So much for the Moral basis of the Reformation; we must pass on now to the Doctrinal. Erasmus has told us, what a dozen great Churchmen had said before him and what human nature herself tells us, that institutions, like individuals, will in the long run find their teaching judged by their behaviour. It was the essential sanity of the English public which bred closer and closer criticism of the cleric, first in his person and then in his teaching. Christ's words do but reinforce what common sense will always suggest: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

We have seen (Chapter XXXII) how Scholasticism had always lacked one element essential to a perfect philosophy: it never applied thoroughly scientific enquiry to its own fundamental assumptions. It rested upon belief in a barbarian's hell, and in the inerrancy of a written book, and in the infallibility of the Church: and these three elements, in combination, had the devastating force of mingled sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal. For upon these theological assumptions the Schoolmen built a strictly—one may say ferociously—logical system, which coloured the whole thought of those ages, and from which the mystic alone, by treating this logic as irrelevant and seeking his own direct way to God through other paths, could escape without necessarily losing his orthodoxy. For, within that stately scholastic framework, there were innumerable quiet corners for the meditations and the adoration of a simple soul; and few men would have quarrelled with these immemorial ecclesiastical traditions if only the teachers had, with any consistency, shown forth their faith by their works.