authors of antiquity were lost, at this time, through the sloth and negligence of the Greeks” (p. 219).  “Nor did the cause of philosophy fare better than that of literature.  Philosophers, indeed, there were; and, among them, some that were not destitute of genius and abilities; but none who rendered their names immortal by productions that were worthy of being transmitted to posterity” (p. 219).  So low, under the influence of Christianity, had sunk the literature of Greece—­Greece Pagan, which once brought forth Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Zenophon, and many another mighty one, whose fame rolls down the ages—­that Greece had become Greece Christian, and the vitality of her motherhood had been drained from her, and left her without strength to conceive men.  In the West things were yet worse—­instead of Rome Pagan, that had spread light and civilization—­the Rome of Cicero, of Virgil, of Lucretius—­we have Rome Christian, spreader of darkness and of degradation, the Rome of the Popes and the monks.  The Latins “were, almost without exception, sunk in the most brutish and barbarous ignorance, so that, according to the unanimous accounts of the most credible writers, nothing could be more melancholy and deplorable than the darkness that reigned in the western world during this century....  In the seminaries of learning, such as they were, the seven liberal sciences were taught in the most unskilful and miserable manner, and that by the monks, who esteemed the arts and sciences no further than as they were subservient to the interests of religion, or, to speak more properly, to the views of superstition” (p. 219).  But the light from Arabia was struggling to penetrate Christendom.  Gerbert, a native of France, travelled into Spain, and studied in the Arabian schools of Cordova and Seville, under Arabian doctors; he developed mathematical ability, and returned into Christendom with some amount of learning:  raised to the papal throne, under the name of Sylvester II., he tried to restore the study of science and philosophy, and found that his geometrical figures “were regarded by the monks as magical operations,” and he himself “as a magician and a disciple of Satan” (p. 220).

The vice of the clergy was something terrible.  “These corruptions were mounted to the most enormous height in that dismal period of the Church which we have now before us.  Both in the eastern and western provinces, the clergy were, for the most part, composed of a most worthless set of men, shamefully illiterate and stupid, ignorant, more especially in religious matters, equally enslaved to sensuality and superstition, and capable of the most abominable and flagitious deeds.  This dismal degeneracy of the sacred order was, according to the most credible accounts, principally owing to the pretended chiefs and rulers of the universal Church, who indulged themselves in the commission of the most odious crimes, and abandoned themselves to the lawless impulse of the most licentious