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Forgery In Christianity
CHRISTIAN “SCIENCE” “The Church, far from hindering the pursuit of the sciences, fosters and promotes them in many ways.” (CE. xiii, 609.)The Middle Ages, as generally understood, “is a term used to designate that period of European history between the Fall of the Roman Empire and about the middle of the fifteenth century,” (CE. x, 235),—the era of the discovery of printing,—a full thousand years. The highly significant and evidently unstudied explanation is made: “The Middle Ages have become an interlude, clearly bounded on both extremities by a more civilized or humane idea of life, which men are endeavoring to realize in politics, education, manners, literature, and religion.” (CE. xii, 765.) Those two clearly bounded extremities are the Pagan civilization of the dying Roman Empire and the secular, skeptical, rationalistic “Renaissance of Knowledge,” which CE. clerically complains embodied “the ideas and spirit of classic paganism.” (i, 34.) We have just seen that during this Millennium “thoroughly saturated with Christianity” there was, in Christendom, no literature, other than theological treatises, monkish chronicles and Saint-tales, and no science of whatever category,—except “sacred science” or theology: “Theology is the very science of faith itself” (CE. xiii, 598); and we have seen to what intellectual status that sacred science led the human mind. The zeal with which the Church pursued its propagation of the Faith as the central feature of its educational system, with all other branches of human knowledge as an indifferent “side line,” we have noted, in the language of the ecclesiastical scientists. The Church maintains that it “fosters and promotes sciences in many ways,” and inferentially always has encouraged and protected science in all its manifold forms of utilitarian humanism. But Holy Church has some naive notions of science and of the ecclesiastical limitations imposed upon it. While thus fostering and promoting the sciences, “Yet”, says CE., “while acknowledging the freedom due to them, she tries to preserve 289 them from falling into errors contrary to Divine doctrine, and from overstepping their boundaries and throwing into confusion matters that belong to the domain of faith”! (Vatican Decrees, Sess. III, De Fide, ch. 4; CE. xiii, 609.) The priestly principle of the subordination of scientific fact to dogmatic faith is thus naively posed: “Science is limited by truth, which belongs to its very essence. Should science ever have to choose between truth and freedom (a choice not at all imaginary), it must under all circumstances decide for truth, under the penalty of self-extermination. ... Ethics is more important for mankind than science. Those who believe in revelation, know that the Commandments are the criteria by which men will be judged.Than this last sentence, a more palpable and ridiculous untruth has never been uttered by the clerical Liars of the Lord. No single scientific fact ever discovered and proclaimed, in all the struggling history of Science in defiance of Church, has ever been “revised,” altered or withdrawn in deference to religious Dogma. Every fact of science has proudly and triumphantly defied and refuted Dogma and Church, and made them both cheap and ridiculous. Faith hates facts; they are forever divorced on grounds of congenital incompatibility. The Church, True Church, and Protestant, has screamed and reviled at every truth of Science which was ever discovered; with high priestly anathema, the curse of God, with prison, rack, and stake, it has sought to suppress and kill every thought of the human mind, every bold thinker, whose truths for the benefit of mankind have contradicted and ridiculed it and its holy dogmas. Every single one; I challenge the production of a solitary instance of exception. The catalogue is too vast to even summarize here; for details and proofs the monumental works of Dr. Andrew D. White, The Warfare between Science and Theology, and Dr. John W. Draper's Conflict between Science and Religion,—(the latter on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books), may be profitably consulted and are cheerfully recommended in refutation of this example of priestly mendacity. We have read what happened to that “singular exception,” the Irish monk Bishop Vergilius. But let the false pretense be exposed by a few examples given by the American apologist for “the Holy See, deservedly known as the nursing mother of schools and universities,” such as we have above admired. Until these “universities” began, about the year 290 1211 (CE. xii, 766) of the Christian epoch, no one had dared to think; Christendom was too steeped in ignorance and credulity to think. These Middle Ages, says CE. (xii, 38), were “a civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity,” and therefore incapable of scientific thought or feeling. “All Greek learning [had been] lost for a thousand years in Western Christendom. ... The loss of Greek authors and the decline of Church Latin [as well as the Latin Church] into barbarism were misfortunes in a universal ruin.” (CE. xii, 765.) But men's minds could not forever be kept in the chains of priestly dominance; Gulliver began to wake and rouse and to struggle against the multiplied strands of theological cobwebs with which the Lilliputs of Faith had fast bound him while in his millennial sleep of the