and cowardly hind, making the fiction of apostolic authority to bind and loose, as prolific in acres as the other divine right to have and hold; thus the force of cultivated intellect, wielded by a chosen few and sanctioned by supernatural authority, becomes as potent as the sword.

A third force, developing itself more slowly, becomes even more potent than the rest:  the power of gold.  Even iron yields to the more ductile metal.  The importance of municipalities, enriched by trade, begins to be felt.  Commerce, the mother of Netherland freedom, and, eventually, its destroyer—­even as in all human history the vivifying becomes afterwards the dissolving principle—­commerce changes insensibly and miraculously the aspect of society.  Clusters of hovels become towered cities; the green