or institution. The moral anomalies of
such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of
events immediately connected with them, and those events are most
entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most
expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish
words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been
incorporated into our popular religion.

It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry
of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves.
The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in
his _Republic_, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the
materials of pleasure and of power, produced by the common skill and
labour of human beings, ought to be distributed among them. The
limitations of this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by
the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato,
following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral
and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past,
the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged
the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and
Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression
of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The
incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of
the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in
their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action
and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed
as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without
incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The
abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of
women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were
among the consequences of these events.

The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The
freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a
religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if
the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and
motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth
became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar
appearance and proceedings of life bec