Christian Dark Ages of Faith. “Under these circumstances,” admits CE,. “a revival of learning so soon as the West was capable of it, might have been foreseen.” (CE. xxi, 765.) The Church was keen and hostile, and did forsee what was coming. The first University was founded in 1211; in identically that time the Holy Inquisition was established by His Holiness Innocent III to guard against heretics and “other innovators.” “The taking of Constantinople in 1204, the introduction of Arabian, Jewish, and Greek works into the Christian schools, the rise of the universities—these are the events which led to the extraordinary intellectual activity of the thirteenth century. ... Even in the Christian schools there were declared Pantheists ... who bade fair to prejudice the cause of Aristotelianism. These developments were suppressed by the most stringent disciplinary measures during the first few decades of the thirteenth century. ... Roger Bacon demonstrated by his unsuccessful attempts to develop the natural sciences the possibilities of another kind which were latent in Aristotelianism.” (CE. xiii, 548, 549.) Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the “Doctor Mirabilis,” whose “attempts to develop the natural sciences” were so drastically suppressed, was the genius of the dawning “Revival of Learning”—the Renaissance. He wrote over eighty books, a number of the most important in a secret cryptogram for fear of the ecclesiastical consequences—which he finally suffered. “It is in these treatises that Bacon speaks of the reflection of light, mirages, burning-mirrors, of the diameters of the celestial bodies and their distances from one another, of their conjunction and eclipses; that he explains the laws of ebb and flow, proves the Julian calendar to be wrong; he explains the composition and effects of gunpowder, discusses and affirms the possibility of steam-vessels and aerostats, of microscopes and telescopes, and some other inventions made many centuries later. ...‘Pope Nicholas IV, on the advice of many brethren condemned and rejected the doctrine of the English brother Roger Bacon, Doctor of Divinity, which contains many suspect innovations, by reason of which Roger was imprisoned' 12 or 14 years” (CE. xiii, 112), until death released him from the strangling clutches of the “nursing-mother of schools and Universities,”—which always “encourages Science”! Roger's great German contemporary “Blessed Albertus Magnus” (c. 1206-1280), was “accused of magic and of neglecting the sacred sciences. ... Albert respected authority and traditions, was prudent in proposing the results of his investigations. ... sometimes he hesitates and does not express his own opinion, 291 probably because he feared that his theories, which were‘ advanced' for those times—[when Church was “far from hindering the pursuit of the sciences”],—would excite surprise and occasion unfavorable comment.” Among the products of his “magic,” Blessed Albert “gives an elaborate demonstration of the sphericity of the earth. ... More important than Albert's development of the physical sciences was his influence on the study of philosophy and theology.‘ All inferior (i.e. natural) sciences should be servants (ancellas) of Theology, which is superior and the mistress' (Aquinas).” (CE. i, 265-6.) Thus the Church thwarted and prevented what would have been the much earlier “triumph of scientific discovery, with which, as a rule, ... the seats of academic authority had too little sympathy.” (CE. xiii, 549.) The criminal ignorance and bigotry of the Church are nowhere more convincingly evident than in its repression of medical science through the ages when pestilence and plague swept unchecked through Christendom, while holy priests and monks chanted litanies and scared devils as the sole means of staying the ravages of Disease and Death. Listen to the same old story: “Modern medical science rests upon a Greek foundation. ... The secret of the immortality of Hippocrates rests on the fact that he pointed out the means whereby medicine became a science. ... Hippocratic medical science celebrated its renascence in the eighteenth century. ... Arabian medical science forms an important chapter in the history of the development of medicine, [largely] because it preserved Greek medical science. ... With the decline of Arabian rule [and Christian rise, in Spain]—began the decay of medicine. ... In 1085 Toledo was taken from the Moors, and Spain became the transmitter of Arabian medicine.” Here comes in the first medical scientist to defy the Church and escape its Holy Inquisition. Vesalius (born 1511), became physician to the Emperor Charles V; “his eagerness to learn went so far that he stole corpses from the gallows to work on at night in his room. ... The supreme service of Vesalius is that he for the first time [in 1500 years of Church cherishing of Science], with information derived from the direct study of the dead body, attacked with keen criticism the hitherto unassailable Galen, and thus brought about its overthrow. Vesalius is the founder of scientific anatomy and of the technique of modern dissection. Unfortunately, he himself destroyed a part of his scripts on learning that his enemies intended to submit his work to ecclesiastical censure”! (CE. x, 123-130, passim.) Indeed, “at that era a scholar ... who generally struck out so many new ideas in opposition to the commonly held opinion, could easily be accused of heresy. So many of his relations with Protestant scholars appeared suspicious. ... Personally he avoided expressing his opinion, in order not to fall under suspicion of heresy”! (CE. xv, 379.) In defiance of the ban of the Holy Ghost on dissection and anatomy, Vesalius dissected the stolen corpses: his work disproved the Luz, or “Resurrection Bone,” the nucleus of the heavenly restoration of the human body, and disclosed that Adam's missing rib, lost since Eve was carved from it some 4500 years previously, was still there. These impious refutations of the Church's sacred science so enraged the clerical savants that it required all the efforts of the Emperor to save his great physician from the Dogs of the Lord and the Holy Inquisition. 