As already hinted this hierarchical 64 system was mixed up with religious ideas. Accordingly, we find that the Middle Ages had a distinct religion of their own, developed from, but by no means identical with, that early Christianity, which was one of the forces that broke up the Roman Empire. As long as that empire lasted in its integrity Christianity was purely individualistic; it bade every man do his best for his future in another world, and had no commands to give about the government of this world, except to obey the “powers that be” in non-religious matters, in order to escape troubles and complications which might distract the attention of the Christian from the kingdom of God.
But in mediaeval Christianity, although this idea of individual devotion to the perfection of the next world still existed, it was kept in the background, and was almost dormant, except sporadically (as exemplified by St. Thomas à Kempis, St. Francis, St. Bernard, etc.) in the presence of the idea of the Church. The latter was not merely a link between the earthly and the heavenly kingdoms, 65 but may even be said to have brought the kingdom of heaven to earth by breathing its spirit into the temporal power, which it recognised as another manifestation of its own authority. The struggles between the temporal and the spiritual power, which form so large a part of the history of the Middle Ages, were not the result of any antagonism of ideas between the two, but came of the tendency of one side of the great organisation of society to absorb the other, without rejecting its theory.
In short, on the one hand, the Church was political and social as much as religious, while, on the other, the State was at least as much religious, as it was political and social.
For instance, all the great corporations, which were such a prominent feature of the Middle Ages, from the fraternity of knighthood to the guilds of craft, were on the one hand religious institutions, though on the other they were devised for obvious practical purposes. Again, in