literature was unknown in Europe for many centuries. The trade in spurious relics, the rapacity and unscrupulousness of the Papacy, the coarseness of the nobles and people, and the general sexual licence of priests and monks were almost incredible.
This dark age began to receive the first rays of new light in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and historians are agreed that the new light came from the civilisation of the Spanish Moors. This it was that, by introducing Greek literature and its Arab commentators, led to the early revival of science. But the cult of the grossest relics and superstitions continued, and the clergy repressed, or inspired rulers to repress, all dissent with more ferocity than ever. During the one general persecution of the early Christians by the Romans about two thousand had suffered for the faith; and only a few hundreds can be added from the earlier sporadic persecutions. But within fifty years of the establishment of Christianity in the Empire, tens of thousands of Donatists, Manichaeans, Arians, Pagans, etc., were done to death, and hundreds of thousands ruined or maltreated, by the triumphant Christians. In later centuries it was the turn of Monophysites, Monothelites, etc., and in the first quarter of the thirteenth century alone more than a million heretics were done to death in Languedoc. If the Jews and witches and others who suffered on religious grounds be added, the “butcher’s bill” of the new religion passes ten millions; and beyond