292 A word only may be added on the highly significant question of hospitals and asylums in the Ages of Faith. “The idealism of medieval theological beliefs led to the founding of orphan asylums and hospitals. But the impracticability and‘ other-worldliness' of the Middle Ages prevented effective treatment of the diseases of the inmates. Such hospitals were merely dark, crowded, and unsanitary places of refuge for the needy and sick, who received no rational medical attention. ... The Middle Ages, which some profess to admire, were in reality times of low civilization.” For a shocking account of the hospitals, lying-in dens and insane pens of medieval Christian idealism, reference must be made to Dr. Henry W. Haggard's Devils, Drugs and Doctors; (cf. CE. vii, 492; x, 125). Such as these miserable lazzaretti were, they were for the superstitious Faithful only: “The bigoted Pius V actually directed that no medical assistance should be given to any person who declined spiritual attendance”! (Macaulay, Const. Essays; Church and State, p. 136.) But for the benighted theological repression of thought and of discovery of the secrets and powers of Nature, here barely hinted, the germs of modern science and invention which lay latent and struggling in the fertile minds of these great pioneers, would have quickly developed and would have recreated civilization and enriched humanity centuries before they did, when Holy Church got too feeble and discredited longer to enchain the minds of men. But, as it was, the “sacred science of Christianity” must be protected by force and proscription against the facts and knowledge of Nature and the quickening minds of men. To guard its precious Bible “revelations,” the Church upheld the Bible and forced all men to close their minds when they opened its sacred pages. At last, Galileo fitted two bits of glass into an old Church organ-pipe, poked it at the “firmament of heaven” which had cost Jehovah a whole day's work, and, Lo! the whole of the “sacred science” of the Church collapsed into universal ruin! The truth of God's revelation became an exploded myth, and its inspired Bible a book of Fable. The holy Church screeched in terror its unholy anathemas. “What, more than all,” confesses the CE., “raised alarm [over the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo], was anxiety for the credit of Holy Scripture, the letter of which was then universally believed to be the supreme authority in matters of SCIENCE, as in all others.” (CE. vi, 344.) The Church made monstrous efforts to murder the new thought: “we know from the calendar of saints and other sources how much had been done to cheek the wild license of thought and speech in the Peninsula. Giordano Bruno, renegade and pantheist, was burnt in 1600; Campanella spent [27] long years in prison. The different measures meted out to Copernicus by Clement VII and to Galileo by Paul V need no comment [its shame chokes the Church]! The papacy aimed henceforth at becoming an‘ ideal government under spiritual and converted men.'” (CE. xii, 768.) The Church missed this aim; but with the unholy aid of its Holy Inquisition, which in 1542 it declared to be “the supreme tribunal for the whole world” (CE. xiii, 137), and its sacred “Index of Prohibited Books,” instituted in 1557, it murdered men and thought for yet several centuries. The up-to-date edition of 1929 closes the minds of the “Faithful” to over 5,000 books of the highest intellectual merit—as partially catalogued in the news dispatches. (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Nov. 11, and Dec. 1, 1930). This 293 precious Proscription for preserving the “purity and genuineness of her Apostolic doctrine” intact for the “guileless and innocent hearts” of the Babes of Faith, and to prevent them from learning anything which might put them “on inquiry” as to the “purity and genuineness” of these holy “Apostolic” myths, includes the immortal works of Gibbon, Sterne, Dumas, Victor Hugo, our own Dr. Draper, Anatole France, La Fontaine, Lamartine, Balzac, Rousseau, Steele, Addison, Talleyrand, Henry Hallam, Voltaire, Zola, Maeterlinck—(this my Book will probably be added by special Decree);—in a word every book by—(mine excluded)—the brilliant and fearless thinkers of the world who have scorned Holy Church, and have been laureated by winning inclusion in this Holy Index of Inspired Ignorance. It is a vain and foolish gesture of Bigotry, defeating its own malicious purpose: “Prohibited Books illuminate the world; words suppressed or condemned are repeated from one end of the world to the other,” as Emerson admirably has expressed. But no wonder that “a [Faithful] Christian child knows more of the important