304 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

been exposed. In raising up a successor to Nestorius and Eutyches in the
person of Muhammad, and in unleashing the Primitive Muslim Arab
assailants of the Empire at the heels of their Zoroastrian Persian pre-
decessors, History was giving herself unnecessary trouble for the sake of
making assurance doubly sure.

A 'Fate* that condemned the Roman Empire to lose both Italy and
its Oriental provinces irretrievably in the end, in spite of the Imperial
Government's obstinately repeated attempts to halt and reverse the
remorseless march of History, asserted its power over the Achaemenian
and Mauryan empires by the contrary move of constraining them to re-
establish themselves sooner or later in new shapes after the militant
intrusion of the Hellenic Society into the Syriac and Indie societies'
domains had prematurely overthrown, first the Syriac, and then the
Indie, universal state, before either of these had attained the term of
four hundred years that seems to be the standard life-span of a polity of
this species.1 We have identified an avatar of the Achaemenian Empire in
the Arab Caliphate, and an avatar of the Mauryan Empire in the Guptan
Empire.2 In the tug-of-war between an intrusive Hellenic Society's
effort to absorb the Syriac and Indie societies' frayed social tissue into
her own body social and the nisus of the two invaded societies to expel
the invader, however tardily and at however high a cost, in order to re-
sume and complete the regular course of a disintegrating society's history,
we have another example, on the political plane, of a trial of strength
between conflicting social forces working itself out in a series of succes-
sive rounds.

If we now pass from the political plane to the religious, we shall find
here a counterpart of North America's 'fate' to be partitioned between
two sovereignties in the 'fate' of France and England to be partitioned
between two ecclesiastical allegiances.

In another context3 we have already noticed that, since the twelfth
century of the Christian Era, the Roman Catholic Church in France had
been engaged in,a never more than temporarily successful struggle to
re-establish the ecclesiastical unity of France as a Catholic country against
an impulse towards secession which, from that time onward, kept on
reasserting itself in some new form after each previous manifestation had
been repressed. A revolt against Catholic Christianity which had taken
the form of Catharism at its first outbreak in Southern France in the
twelfth century was stamped out there in the thirteenth century in this
form only to re-emerge in the same region in the sixteenth century in the
form of Calvinism. Proscribed as Calvinism, it promptly reappeared as
Jansenism, which was the nearest approach to Calvinism that was pos-
sible within^the Catholic fold. Proscribed as Jansenism, it reappeared as
Deism, Rationalism, Agnosticism, and Atheism. Every time that a re-
peatedly challenged Catholic Church seemed to have succeeded in
reimposing a Catholic ecclesiastical unity upon France through an
apparently conclusive victory over the dissenting movement of the day,
the momentarily defeated forces of dissent thus baffled the victor by

1 ?ee p. 389, above. * See J. i, 76-77 and 86-87.

3 in IX. vui. 609—10.