essible to
cruelty and licentiousness. In times when statesmen were incapable
of forming extensive political combinations, it was better that the
Christian nations should be roused and united for the recovery of the
Holy Sepulchre, than that they should, one by one, be overwhelmed by
the Mahometan power. Whatever reproach may, at a later period, have been
justly thrown on the indolence and luxury of religious orders, it was
surely good that, in an age of ignorance and violence, there should be
quiet cloisters and gardens, in which the arts of peace could be safely
cultivated, in which gentle and contemplative natures could find an
asylum, in which one brother could employ himself in transcribing the
AEneid of Virgil, and another in meditating the Analytics of Aristotle,
in which he who had a genius for art might illuminate a martyrology or
carve a crucifix, and in which he who had a turn for natural philosophy
might make experiments on the properties of plants and minerals. Had
not such retreats been scattered here and there, among the huts of
a miserable peasantry, and the castles of a ferocious aristocracy,
European society would have consisted merely of beasts of burden and
beasts of prey. The Church has many times been compared by divines
to the ark of which we read in the Book of Genesis: but never was the
resemblance more perfect than during that evil time when she alone rode,
amidst darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath which all the great
works of ancient power and wisdom lay entombed, bearing within her that
feeble germ from which a Second and more glorious civilisation was to
spring.

Even the spiritual supremacy arrogated by the Pope was, in the dark
ages, productive of far more good than evil. Its effect was to unite the
nations of Western Europe in one great commonwealth. What the Olympian
chariot course and the Pythian oracle were to all the Greek cities, from
Trebizond to Marseilles, Rome and her Bishop were to all Christians
of the Latin communion, from Calabria to the Hebrides. Thus grew up
sentiments of enlarged benevolence. Races separated from each other by
seas and mountains acknowledged a fraternal tie and a common code of
public law. Even in war, the cruelty of the conqueror was not seldom
mitigated by the recollection that he and his vanquished enemies were
all members of one great federation.

Into this federation our Saxon ancestors were now admitted. A regular
communication was opened