truths [of a certain brand] than did Kant, Herbert Spencer, or Huxley,” as is the “sour grapes” sneer of CE. (xiii, 607) at those whose minds are free to seek and find the truths of Nature and work from them true Miracles of Science; for the boundless benefit of Man. This enlightened Index, established at the behest of the Holy Ghost for keeping men ignorant, dates from the foundation of the Faith; it deserves a word of admiration, which may be spoken by its learned apologist: “Before the art of printing was discovered, it sufficed to burn a few manuscript copies to prevent the spreading of a doctrine. So it was done at Ephesus in the presence of St. Paul (Acts xix, 19). It is known that the other Apostles, the Fathers of the Church, and the Council of Nice (325) exercised the same authority; [citing] the various censures, prohibitions, and indexes issued by cities, universities, bishops, provincial councils, and popes, through the Christian centuries.” (CE. xiii, 607.) Who wonders that they were “The Dark Ages”? With the final childish, senile sneer of the Church we will. dismiss this phase of examination of the paralyzing efficiency of Faith. Says our guardian of the archaic fossils embedded in the Rock of Faith: “It is true, the believer is less free in his knowledge than the unbeliever, but only because he [which one?] knows more. Hence it is, that a well-instructed Christian child knows more of the important truths than did Kant, Herbert Spencer, or Huxley. Believing scientists—[a self-stultification] do not wish to be free-thinkers just as respectable people do not wish to be vagabonds”! (CE. xiii, 607.) So be it! But the vagabonds of Freethought are those who, at infinite cost of torture and blood, through all the centuries of Creed and Crime of the Church, and in heroic scorn of the Church and her “sacred science,” have made our dearly-earned civilization what even it is to-day. Step by step, from contest to ultimate conquest, in every single conflict of Fact with Faith, the Church has been defeated and has retreated—put to shaming rout. It has been a slow and tortuous progress,— “For faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last”! 294But fantastic Faith has wondrous powers of “accommodation” and specious tenacity of false pretense of being forever inspiredly right. The process of adjustment has throughout a thousand instances been the same: Faith is confronted with a discrediting Fact; it curses it and denies it. When the fact is crammed down its throat and it is forced to recognize it, it lyingly denies that it had ever denied it. Then when all mankind has united in joyful acceptance of the new fact, the arch hypocrite declares that it is entirely in accord with its “sacred science,” and tries to steal all credit for it as one of its very own grand contributions to “Christian civilization,” and sanctimoniously wheezes, “How much grander a concept it gives of the infinite knowledge and glory of Gawd in His wonderful process of Nature”! Oh, Hypocrisy! Thou art the Church of God! “Semper eadem”—lying and shameless! A thrilling retrospect, and inspirational look into the Future, are thus expressed: “It is to scientific devotion more than to any other cause that man owes his present position on a new earth and under new heavens. Nothing else has so immeasurably enlarged his conception. Everywhere his experiments have opened up stretches of infinity ... Personified Science might indeed be proud to have begun so humbly and to have achieved so much. By the use of her method men have weighed the planets as in scales, they have read the secrets of the animal and vegetable world. They have discovered‘ what is in man,' not wholly, but in some large and wonderful degree. Instead of the burnt-out lamp of dogmatism Science has given to humanity‘ the light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.' In an effort to minimize drudgery and misery her great discoveries have attained to concrete availability in useful arts that have remade the world and increased immeasurably the comfort of men and their joy. ... Scientific devotion has broadened the horizon of man at every step. In the course of time humanity must leave the shrines of its cherished idols behind and push steadily on! Sensing the poetic nature of this truth, James Russell Lowell spoke in verse to those of his fellow men who could understand: ‘New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws which in our father's times were best; And, doubtless, after us, some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men then we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.'” ...In glorious contrast to the murderous principles, and practices of Faith— “Reason did never sentence or condemn Faith to the torture. Freedom all she claims For larger understanding of her aims; Hers no evasion, sleight, or stratagem, But only fearless quest our ignorance to stem.” 295 THE REBIRTH OF CIVILIZATION GULLIVER AWAKES “The RENAISSANCE—the achievements of the modern spirit in opposition to the spirit which prevailed during the Middle Ages”! (CE. xii. 765.)During the Dark Ages of Faith men were born into the world with the same capacities and potentialities of intellect as were the Sages of Greece and the Jurisconsults and Statesmen of Rome. The poles are not farther apart, however, day and night not more different in volume of light, than the prechristian and Christian eras in point of intellectual