of burden—­the third estate.  There you have club-law, feudalism, and fanaticism in close alliance, and in their train shocking uncertainty and darkness of mind, a corresponding intolerance, discord of faiths, religious wars, crusades, persecution of heretics and inquisitions; as the form of fellowship, chivalry, an amalgam of savagery and foolishness, with its pedantic system of absurd affectations, its degrading superstitions, and apish veneration for women; the survival of which is gallantry, deservedly requited by the arrogance of women; it affords to all Asiatics continual material for laughter, in which the Greeks would have joined.  In the golden Middle Age the matter went as far as a formal and methodical service of women and enjoined deeds of heroism, cours d’amour, bombastic Troubadour songs and so forth, although it is to be observed that these last absurdities, which have an intellectual side, were principally at home in France; while among the material phlegmatic Germans the knights distinguished themselves more by drinking and robbing.  Drinking and hoarding their castles with plunder were the occupations of their lives; and certainly there was no want of stupid love-songs in the courts.  What has changed the scene so?  Migration and Christianity.

Demop.  It is a good thing you reminded me of it.  Migration was the source of the evil, and Christianity the dam on which it broke.  Christianity was the means of controlling and taming those raw, wild hordes who were washed in by the flood of migration.  The savage man must first of all learn to kneel, to venerate, and to obey; it is only after that, that he can be civilised.  This was done in Ireland by St. Patrick, in Germany by Winifred the Saxon, who was a genuine Boniface.  It was migration of nations, this last movement of Asiatic races towards Europe, followed only by their fruitless attempts under Attila, Gengis Khan, and Timur, and, as a comic after-piece, by the gipsies:  it was migration of nations which swept away the humanity of the ancients.  Christianity was the very principle which worked against this savagery, just as later, through the whole of the Middle Age, the Church and its hierarchy were extremely necessary to place a limit to the savagery and barbarism of those lords of violence, the princes and knights:  it was the ice-breaker of this mighty flood.  Still, the general aim of Christianity is not so much to make this life pleasant as to make us worthy of a better.  It looks beyond this span of time, this fleeting dream, in order to lead us to eternal salvation.  Its tendency is ethical in the highest sense of the word, a tendency which had hitherto been unknown in Europe; as I have already pointed out to you by comparing the morality and religion of the ancients with those of Christianity.