sought to replace. Yet millenarians, seeking to escape from what they regar ded as the debased erlacimentt of the original Christian vision, were not discourage d, or warned, by past failures. They emerged again in England, in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Stuart tyranny, in the 1650s. The puritan divine, Richa rd Baxter, wrote: ‘They made it their business to set up the light of natur e, under the name of Christ in Men, and to dishonor and cry down the Church, the Scriptures , the present Ministry, and our Worship and Ordinances; and called men to hearken to Christ withi n them. But withal, they conjoined a Cursed Doctrine of Libertinism, which brought them to an abom inable filthiness of Life. They taught. . . that God regardeth not the Actions of the Outward Man, but of the Heart, and that to the Pure all things are Pure (even things forbidden). And so as allowed by God, they spoke most hideous Words of Blasphemy, and many of them committed whoredoms commonly . Insomuch that a Matron of great Note for Godliness and Sobriety, being perverted by them, turned so shameless a Whore, that she was Carted in the streets of London.’ These extremists were prophets or Ranters, who had much in common with the 10achimites or, for that matter, Tertullian. Such elements have always seized the opportunity of a crisis or breakdown in society to promote apocalyptic or extraordinary solutions, whether moral or politico-eco nomic. The English Civil War was just such an occasion. As one orthodox critic put it (1651): ‘It is no new work of Satan to sow Heresies, and breed Heretics, but they never came up so thick as in these latter times. They were wont to peep up by one and one, but now they sprout out by huddles and clusters (like locusts out of the bottomless pit) ... thronging upon us in swarms, as the Caterpillars of Egypt.’ More recently, the specifically Christi an element, always the first victim when millenarianism lurches into terror, had tended to recede into the backgr ound or disappear altogether. Yet millenarians, from Tertullian on, had nearly always been anti-clericala characteristic they share with modern non-Christian prophets and apocalyptic, like Marx, the Paris communards of 1870, Trotskyites, Maoists and other seekers for an illusory perfection in this world. The secular Daniels of the twentieth century has scriptural credentials and their lineage is Christian. This analysis of medieval Christianity thus presents two types of social experiment in molding society around moral principles - an orthodox experiment and the radical alternative it provoked. Both tend to fail because both, in different ways, are too ambitious; and in the process of trying to fend off failure each type of experiment is liable to betray its Christian principles. One of the great, but perhaps inevitable, tragedies of history was the transformation of the Gregorian reform into an institutional obsession with power, and one of the perpetual, but equally fated, tragedies of history is the progression from millenarianism to the total abandonment of moral values. But Christianity, fortunately, contains more than these two imperfect matrices; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we see the emergence and the struggle for survival of a third force: Christian humanism. 90