product. Why so vast a difference? Simply—that the pre-Christian mind was free, and explored unfettered and unafraid the boundless zones of Nature, in search of the Supreme Good and the practical benefits to be wrung from the world in which Pagan man lived for the benefit of himself and of his kind: while the Christian mind was bound by what it regarded as revealed Truth and shackled by theology and priestcraft, which closed every highway and bypath of approach to Nature with the warning sign: “No Thoroughfare. Moses.” “When one has once believed, search should cease,” as Father Tertullian said. The ban of Eden—”Of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge thou shalt not eat,” was enforced by the Priest by ecclesiastical censorship and burning of books, by the Inquisition of Faith, the Index, the rack, the stake. The ingrained aim and end of Man was Heaven; for that other-worldly destiny alone was he taught and trained; that was the whole Christian scheme of education and outlook on life; the things of this world were contemned and ignored. Through these Ages of Faith two careers only were open to men—priestcraft and military. With rarest exception only clerical persons could read or write; the great masses of the peoples were utterly illiterate, ignorant, superstitious, devout slaves of priestcraft; their civil status serfs; they lived in filth and squalor unbelievable, wearing their coarse fabric or leathern garments until they rotted off their unwashed bodies, the victims of disease, plagues and famines which often killed off near half the population, and aided by wars and rapine incessant, greatly incited and waged by the political Church to further its corrupt greed and ambition, keep the squalid population of Europe at a standstill, so that it took a century to double the miserable masses, fed on black rye bread and slops, and on lying saint-tales, martyr-myths and forged relics for increase of stupid and credulous devotion to its faithless Faith and Priests, the while they were brutalized and kept savage by the almost daily free spectacles furnished by Holy Church of public torturings and burnings by slow priest-set fires of countless heroic men and women who were unafraid to despise and defy the priests. Faith thus flourished on ignorance and credulity, which the Church diligently fostered and exploited for its unholy purposes of wealth and power, of rule by ruin. As none but priests could read and write, while kings and public men were mere soldiers and illiterates, and public business must be carried on through written documents, the public offices of State, from the King's chancellor and ambassadors to the lowliest clerks, were priests, and thus Priestcraft and Church increased 296 their sinister power and dominance and wealth. These facts explain the sinister motive of the priestly monopoly of literacy, and fully account for the crass ignorance of Christendom which the vaunted Teaching Mission of the Church entailed. BENEFIT OF CLERGY For a long dark span of centuries Holy Church, as sole and unique, Divinely inspired and guided Teacher of Christendom, plied the gentle art of Pedagogy for the Faithful. The net result of the intellectual efforts of the Inspired Teacher may be summed up and made luminous by a couple of descriptions of the wonderful “benefit of clergy” as a Teaching Institution. Says first Dr. James Harvey Robinson: “For six or seven centuries after the overthrow of the Roman government in the West [476], very few outside of the clergy ever dreamed of studying, or even of learning to read and write. Even in the Thirteenth Century an offender who wished to prove that he belonged to the clergy in order that he might be tried by a church court, had only to show that he could read a single line; for it was assumed by the judges that no one unconnected with the church could read at all. It was therefore inevitable that all the teachers were clergymen, that almost all the books were written by priests and monks, and that the clergy was the ruling power in all intellectual, artistic, and literary matters—the chief guardians and promoters of civilization. Moreover, the civil government was forced to rely upon churchmen to write out the public documents and proclamations. The priests and monks held the pen for the king. Representatives of the clergy sat in the king's councils and acted as his ministers; in fact, the conduct of government largely devolved upon them.” (Robinson, The Ordeal of Civilization, pp. 157-8.) This “benefit of clergy,” in the legal sense in which it is above used, and the degraded state of ignorance which gave occasion for it and the presumptions of the clergy enforcing it, are defined and explained by the clergy: “Benefit of Clergy.