well
fitted to nurse poetical genius in an imaginative and observant mind.

Nor did the religious spirit of the age tend less to this result than
its political circumstances. Fanaticism is an evil, but it is not the
greatest of evils. It is good that a people should be roused by any
means from a state of utter torpor;--that their minds should be diverted
from objects merely sensual, to meditations, however erroneous, on the
mysteries of the moral and intellectual world; and from interests which
are immediately selfish to those which relate to the past, the future,
and the remote. These effects have sometimes been produced by the worst
superstitions that ever existed; but the Catholic religion, even in
the time of its utmost extravagance and atrocity, never wholly lost the
spirit of the Great Teacher, whose precepts form the noblest code, as
His conduct furnished the purest example, of moral excellence. It is of
all religions the most poetical. The ancient superstitions furnished
the fancy with beautiful images, but took no hold on the heart. The
doctrines of the Reformed Churches have most powerfully influenced
the feelings and the conduct of men, but have not presented them with
visions of sensible beauty and grandeur. The Roman Catholic Church has
united to the awful doctrines of the one that Mr Coleridge calls the
"fair humanities" of the other. It has enriched sculpture and painting
with the loveliest and most majestic forms. To the Phidian Jupiter it
can oppose the Moses of Michael Angelo; and to the voluptuous beauty
of the Queen of Cyprus, the serene and pensive loveliness of the Virgin
Mother. The legends of its martyrs and its saints may vie in ingenuity
and interest with the mythological fables of Greece; its ceremonies and
processions were the delight of the vulgar; the huge fabric of secular
power with which it was connected attracted the admiration of the
statesman. At the same time, it never lost sight of the most solemn
and tremendous doctrines of Christianity,--the incarnate God,--the
judgment,--the retribution,--the eternity of happiness or torment. Thus,
while, like the ancient religions, it received incalculable support from
policy and ceremony, it never wholly became, like those religions, a
merely political and ceremonial institution.

The beginning of the thirteenth century was, as Machiavelli has
remarked, the era of a great revival of this extraordinary system. The
policy of Innocent,--the growt