These facts help to explain the strange inconsistencies of the mediaeval world. To return to our starting point they also make the usual distinction between the values, moral and intellectual, of mediaeval and later times very misleading. If we search in history for examples of sheer good ness, or of forms of delicate perception, or of intellectual great ness, of legal acumen or of constructive ability, we can find them as readily in the middle ages as elsewhere, just as we find, as nowhere else, depths of religious experience. All that was fresh and vigorous in the European peoples could be drawn out and directed in the service of religion and art, learning, and even of statesmanship. Similarly, it could be perverted into an intensity of persecution or cruelty, into decadent orgies of sophisticated superstition, just as it could respond to eccentric and heretical in fluences, or find its own vent in ways which seem to us to be startlingly modern. A sedentary society, throwing off a continuous stream of wanderers; a conventional society, ruled by custom, yet indulging all sorts of adventures of the spirit ; a pagan so ciety responsive at every turn to the teaching of the Christian religion—such was mediaeval society.
Mankind has not yet found the way to health without belief in its past. It steps back with relief into the old tried paths from the highest, the best thought-out experi ments in constructive revolution. Societies, during the thousand years after the fifth century, found health in the vigorous persist ence of custom, and the veneration for custom. The essential thing to remember is that mediaeval belief in custom was not a dead weight, but a conscious discipline in a changing world. Lawyers and church have idealized it in the light of their belief in a universe bound together by law. Moreover men instinc tively clung to their trust in custom, for the conception of the universe with which they were presented did not permit of that constant discovery of the inner relations of things which we call science. However speculative or transitory modern science is, it has secured popular allegiance by using the mysteries of nature—heat, electricity and so on—in the everyday service of man, so that conservatism nowadays shares its old power with a belief in science. Yet, as has been well said, modern science was both made possible by the earlier, mediaeval, belief in the reason ableness of the world, and was also an adventurous reaction against the rationalism of mediaeval thought. It was a revolt against the rigidity of law, but the belief in law was at the root of the new investigation into facts. The conception of sovereignty illustrates the same tendency in the political world; it was a recog nition of the fact that certain social entities were directing their energies in their own self-regarding way, and a repudiation of the belief (due to a mingling of Christian and Roman ideas) in the unity of mankind under a universal law of nature ; yet a long discipline had been required, under the regime of custom, in order to make the conception of sovereignty safe or tolerable. Its value
is on the wane, and the trust in law in the mediaeval sense seems to be returning.
The Christian Church shaped the European peoples in two ways. It gave direction to the energy of the robust European peoples, and it offered a higher interpretation of the meaning of life. Suicidal strife, with the succeeding stag nation, was checked. The Romans had impressed on the barbar ians a system of law and order which they had neither the ability nor the desire to maintain. The Church maintained this system in its own way and, while accepting the traditional social arrangements of the barbarians, enabled them to develop. The response was very extraordinary. Indeed the danger of absorption was so great that the Church in self defense strengthened its or ganization and emphasized its unity in the Papacy. Hence we have the interplay of political and ecclesiastical forces which runs through the history of feudal and afterwards of national or urban societies, and profoundly modified the structure of the Church itself. Throughout the middle ages the Church maintained the conception of unity and its claim to interpret the moral law. But its other great function, though sometimes lost in the de velopment of organization, was never forgotten. There again the peoples responded. Their craving for certainties or for adventure was met by the development of dogma, the various monastic ex periments, the Crusades. They produced an endless series of saints. They tried to comprehend in their schools and universities the learning of the ancient world and to harmonize it with the teaching of the theologian. They built thousands of buildings, bringing all their energy to expression in the name, if not in the service, of a Church and the saints. Our political systems, our scientific thought, and our art are developed from those of the middle ages, and the conscious reactions against the fundamental ideas of the mediaeval church are a tribute to its strength.
(F. M. P.) MIDDLEBOROUGH, a town of Plymouth county, Massa chusetts, U.S.A., 3o m. S. of Boston, on the Taunton river and served by the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad. The population was
in 1920; 8,608 in 1930. It has an area of 7o sq.m. and embraces several villages. There are many shoe factories and various other manufacturing industries. The public library and many of the town's improvements owe their existence to gifts from Thomas Sprout Peirce (1823-1901), a local mer chant, and to a trust fund created by his will. The town of Middle borough was established in 1669, from common lands called Namassakett.