ce 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.

_Phil_. That is right so far as theory is concerned; but look at the
practice. In comparison with the Christian centuries that followed, the
ancient world was undoubtedly less cruel th