It would be impossible to gain any adequate notion of the intellectual forces, that made up the mind of the average European statesman from 1600–1800… - Neville Figgis

Christianity is not less, but ten thousand times more revolutionary than people think. That jaded middle-aged society of the Pagan Empire did well to see in the Church its foe, and to persecute a living spirit with the gift of Eternal youth. Some tell us that Jesus proclaimed a social gospel. So He did. But it was not that of Karl Marx or Henry George or any legislator. He came to upset the whole scale of values, and by changing men's desires to inaugurate a new epoch.

The medieval state had one basis of unity denied to the modern—religion. Baptism was a necessary element in true citizenship in the Middle Ages and excommunication was its antithesis. No heretic, no schismatic, no excommunicate has the rights of citizenship. ... Philip of Spain's famous remark, that he would rather not reign at all than reign over heretics, was merely an assertion of medieval principles by a man who really believed in them.

It is not to revive of the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us to envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective.