To understand either the Middle Ages or the Reformation, we must beware of exaggerating the fundamental unity of medieval thought and practice. The extreme violence with which Unity was proclaimed, and often enforced, did indeed achieve long and considerable success. The gospel of the uselessness of persecution is true only if we look forward to a far longer time than the vast majority of men take into their calculations. We have seen how this was as true in Piers Plowman's day as it is in ours:

The Totalitarian Church had, originally, corresponded very nearly to healthy and growing aspirations; it had done much to free the soul from an inferiority-complex and to help the body by bringing order into anarchy. This Roman Church had played, in her turn, the rôle which St Augustine ascribes to the Roman Empire; she had been the παιδαγωγός—half-nurse, half-tutor—to a new-born era. The orthodox ecclesiastical historian has a comparatively easy task for the first thousand years of history. Mr Christopher Dawson's excellent Making of Europe affords an admirable example of this; up to that point, even the modern agnostic is willing to go a long way with him. But it is with the revival of learning and active thought, before the eleventh century has run out, that the apologist's task becomes really difficult.