as the most violent educators ever known to man, but they were justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may have risked towards the milder teachers of his infancy, he was an abject pupil towards explosives. The Sieur de Joinville left a record of the energy with which the relatively harmless Greek fire educated and enlarged the French mind in a single night in the year 1249, when the crusaders were trying to advance on Cairo. The good king Saint Louis and all his staff dropped on their knees at every fiery flame that flew by, praying—"God have pity on us!", and never had man more reason to call on his Gods than they, for the battle of religion between Christian and Saracen was trifling compared with that of education between gunpowder and the Cross.
The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a conscious purpose, was upset by the Compass and Gunpowder which dragged and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of learning. At first, the apparent lag for want of volume in the new energies lasted one or two centuries, which closed the great epochs of emotion by the Gothic Cathedrals and Scholastic Theology. The moment had Greek beauty and more than Greek pathos, but it was brief; and for another century or two, western society seemed to float in space without apparent motion. Yet the attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, and education became more rapid than ever before. Society began to resist, but the individual showed greater and greater insistance, without realising what he was doing. When the Crescent drove the Cross in shameful ignominy from Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Faust were printing their first Bible at Mainz under the impression that they were helping the Cross. When Columbus discovered the West Indies in 1492, the Church looked on it as a victory of the Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset Europe half a century later, they were trying, like St. Augustine, to substitute the Civitas Dei for the Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set out for New England in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas Dei in State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries of license, the Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630,—as science goes on repeating to us every day,—it condemned anarchists, not
