THE MILLENNIUM OF MADNESS. 227 



education, flourishing schools of philosophy, poetry, and natural sci- 

 ence. Five hundred years after the triumph of the Gothic conquerors 

 we find their empires groaning under a concentration of all scourges. 

 The day-star of civilization had set in utter night ; the proud nations 

 of the West had sunk in poverty, bigotry, general ignorance, cruel 

 abasement of the lower classes, squalid misery of domestic life, sys- 

 tematic suppression of political, personal, and intellectual liberty. 



How shall we explain that dreadful aphanasia, that thousand years' 

 eclipse of reason and freedom that followed like an unnatural night 

 upon the brightest sunrise in the history of the human race ? A year 

 after the death of the prophetess Sospitra, says the pagan historian 

 Eunapius, her son was one day standing before the temple of Serapis, 

 when the prophetic spirit of his mother fell upon him : " Woe be our 

 children ! " he exclaimed, when he awakened from his trance ; " I 

 see a cloud approaching : a great darkness will fall upon the human 

 race." 



And, verily, that cloud did not come from Olympus or Mount Sinai. 

 The law revealed in the " conservation of forces " holds good in many 

 phenomena of the moral world. Every apparent annihilation of energy 

 is only a metamorphosis of its manifestations, and we can often dis- 

 cover the principle of that metamorphosis by ascertaining the active 

 concomitants of its results. Just as mechanical force can be converted 

 into heat, or heat into electricity, the energy diverted from rural pur- 

 suits may assert itself in political, industrial, or scientific activity. The 

 pent-up vigor of the middle ages had no such outlets. War, now a 

 curse, was then a welcome, but limited, alternative of stagnation ; the 

 lethargy of the dreary intervals was for millions a night without even 

 the starlight of hope. Yet that strange torpor was accompanied by 

 the feverish activity of a novel pursuit a relentless war against the 

 instincts of Nature. The children of freedom-loving ancestors were 

 imprisoned in convents, where bigotry and superstition conspired for 

 the suppression of every natural feeling. Hordes of self -torturing 

 fanatics roamed the land, appalling the wretched peasants by their 

 direful predictions of approaching calamities. Fourteen different or- 

 ders of monastic devotees vied in the systematic mortification of their 

 natural desires, the depletion of their physical and intellectual vigor, 

 the enforcement of health-destroying penances, and reason-insulting 

 dogmas and ceremonies. While science withered to its very roots in 

 the famished love of knowledge, the mania of antiphysics rioted in 

 the production of thousands upon thousands of voluminous manu- 

 scripts devoted to the propaganda of self-torture and self-abasement, 

 and the glorification of Nature-insulting fanatics. Art worshiped at 

 the same shrine. Painters exhausted their fancy in the representation 

 of physical wrecks and ghastly tortures. Winckelmann estimates that 

 hardly one in ten thousand of the plastic masterpieces of a Nature-lov- 

 ing antiquity escaped the fury of the monastic iconoclasts. The war 



