not believe in the faith of their time; the tortures used to extort confessions from the innocent; the immolation of thousands charged with being wizards or witches; the extinction of little centres of civilization in the South of France and elsewhere by brutal crusades—­contemplating all this, we seem to be contemplating not only madness but furious madness.  I need not speak to you of the Crusades, which also belonged to this period.  Compared with the Roman and Greek civilizations before it, what a horrible Europe it was!  And yet the thinker must recognize that it had a strength of its own, a strength of a larger kind than that of the preceding civilizations.  It may seem monstrous to assert that all this cruelty and superstition and contempt of learning were absolutely necessary for the progress of mankind; and yet we must so accept them in the light of modern knowledge.  The checking of intellectual development for hundreds of years is certainly a fact that must shock us; but the true question is whether such a checking had not become necessary.  Intellectual strength, unless supported by moral strength, leads a people into the ways of destruction.  Compared with the men of the Middle Ages, the Greeks and Romans were incomparably superior intellectually; compared with them morally they were very weak.  They had conquered the world and developed all the arts, these Greeks and Romans; they had achieved things such as mankind has never since been able to accomplish, and then, losing their moral ideal, losing their simplicity, losing their faith, they were utterly crushed by inferior races in whom the principles of self-denial had been intensely developed.  And the old instinctive hatred of the Church for the arts and the letters and the sciences of the Greek and Roman civilizations was not quite so much of a folly as we might be apt to suppose.  The priests recognized in a vague way that anything like a revival of the older civilizations would signify moral ruin.  The Renaissance proves that the priests were not wrong.  Had the movement occurred a few hundred years earlier, the result would probably have been a universal corruption I do not mean to say that the Church at any time was exactly conscious of what she was doing; she acted blindly under the influence of an instinctive fear.  But the result of all that she did has now proved unfortunate.  What the Roman and Greek civilizations had lost in moral power was given back to the world by the frightful discipline of the Middle Ages.  For a long series of generations the ascetic idea was triumphant; and it became feeble only in proportion as men became strong enough to do without it.  Especially it remodelled that of which it first seemed the enemy, the family relation.  It created a new basis for society, founded upon a new sense of the importance to society of family morals.  Because this idea, this morality, came through superstition, its value is not thereby in the least diminished.  Superstitions often represent correct guesses at eternal