438 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
ardent secessionists. The Protestants revolted against a Roman Catholic
Church which, in their eyes, had ceased to be Una Sancta to become the
Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse.1 The English shook from their feet
the dust2 of a treacherous continent, and the Americans the dust of a
treacherous hemisphere. And, when a Western internal proletariat had
become as -widespread as the 'capitalist' Western Civilization that, in the
Communists* indictment of it, stood accused of having reduced the
proletariat to misery, the seceding Communists found in Russia a non-
Western base of operations for mounting an attack upon Capitalism in
its Western birthplace and citadel. The irreconcilability of these con-
flicting appreciations of a Western Civilization's value showed that all of
them were subjective, and their subjectivity convicted all of them of
inconclusiveness.

Pessimism, of course, was no more proof than optimism against the
possibility of being refuted by events. If Gibbon lived to see the out-
break of the French Revolution refute his unfounded optimistic con-
viction that History had come to an end in the eighteenth century, he
was only suffering the same fate as his forebears the eleventh-century
Western Millenarians,3 whose no better founded pessimistic conviction
that History was coming to an end on the thousandth anniversary of
Christ's nativity—or, failing that, at any rate on the thousandth anni-
versary of the end of His mission on Earth—was no less conclusively
refuted within their own lifetime by History's inconsiderate perform-
ance of sailing on serenely through each, in turn, of these nicely calculated
successive terminal dates.

Nor did History merely insist on continuing to flow beyond the latest
term that these Millenarians had prescribed for her. She completed
their discomfiture by choosing the very date on which they had pre-
dicted that she was to go out of action as her date for opening a new
chapter in the growth-phase of these eccentric Millenarian pessimists'
own society. An eleventh century of the Christian Era which, in the
event, did not bring with it the end of the history of all things, did
doubly falsify the Millenarians' gloomy expectations by inaugurating,
instead, the opening of a new chapter in the growth of the Western
Civilization; and the fresh impetus acquired by this growing civilization
in this critical passage of its history was actually comparable, in its
vigour and creativity, to the classic flowering of the same civilization
some four hundred years later. If it is a commonplace that the fifteenth
century of the Christian Era saw the Western World move out of a
'medieval* into a 'modern' stage of its growth, it is no less clear that the
eleventh century of Western history witnessed a similar transition to
'the Middle Ages* from *the Dark Ages'.4 Yet, in thus conclusively
demonstrating the erroneousness of the eleventh-century Western Mil-
lenarians* application to their own times of a Primitive Christianity's
belief in the imminence of Christ's Second Coming, the course of
Western history did not eradicate this traditional expectation from the
minds of the confuted Millenarians' descendants. In cultivated Western

1 Rev. xviL 3-6. 2 Luke ix. 5. Cp. Matt. x. 14; Mark vi. n.

3 See L L 171, n. x. * See I. L 171.