that modesty and morality could be maintained.  The bed was usually a bag of straw; a wooden log served as a pillow.  Personal cleanliness was utterly unknown; great officers of state, even dignitaries so high as the Archbishop of Canterbury, swarmed with vermin; such, it is related, was the condition of Thomas a Becket, the antagonist of an English king.  To conceal personal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and profusely used.  The citizen clothed himself in leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating impurity, might last for many years.  He was considered to be in circumstances of ease, if he could procure fresh meat once a week for his dinner.  The streets had no sewers; they were without pavement or lamps.  After night-fall, the chamber-shutters were thrown open, and slops unceremoniously emptied down, to the discomforture of the wayfarer tracking his path through the narrow streets, with his dismal lantern in his hand” (Ibid, p. 265).  Little wonder indeed, that plagues swept through the cities, destroying their inhabitants wholesale.  The Church could only pray against them, or offer shrines where votive offerings might win deliverance; “not without a bitter resistance on the part of the clergy, men began to think that pestilences are not punishments inflicted by God on society for its religious shortcomings, but the physical consequences of filth and wretchedness; that the proper mode of avoiding them is not by praying to the saints, but by ensuring personal and municipal cleanliness.  In the twelfth century it was found necessary to pave the streets of Paris, the stench in them was so dreadful.  At once dysenteries and spotted fever diminished; a sanitary condition, approaching that of the Moorish cities of Spain, which had been paved for centuries, was attained” (Ibid, p. 314).  The death-rate was still further diminished by the importation of the physician’s skill from the Arabs and the Moors; the Christians had depended on the shrine of the saint, and the bone of the martyr, and the priest was the doctor of body as well as of soul.  “On all the roads pilgrims were wending their way to the shrines of saints, renowned for the cures they had wrought.  It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines....  For patients too sick to move or be moved, there were no remedies except those of a ghostly kind—­the Paternoster and the Ave” (Ibid, p. 269).  Thus Christianity set itself against all popular advancement, against all civil and social progress, against all improvement in the condition of the masses.  It viewed every change with distrust, it met every innovation with opposition.  While it reigned supreme, Europe lay in chains, and even into the new world it carried the fetters of the old.  Only as Christianity has grown feebler has civilization strengthened, and progress has been made more and more rapidly as a failing creed has lost the power to oppose.  And now, day by