The Martyrdom of Man - Winwood Reade (golden son ebook txt) 📗
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revealed; they established convents, and nunneries, and
splendid temples, adorned with images, and served by priests
with shaven heads, who repeated prayers upon rosaries, and who
taught that happiness in a future state could best be obtained
by long prayers and by liberal presents to the Church. In the
Eastern or Greek world, Christianity in no way assisted
civilisation, but in the Latin world it softened the fury of
the conquerors, it aided the amalgamation of the races. The
Christian priests were reverenced by the barbarians, and these
priests belonged to the conquered people.
The Church, it is true, was divided by a schism; Ulphilas, the apostle of
The Goths, was an Arian; the dispute which had arisen in a lecture-room at Alexandria, between a bishop and a presbyter, was
continued on a hundred battlefields. But the Franks were
Catholics, and the Franks became supreme. The Arians were
worsted in the conflict of swords as they had formerly been
worsted in the conflict of words. The Empire of the West was
restored by Charlemagne, who spread Christianity among the
Saxons by the sword, and confirmed the spiritual supremacy of
Rome. He died, and his dominions were partitioned among kings
who were royal only in the name. Europe was divided into
castle-states. Savage isolation, irresponsible power: such was
the order of the age. Yet still there was a sovereign whom all
acknowledged, and whom all to a certain extent obeyed. That
sovereign was the Pope of Rome. The men who wore his livery
might travel throughout Europe in safety, welcome alike at
cottage and castle, paying for their board and lodging with
their prayers. If there is a Great Being who listens with
pleasure to the prayers of men, it must have been in the Dark
Ages that he looked down upon the earth with most satisfaction.
That period may be called The Age of the Rosary. From the
Shetland Islands to the shores of China, prayers were being
strung, and voices were being sonorously raised. The Christian
repeated his Paternosters and his credos on beads of holy clay
from Palestine; the Persian at Teheran, the negro at Timbuctoo;
the Afghan at Kabul, repeated the ninety-nine names of God on
beads made of camel bones from Mecca. The Indian prince by the
waters of the Ganges muttered his devotions on a rosary of
precious stones. The pious Buddhist in Ceylon, and in Ava, and
in Pekin, had the beads ever between his fingers, and a prayer
ever between his lips.
By means of these great and cosmopolitan religions, all of which
possessed their sacred books, all of which enjoined a pure morality,
all of which united vast masses of men of different and even hostile
nationalities beneath the same religious laws, beneath the same
sceptre of an unseen king; all of which prescribed pilgrimage and travel
as a pious work, the circulation of life in the human body was promoted;
men congregated together at Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and
Benares. Their minds and morals were expanded. Religious
enthusiasm united the scattered princes of Europe into one
great army, and poured it on the East. The dukes and counts and
barons were ruined; the castle system was extinguished: and the
castle serfs of necessity were free. The kings allied
themselves with the free and fortified cities, who lent troops
to the crown, but who officered those troops themselves; who
paid taxes to the crown, but who voted those taxes in
constitutional assemblies, and had the power to withhold them
if they pleased. Those towns now became not only abodes of
industry and commerce, but of learning and the arts. In Italy
the ancient culture had been revived. In Italy the towns of the
Western Empire had never quite lost their municipal
prerogatives. New towns had also arisen, founded in despair and
nurtured by calamity. These towns had opened a trade with
Constantinople, a great commercial city in which the Arabs had
a quarter and a mosque. The Italians were thus led forth into a
trade with the Mohammedans, which was interrupted for a time by
the Crusades only to be afterwards resumed with redoubled
vigour and success. For then new markets were opened for the
spices of the East. Pepper became a requisite of European life;
and pepper could be obtained from the Italians alone. The
Indian trade was not monopolised by a single man, as it was in
the lands of the East. It was distributed among an immense
population. Wealth produced elegance, leisure, and refinement.
There came into existence a large and active-minded class,
craving for excitement, and desirous of new things. They
hungered and thirsted after knowledge; they were not content
with the sterile science of the priests. And when it was
discovered that the world of the ancients lay buried in their
soil, they were seized with a mania resembling that of
treasure-seekers in the East, or of the gold-hunters in the New
World.
The elements of the Renaissance were preserved partly in
Rome and the cities of the West, partly in Constantinople, and
partly in the East. The Arabs, when they conquered Alexandria,
had adopted the physical science of the Greeks, and had added
to it the algebra and arithmetic of India. Plato and Aristotle,
Galen and Hippocrates, Ptolemy and Euclid, had been translated
by the Eastern Christians into Syriac, and thence into the
Arabic. But the Arabs had not translated a single Greek
historian or poet. These were to he found at Constantinople,
where the Greek of the ancients was still spoken in its purity
at the court and in the convents though not by the people of
the streets. The Greeks also had preserved the arts of their
forefathers; though destitute of genius, they at least retained
the art of laying on colours, of modelling in clay, and of
sculpturing in stone. The great towns of Italy, desirous to
emulate the beauties of St. Sophia, employed Greeks to build
them cathedrals, and to paint frescoes on their convent walls,
and to make them statues for their streets. These Greek
strangers established academies of art; and soon the masters
were surpassed by their pupils. The Italians disdained to
reproduce the figures of the Greek school, with their meagre
hands, and sharp pointed feet, and staring eyes. Free
institutions made their influence felt even in the arts; the
empire of authority was shaken off. The fine arts spread beyond
the Alps; they were first adopted and nurtured by the Church,
afterwards by the Town. Oil-painting was invented in the North.