—The exemption from the jurisdiction of the secular courts, which ... was accorded to clergymen. ... When a clerk was brought before a court, he proved his claim to benefit of clergy by reading, and he was turned over to the ecclesiastical court, as only the clergy were generally able to read. This gave rise to the extension of the benefit of clergy to all who could read. [It is added, for historical interest]: The privilege of benefit of clergy was entirely abolished in England in 1827. In the Colonies it had been recognized, but by Act of Congress of 30 April, 1790, it was taken away in the Federal courts of the United States. Traces of it are found in some courts of different States, but it has been practically outlawed by statutes or by adjudication.” (CE. ii, 446-7.) All this serves to confirm the truth of the statement, that the Church and the clergy imposed and perpetuated Ignorance as the basis of their sordid greed for power and control over the Ignorant. THE CRIMINAL CRUSADES STARTED THE REVOLT But—for a wonder under such conditions, and after a thousand years, a slow but portentous change began to manifest itself in sodden Christendom. Note this pregnant statement: “Up to this time (1250) almost wholly absorbed in the supernatural, [men 297 now] took more interest in worldly things. Unconditional renunciation of the world came to an end, and men grew more matter-of-fact and practical.” (CE. vi, 493.) As the result of this “extraordinary change ... education found its way among laymen, and it developed trade.” (Ib.) This confirms the fact that only priests could read and write or had any sort of “education,” in all those Church-taught ages when “scholar and priest meant one and the same thing.” Indeed, it is stated: “Only the clergy were generally able to read.” (CE. ii, 446.) About that time it was that the feeling of nationality first began to stir in minds of civil rulers and of people able to realize the imperial schemes of Holy Church for one great Empire under the rule of the Vicar of God. To forestall and check this dangerous restlessness of peoples, Kings, and nascent nationality, the Church devised that since time-honored scheme of joining restless factions in war on some common enemy, thus to avert domestic difficulties: here was born the gigantic folly and crime of the Crusades, for the pretended rescue of the empty and apocryphal “Sepulchre of Christ from the Infidel.” This titanic scheme and its purposes are naively thus confessed: “The idea of the Crusades corresponds to a political conception which was realized in Christendom only from the eleventh to the fifteenth century: this supposes a union of all peoples and sovereigns under the direction of the popes. ... The history of the Crusades is therefore intimately connected with that of the popes and the Church. These Holy Wars were essentially a papal enterprise. The idea of quelling all dissensions among Christians, of uniting them under the same standard and sending them forth against the Mohammedans was conceived in the eleventh century, at a time when there were as yet no organized states in Europe.” (CE. iv, 543, 556.) A more gigantic crime and overwhelming failure of ambitious design was probably never recorded in history. But far different and more transcendent results for civilization were brought about. Indeed, the Crusades were the beginning of European civilization. Says CE.: “The Crusades brought about results of which the popes had never dreamed, and which were perhaps the most important of all. They reestablished traffic between the East and West which, after having been suspended for several centuries, was then resumed with even greater energy; they were the means of bringing from the depths of their respective provinces and introducing into the most civilized Asiatic countries Western knights, to whom a new world was thus revealed, and who returned to their native land filled with novel ideas. ... Moreover, as early as the end of the twelfth century, the development of general culture was the direct result of these Holy Wars. ... If, indeed, the Christian civilization of Europe has become universal culture, in the highest sense, the glory redounds, in no small measure, to the Crusades”! (CE. iv, 556.) “The original aim of the Crusades, it is true, was not attained. But the civilization of Western Europe gained from the Orient the best the East had to give and thus was greatly aided in its development” (CE. v, 612). The yet quasi-barbarian rulers and rabbles of Christendom were thus brought into direct contact with a real civilization; had their first glimpse of Arabian culture and civilized refinements of life, saw the men with whom they were in deadly conflict who were vastly their superiors in every ideal and practical accomplishment, and infinitely more humane. One instance will illustrate the difference between Christian brutality and Moslem humanity. When the Christian 298 Crusaders of Christ captured Jerusalem in 1099 and rushed in to rescue the tomb of their dead God from the Infidel, the streets of the Holy City ran with human blood up to the horses' bridles; “the Christians entered Jerusalem from all sides [July 15, 1099] and slew its inhabitants regardless of age or sex”! (CE. iv, 547.) When nearly a century later (September 17, 1187), Saladin and his “Infidel hosts” recaptured the City and overthrew the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, not a murder nor act of violence or outrage was committed on the inhabitants, and the murderous hordes of Christ were allowed to depart in peace. The Christians began to learn what civilization was. Thus “ the Crusades—those magnificent expeditions which, inspired and supported by the Church, brought huge masses of people into contact with the Orient. ... They were the means of spreading ... the theories and methods of Arabian scholarship, at that time quite advanced, and thereby placing the researches of Western scholars on entirely new bases, and putting before them new aims and objects.” (CE. vi, 448.) An immense confession of Christian failure!
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