The Crusades (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: on the mystery of the Incarnation, may ifr some degree have helped to fix the minds of men on the land where the Saviour had lived, and on the several scenes of his ministry; but this alone would never have sufficed to work the revolution which Christianity has manifestly undergone, even before we reach the age of Constantino. The victory won over heathenism, if not merely nominal, was at best partial. The religion of the empire knew nothing of the One Eternal God, who demands from all men a spontaneous submission to his righteous law, and bids them find their highest good in his divine love. That religion rested on the might of the Capitoline Jupiter and the visible majesty of the Emperor; but the real influences which were at work from the first to modify the Christianity of St. Paul lay in the lower strata of society, in the modes of thought and feeling prevalent among the masses who furnished the converts of the first two or three centuries. In these converts we cannot doubt that there was wrought a real change, ?a change manifest chiefly in the conviction that the divine law is binding on all, and that the state of things in the Roman world was unspeakably shameful. In the Jesus whom Paul preached they beheld the righteous teacher who condemned the iniquities of godless rulers and a corrupt people, the avenger of their unjust deeds, the loving Redeemer in whose arms the weary and heavy-laden might find rest, the awful Judge who should be seen at the end of the world on his great white throne, with all the kindreds of mankind awaiting their doom before Him. The personal human love thus kindled in them turned only into a different channel thoughts and feelings which it would need centuries to root out. These thoughts and feelings had been fed by that tendency to localize in...