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'THERE IS NO ARMOUR AGAINST FATE*;'^'305
re-entering the lists under a fresh banner and in a new-fangled panoply.
More than seven hundred years after the savage repression of the? Albi-
genses had been completed in A.D. 1229,* France was farther than sjtie liad
been at the twelfth-century zenith of Catharism's fortunes in Langu«^6c"" "
from an ecclesiastical unity that the Catholic Church had re-establishecE""'"
in France by force majeure no less than three times over in the meanwhile.
The Protean stratagem of metamorphosis had invariably saved a re-
peatedly defeated movement of religious dissidence from ever being
stamped out for good and all; and, at the time of writing, mid-way
through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, it looked as if this
historic wrestling match between Proteus and Menelaus in a French
ecclesiastical arena would end, unlike the fabulous incident in the Odys-
sey,2 in Menelaus, not Proteus, giving up the game and capitulating on
his opponent's terms.

This irrepressibly recurring rebellion in France against ecclesiastical
unity under the auspices of the Roman Church has its counterpart in
England in a likewise irrepressible rebellion against ecclesiastical unity
under the auspices of an Episcopalian Protestant Established Church of
England. An anti-episcopalian Protestant secessionist movement, which
had raised its head in the course of the last quarter of the sixteenth
century and had put down Episcopacy from its seat in A.D. 1643, was
quashed in the form of Puritanism in and after A.D. 1662, only to re-assert
itself in the form of Methodism in the eighteenth century. An Episcopa-
lian Established Church of England, whose prelates might have imagined
in A.D. 1662 that they had succeeded in their day in achieving an eccle-
siastical uniformity that their redoubtable predecessor, Archbishop
Laud, had failed to achieve in his, was living in the same ephemeral
fool's paradise as the 'Melchites' on the morrow of a proscription of Nes-
torianism which had been the signal for the more baffling onset of
Monophysitism. In England, as in France, by the middle of the twentieth
century, the ideal of an authoritarian ecclesiastical unity had been demon-
strated to be a lost cause by the repeated stultification of successive
attempts to carry it to a conclusive victory.

In other contexts, again, we have noted the 'fate' of a Judaic Mono-
theism to be perpetually beset by a repeatedly resurgent Polytheism, and
the 'fate* of a kindred Judaic concept of the One True God's Trans-
cendence to be no less perpetually beset by a repeatedly resurgent yearn-
ing for a God Incarnate.

Monotheism put down the worship of Ba'al and Ashtoreth only to
find a jealous Yahweh's rigidly proscribed traditional divine associates
slily creeping back into the fold of Jewish orthodoxy in the guise of
personifications of the Lord's *Word% 'Wisdom', and 'Angel*,3 and after-
wards establishing themselves within the fold of Christian orthodoxy,
from the outset and as of right, in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and
in the cults of God's Body and Blood, God's Mother, and the Saints.
These re-encroachments of Polytheism on Monotheism in the Christian
Church, which were more flagrant than the re-encroachments in Juda-

i See IV. iv. 369, n. 4.

* Odyssey, Book IV, II. 363-570. 3 See VII. vii. 718.