or the detection and
punishment of guilt, the creed, however impossible to be reconciled with
experience, might have proved a salutary check upon a rude people, and
would at least have had the only palliation that can be offered for a
religious imposture, its political expediency. In the legends of those
times, on the contrary, they appeared only as perpetual intercessors,
so good-natured and so powerful, that a sinner was more emphatically
foolish than he is usually represented if he failed to secure himself
against any bad consequences. For a little attention to the saints, and
especially to the Virgin, with due liberality to their servants, had
saved, he would be told, so many of the most atrocious delinquents, that
he might equitably presume upon similar luck in his own case.

This monstrous superstition grew to its height in the twelfth century.
For the advance that learning then made was by no means sufficient to
counteract the vast increase of monasteries, and the opportunities which
the greater cultivation of modern languages afforded for the diffusion
of legendary tales. It was now, too, that the veneration paid to the
Virgin, in early times very great, rose to an almost exclusive idolatry.
It is difficult to conceive the stupid absurdity and the disgusting
profaneness of those stories which were invented by the monks to do her
honour. A few examples have been thrown into a note.[534]

[Sidenote: Not altogether unmixed with good.]

Whether the superstition of these dark ages had actually passed that
point when it becomes more injurious to public morals and the welfare of
society than the entire absence of all religious notions is a very
complex question, upon which I would by no means pronounce an
affirmative decision.[535] A salutary influence, breathed from the
spirit of a more genuine religion, often displayed itself among the
corruptions of a degenerate superstition. In the original principles of
monastic orders, and the rules by which they ought at least to have been
governed, there was a character of meekness, self-denial, and charity
that could not wholly be effaced. These virtues, rather than justice
and veracity, were inculcated by the religious ethics of the middle
ages; and in the relief of indigence it may, upon the whole, be asserted
that the monks did not fall short of their profession.[536] This
eleemosynary spirit indeed remarkably distinguishes both Christianity
and Mohammedism from the moral