skies, that sudden change could not have been more keenly nor more painfully felt than that which marked the contrast between the southern lands of Spain and the countries of France and Germany and England and Italy, during the same age of the world's history. Scarcely a city anywhere, save those few that had been erected along the Rhine and the Danube by the Romans. Nothing that could, even with the broadest stretch of leniency, be designated as agricultural. Everywhere pathless forests, howling wastes, ill-boding wildernesses, death-exhaling swamps, pestiferous fens. Prussia, and many more of to-day's proudest stars in the galaxy of European provinces, we find still uncivilized, still roaming about in the very costumes of native barbarians, in the spirits—and vampires—and nixes—and gnomes—and kobolds—inhabited pathless forests. Nowhere a street or highway, save those the Romans had built. Everywhere we must make our way, amidst indescribable difficulties, through almost impassable mud and clay. The people crowded together in miserable
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hamlets, inhabit wretched homesteads, crudely and bunglingly put together of undressed timber, or of twigs wattled together and covered with clays or thatched with straw or reeds, consisting seldom of more than one room, which shelters alike man, woman, child, man servant, maid servant, fowl and beast, a commingling of sex and species not altogether conducive to modesty or morality. The floor, for the main part is composed of the hard bare ground, or at best is covered with dry leaves or with filthy rushes. Nowhere a window, nowhere a chimney, the smoke of the ill-fed, cheerless fire escaping through a hole in the roof. Straw pellets constitute the bed, and a round log serves the place of bolster and pillow, one platter of treen stands in the center of the table—if "table" it might be called—from which man, woman and child, master and servant, maid and mistress, eat with spoons of wood. Fingers serve the place of knives and forks, and a wooden trencher makes the round to quench the thirst.
Everywhere we meet with men with squalid beards, and women with hair unkempt and matted with filth, and both, clothed in garments of untanned skin, or, at best, of leather or hair cloth, that are not changed till they drop in pieces of themselves, a loathsome mass of vermin, stench and rags. No attempt at drainage; the putrefying slops and garbage and rubbish are unceremoniously thrown out of the door.
The most revolting uncleanness abounds, and we cannot help thinking of the scrupulous cleanliness that
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distinguished Cordova, for cleanness is one of the most rigorous injunctions and requirements with both the religion of Mohammed and the religion of Moses. Here, on the contrary, personal uncleanliness, the renunciation of every personal comfort, the branding of every effort for better surroundings, we are told, upon inquiry, has the highest sanction of the church. The sordid example set by the Ascetic monks has established the belief that cleanliness of the body leads to the pollution of the soul, that in the past those saints were most admired who had become one hideous mass of clotted filth. With a thrill of admiration a priest informs us that St. Jerome had seen a monk who for thirty years had lived in a hole, and who never washed his clothes, nor changed his tunic till it fell to pieces; that St. Ammon had never seen himself naked; that the famous virgin, named Silvia, had resolutely refused for sixty years, on religious principles, to wash any part of her body, except her fingers; that St. Euphraxia had joined a convent of 130 nuns, who shuddered at the mention of a bath; that an anchorite had once imagined that he was mocked by an illusion of the devil, as he saw gliding before him through the desert a naked creature black with filth and years of exposure; it was the once beautiful St. Mary of Egypt, who had thus during forty-seven years been expiating her sins of Asceticism.
We have seen enough to lead us to the conclusion, that when we enter into an examination of the mental and moral and religious state of the people, whose personal and
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domestic life hold so low a rank in the history of civilization, we must not place our expectations too high. But low as we picture it to ourselves, the reality we find is infinitly lower than even our most lenient imagination had pictured it. Only a week ago we found Cordova proud, and distinguished, and peerless in the realm of culture, and art, and philosophy, and science, and now, during the same period of the world's history, we find a deep black cloud of appalling ignorance overhanging France, and Italy, and Germany and England, here and there only broken by a few, a very few, glimmering lights. Intellect, fettered hand and foot, lies bleeding at the feet of benighted barbarism, writhing in pain beneath the lashes of degrading superstitions, and groveling credulity. We search for the cause of this stupendous ignorance, and we soon find that to the clergy, more than to all other causes combined, belongs the very ignoble distinction of having ushered into Europe this stolid ignorance, and for being responsible for the unatonable crime of having retarded the advance of civilization by many centuries.
To the all powerful and all controlling influence of the Church is to be ascribed the universal paralysis of the mind during the very same period, when art and science and independent research flourished in Southern Spain under Moorish and Jewish influence. Whomsoever we approach, be they dignitaries of the Church or Church menials, distinguished luminaries or obscure parish priests, a
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conversation with them soon proves to us the sad truth, that their stock of knowledge exhausts itself with an enumeration of some monstrous legends or with the practice and teaching of some degrading and repulsive superstitions.
Secular knowledge is spurned. Physical science is held in avowed contempt and persecuted upon the ground of its inconsistency with revealed truth. Philosophical research is prohibited, under the severest punishment, as pernicious to piety. Upon inquiry as to the cause of this persecution of learning on the part of the church, which, as we modestly dare to suggest, has nothing to lose, but everything to gain from rational research and diligent pursuit of knowledge, a bishop emphatically informs us that they did this with the sanction and authority of the fourth council of Carthage, which had prohibited the reading of secular books by bishops, and with the authority of Jerome who had condemned the study of secular subjects, except for pious ends, and as there was no lack of piety (so they artlessly thought) they saw little use in preserving the learning and literature of the accursed Jews and heathens, and fearing lest they fall into the hands of others, not so pious as they, and not so protected against their pernicious influence by the knowledge of legends, or by the skillful use of magic spells, or exorcising charms, as they were. Or perhaps secretly fearing, lest an intimate knowledge of the learning of the ancients might open the eyes of the people to the ignorance and extortions and crimes and corruptions of
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the Church, they condemn that whole literature to the flames. Hundreds and thousands of valuable manuscripts are thus pitilessly destroyed. We fain would stay their cruel hand, but we fear for our lives. We see them erase the writing from hundreds and thousands of parchment copies of ancient priceless lore, and substitute in its stead legends of saints, and ecclesiastical rubbish, occasioning thus the loss of many an ancient author that is now so painfully missed.
We turn away from this revolting stupidity, but nowhere a pleasing sign to allay our anguish, or appease our grief-stricken heart.
"Oh, thou monstrous ignorance, how deformed dost thou look."
Nowhere freedom of humane thought. Everyone compelled to think as ecclesiastical authority orders him to think. In Germany, France and Northern Spain we find scarcely one priest out of a thousand who can write his name. In Rome itself, once the city of art and culture and learning, as late as 992, a reliable authority informs us, there is not a priest to be found who knows the first elements of letters. In England, King Alfred informs us that he cannot recollect a single priest south of the Thames (then the most civilized part of England) who at the time of his accession understood or could translate the ordinary Latin prayer, and that the homilies which they preached were compiled for their use by some bishop from former works of the
