ecome 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 truth. To-day we
know that all social progress, all national strength, all national vigour,
intellectual as well as physical, depend essentially upon the family, upon
the morality of the household, upon the relation of parents to children.
It was this fact which the Greeks and Romans forgot, and lost themselves
by forgetting. It was this fact which the superstitious tyranny of the
Middle Ages had to teach the West over again, and after such a fashion
that it is not likely e