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informed that conscience may be, will in the end be productive 
of good rather than evil. The final result of the Crusades was 
to temper war with the spirit of Christianity. Clemency to 
the vanquished, principles of honour, a high sense of the duties 
which attached to the knightly character, have made war ever 
since those times quite a different thing to what it was before. 
The fantastic institutions of chivalry may provoke a smile ; its 
code may have been sullied by sensuality ; its literature may 
often have ministered to vice; but at least it raised the standaid 
aimed at by the warrior ; it introduced a spirit other than 
brute force into the world, it made tenderness to the weak no 
longer a reproach on manhood, but, on the contrary, the 
highest and noblest duty of a man. True, in the Middle 
Ages this ideal was confined to those in high station, but at 
least it was something to have produced among the descendants 
of the rude barbarians who had made England their own by 
conquest, whose highest virtue was ferocity, whose most con- 
temptible weakness was soft-heartedness, an ideal of the “ very 
perfite, gentile knight ’’ which describes him, brave as he was, 
as u of his port as meeke as was a maj^de/' and notes among 
his chief characteristics that he “no vilanye ne sayde.”* 
Again I ask, what produced this ideal in Chaucer’s age if it 
be not Christianity ? . 
10. But we can best see what influence Christianity has had in 
moulding men’s lives and characters by confining our observa- 
tions to a more limited space. The history of our own country 
shows in a very remarkable manner the effects of the introduc- 
tion of Christianity. The Saxons and English when they first 
invaded this country were what I have just described them, 
pitiless and ferocious beyond description. War was their chief 
delight, peace the one thing which was intolerable, they 
sacked the cities, massacred the inhabitants, and reduced the 
few whom they did spare into the most cruel aud degrading 
servitude. f When they had done fighting with the natives 
they turned their arms against each other ; and for the first 
hundred and fifty years of their sojourn here we read of nothing 
but battles, conspiracies, assassinations, and disorders. Mark 
the change which was effected by Christianity. It was not 
until the West Saxons had become Christians that they effected 
* Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales. 
f Mr. Freeman adopts the view that the massacre was almost universal. 
Mr. Pearson inclines to the idea that the Britons were frequently enslaved. 
I cannot, I confess, understand the introduction of so many British words 
into the English language except on the latter supposition. But if the 
former be the correct view, it only strengthens the argument in the text. 
