the most brutal, most
ruffianly epochs in history, one of those wherein we encounter most
crimes and violence; wherein the public peace was most incessantly
troubled; and wherein the greatest licentiousness in morals prevailed.
Nevertheless it cannot be denied that side by side with these gross and
barbarous morals, this social disorder, there existed knightly morality
and knightly poetry. We have moral records confronting ruffianly deeds;
and the contrast is shocking, but real. It is exactly this contrast
which makes the great and fundamental characteristic of the middle ages.
Let us turn our eyes towards other communities, towards the earliest
stages, for instance, of Greek society, towards that heroic age of which
Homer's poems are the faithful reflection. There is nothing there like
the contrasts by which we are struck in the middle ages. We do not see
that, at the period and amongst the people of the Homeric poems, there
was abroad in the air or had penetrated into the imaginations of men any
idea more lofty or more pure than their every-day actions; the heroes of
Homer seem to have no misgiving about their brutishness, their ferocity,
their greed, their egotism, there is nothing in their souls superior to
the deeds of their lives. In the France of the middle ages, on the
contrary, though practically crimes and disorders, moral and social evils
abound, yet men have in their souls and their imaginations loftier and
purer instincts and desires; their notions of virtue and their ideas of
justice are very superior to the practice pursued around them and amongst
themselves; a certain moral ideal hovers above this low and tumultuous
community, and attracts the notice and obtains the regard of men in whose
life it is but very faintly reflected. The Christian religion,
undoubtedly, is, if not the only, at any rate the principal cause of this
great fact; for its particular characteristic is to arouse amongst men a
lofty moral ambition by keeping constantly before their eyes a type
infinitely beyond the reach of human nature, and yet profoundly
sympathetic with it. To Christianity it was that the middle ages owed
knighthood, that institution which, in the midst of anarchy and
barbarism, gave a poetical and moral beauty to the period. It was
feudal knighthood and Christianity together which produced the two great
and glorious events of those times, the Norman conquest of England and
the Crusades.

CHAPTER XV.--