Masterpieces of the ancients were discovered in the South. Then
the artists ceased to paint Madonnas, and children, and saints,
and crucifixions. They were touched with the breath of
antiquity; they widened their field; their hands were inspired
by poetical ideas. It is a significant fact that a Pope should
himself conceive the project of pulling down the ancient
Basilica of St. Peter, every stone of which was consecrated by
a memory, and of erecting in its stead a church on the model of
a pagan temple.
The Pope was also urged to set on foot a crusade; not to rescue the
sepulchre from the hands of the infidels, but in the hope that the lost
writings of the Greeks and Romans might be discovered in the East. For
now had arrived the book-hunting age. In the depth of the Dark Ages
there had always been ecclesiastics who drew the fire of their genius
from the immortal works of the pagan writers. There were also
monks who had a passion for translating the writings of the
Greeks into Latin; who went to Constantinople and returned with
chests full of books, and who, if Greek manuscripts could not
otherwise be procured, travelled into Arab Spain, settled at
Cordova, and translated the Greek from the Arabic version,
together with the works of Averroes and Avicenna. The Greeks,
frequently visiting Italy, were invited to give lectures on
their literature, and lessons in their language. The revival of
Greek was commenced by Boccacio, who copied out Homer with his
own hand; and a Greek academy was established at Florence.
Petrarch revived the literature of Rome he devoted his life to
Cicero and Virgil; he wrote the epitaph of Laura on the margin
of the Aeneid; he died with his head pillowed on a book. The
Roman law was also revived; as Greeks lectured on literature in
Italy, so Italians lectured on law beyond the Alps.
And now began the search for the lost. Pilgrims of the antique wandered
through Europe, ransacking convents for the treasures of the
past. At this time whatever taste for learning had once existed
among the monks appears to have died away. The pilgrims were
directed to look in lofts, where rats burrowed under heaps of
parchment; or to sift heaps of rubbish lying in the cellar. In
such receptacles were found many of those works which are yet
read by thousands with delight, and which are endeared to us
all by the associations of our boyhood. It was thus that
Quintilian was discovered, and, to use the language of the
time, was delivered from his long imprisonment in the dungeons
of the barbarians. Lucretius was disinterred in Germany; a
fragment of Petronius in Britain. Cosmo de’ Medici imported
books in all languages from all parts of the world. A copyist
became Pope, founded the Library of the Vatican, and ordered
the translation of the Greek historians and philosophers into
Latin. A great reading public now existed; the invention of
printing, which a hundred years before would have been useless,
spread like fire over Europe, and reduced, by four-fifths, the
price of books. The writings of the classical geographers
inspired Prince Henry and Columbus. The New World was
discovered; the sea-route to India was found. Cairo and
Baghdad, the great broker cities between India and Europe, were
ruined. As the Indian Ocean, at first the centre of the world,
had yielded to the Mediterranean, so now the basin of the
Mediterranean was deserted, and the Atlantic became supreme.
Italy decayed; Spain and Portugal succeeded to the throne. But
those countries were ruined by religious bigotry and commercial
monopolies. The trade of Portugal did not belong to the
country, but to the court. The trade of Spain was also a
monopoly shared between the Crown and certain cities of
Castile. The Dutch, the English, and the French obtained free
access to the tropical world, and bought the spices of the East
with the silver of Peru. And then the great movement for
Liberty commenced. All people of the Teutonic race; the
Germans, the Swiss, the Dutch, the English and the Scotch, the
Danes and the Swedes, cast off the yoke of the Italian
supremacy, and some of the superstitions of the Italian creed.
But now a new kind of servitude arose. The kings reduced the
burghers of Europe to subjection. The constitutional monarchies
of the Middle Ages disappeared. In England alone, owing to its
insular position, a standing army was not required for the
protection of the land. In England, therefore, the
encroachments of the Crown were resisted with success. Two
revolutions established the sovereignty of an elected
parliament, and saved England from the fate of France. For in
that land tyranny had struck its roots far down into the soil,
and could not be torn up without the whole land being rent in
twain. In Spain, despotism might rule in safety over ignorance;
but the French had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, and they
demanded to eat of the Tree of Life. A bread riot became a
rebellion; the rebellion became a revolution. Maddened by
resistance, frenzied with fear, they made their revolution a
massacre. Yet, in spite of mummeries and murders, and
irreligious persecutions; in spite of follies perpetrated in
the name of Reason, and cruelties committed in the
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