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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
Sicut populus, sic sacerdos—“As the priest is, so are the people”. Those words of Isaiah were echoed from mouth to mouth, throughout our period, by men who were seriously concerned for the religion and morals of their own day, and who often saw no hope but in the Second Coming of Christ. Certainly we must not lend ourselves to the injustice of blaming our forefathers wherever they aimed high, and attempted to take the Kingdom of God with violence. But we should have had all the best of those men upon one side in the effort to see the past exactly as it was, and thus to estimate its true relations to the present.
St Thomas More, in reply to the outspoken criticisms of the lawyer St Germain, pointed out with some real truth that these, by implication, struck at the laity also, since it is from the laity that clerics are recruited, and a stream cannot rise above its source. If medieval society had been more advanced in civilization, it would have demanded, and would have got, a better clergy. It is good for us of to-day to remember this, and not to ignore the fact that our criticism of Christianity and its professional exponents is necessarily to some extent a criticism of our own time and our own selves. Let us bear this in mind with regard to the village parson, present and past in all ages.
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