hereby obtain strength. Probably there is no people
in the world among whom this belief has not had at some one time or
another a very great influence. At a later time, in the early
civilizations, this idea would seem to have obtained much larger sway, and
to have affected national life more and more extensively. In the age of
the great religions the idea reaches its acme, an acme often represented
by extravagances of the most painful kind and sacrifices which strike
modern imagination as ferocious and terrible. In Europe asceticism reached
its great extremes as you know during the Middle Ages, and especially took
the direction of antagonism to the natural sex-relation. Looking back
to-day to the centuries in which celibacy was considered the most moral
condition, and marriage was counted as little better than weakness, when
Europe was covered with thousands of monasteries, and when the best
intellects of the age deemed it the highest duty to sacrifice everything
pleasurable for the sake of an imaginary reward after death, we can not
but recognize that we are contemplating a period of religious insanity.
Even in the architecture of the time, the architecture that Ruskin devoted
his splendid talent to praise, there is a grim and terrible something that
suggests madness. Again, the cruelties of the age have an insane
character, the burning alive of myriads of people who refused to believe
or could 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
b