THE ORIGINS OF PROTESTANTISM 



the great men who shaped its missionary policy 

 talked to their pagan converts in the language 

 which they were best capable of understanding. 

 The Church thus adopted the doctrine of cor- 

 porate responsibility for opinion, very much as 

 it adopted Yule-tide and Easter feasts, and the 

 worship, under a scriptural name, of the Bere- 

 cynthian Mother. The outcome of all this was 

 that in the process of Christianizing the pagan 

 world Christianity itself became more or less 

 deeply paganized. Hence those terrible perse- 

 cutions, of Albigensian and other heretics, which 

 marked the epoch of the Church's greatesj su- 

 premacy, and which no one thought of justifying 

 from the teachings of Jesus, but only from Old 

 Testament texts expressing the crude primitive 

 notions of the Jews in their semi-barbarous pe- 

 riod. 



But now, after the Teutonic and Slavic bar- 

 barians had become pretty nearly all converted ; 

 after Europe had come to feel itself reasonably 

 secure against being overrun by Saracens or 

 Mongols ; after the principal European king- 

 doms had arrived at something like political 

 stability ; after the Crusades had shaken up 

 men's ideas by bringing the civilizations of the 

 East and West in contact with each other ; and 

 after the partly paganized Church had begun to 

 put forth such pretensions as, if successful, would 

 have converted Europe into a caliphate, an* 

 239 



