ual reality, a living and a fearful
thing. It would have passed their comprehension if they could have been
assured that a day would come when Christian Europe, by a breath, could
remove from the holy places the scandal of an infidel intruder, but,
upon the whole, would consider it not worth her while to do so. How
differently they acted. [Sidenote: Effect of the Crusades.] When, by the
preaching of Peter the Hermit and his collaborators, who had received a
signal from Rome, a knowledge had come to their ears of the reproach
that had befallen Jerusalem and the sufferings of the pilgrims, their
plain but straightforward common sense taught them at once what was the
right remedy to apply, and forthwith they did apply it, and Christendom,
precipitated headlong upon the Holy Land, was brought face to face with
Mohammedanism. But what a scene awaited the zealous, the religious
barbarians--for such they truly were--when Constantinople, with its
matchless splendours, came in view! What a scene when they had passed
into Asia Minor, that garden of the world, presenting city after city,
with palaces and edifices, the pride of twenty centuries! [Sidenote:
Change of opinion in the Crusaders.] How unexpected the character of
those Saracens, whom they had been taught, by those who had incited them
to their enterprise, to regard as no better than bloodthirsty fiends,
but whom they found valiant, merciful, just! When Richard the
Lion-hearted, King of England, lay in his tent consumed by a fever,
there came into the camp camels laden with snow, sent by his enemy, the
Sultan Saladin, to assuage his disease, the homage of one brave soldier
to another. But when Richard was returning to England, it was by a
Christian prince that he was treacherously seized and secretly confined.
This was doubtless only one of many such incidents which had often
before occurred. Even down to the meanest camp-follower, every one must
have recognized the difference between what they had anticipated and
what they had found. They had seen undaunted courage, chivalrous
bearing, intellectual culture far higher than their own. They had been
in lands filled with the prodigies of human skill. They did not melt
down into the populations to whom they returned without imparting to
them a profound impression destined to make itself felt in the course of
time.

[Sidenote: They discover the immoralities of Italy.] But, secondly, as
to the state of things in Rome. The movem