th vermin; such, it is related, was the condition of Thomas a Becket,
the antagonist of an English king. To conceal personal impurity,
perfumes were necessarily and profusely used. The citizen clothed
himself in leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating
impurity, might last for many years. He was considered to be in
circumstances of ease, if he could procure fresh meat once a week for
his dinner. The streets had no sewers; they were without pavement or
lamps. After night-fall, the chamber-shutters were thrown open, and
slops unceremoniously emptied down, to the discomforture of the wayfarer
tracking his path through the narrow streets, with his dismal lantern in
his hand" (Ibid, p. 265). Little wonder indeed, that plagues swept
through the cities, destroying their inhabitants wholesale. The Church
could only pray against them, or offer shrines where votive offerings
might win deliverance; "not without a bitter resistance on the part of
the clergy, men began to think that pestilences are not punishments
inflicted by God on society for its religious shortcomings, but the
physical consequences of filth and wretchedness; that the proper mode of
avoiding them is not by praying to the saints, but by ensuring personal
and municipal cleanliness. In the twelfth century it was found necessary
to pave the streets of Paris, the stench in them was so dreadful. At
once dysenteries and spotted fever diminished; a sanitary condition,
approaching that of the Moorish cities of Spain, which had been paved
for centuries, was attained" (Ibid, p. 314). The death-rate was still
further diminished by the importation of the physician's skill from the
Arabs and the Moors; the Christians had depended on the shrine of the
saint, and the bone of the martyr, and the priest was the doctor of body
as well as of soul. "On all the roads pilgrims were wending their way to
the shrines of saints, renowned for the cures they had wrought. It had
always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his
art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the
shrines.... For patients too sick to move or be moved, there were no
remedies except those of a ghostly kind--the Paternoster and the Ave"
(Ibid, p. 269). Thus Christianity set itself against all popular
advancement, against all civil and social progress, against all
improvement in the condition of the masses. It viewed every change with
distrust, it met every innovation with