Greek wife of the Russian duke persuaded him to adopt her creed, and he was baptized A.D. 987. Mosheim assumes that the Russian people followed their princes of their own accord, since "we have, at least, no account of any compulsion or violence being employed in their conversion" (p. 215); if the Russians adopted Christianity without compulsion or violence, all we can say is, that their conversion is unique. The Danes were converted in A.D. 949, Otto the Great having defeated them, and having made it an imperative condition of peace, that they should profess Christianity. The Norwegians accepted the religion of Jesus on the same terms. Thus the greater part of Europe became Christian, and we even hear a cry raised by Pope Sylvester II. for the deliverance of Palestine from the Mahommedans--for a holy war. Christianity having now become so strong, learning had become proportionately weak; it had been sinking lower and lower during each succeeding epoch, and in this tenth century it reached its deepest stage of degradation. "The deplorable ignorance of this barbarous age, in which the drooping arts were entirely neglected, and the sciences seemed to be upon the point of expiring for want of encouragement, is unanimously confessed and lamented by all the writers who have transmitted to us any accounts of this period of time" (p. 218). In vain a more enlightened emperor in the East strove to revive learning and encourage study: "many of the most celebrated authors of antiquity were lost, at this time, through the sloth and negligence of the Greeks" (p. 219). "Nor did the cause of philosophy fare better than that of literature. Philosophers, indeed, there were; and, among them, some that were not destitute of genius and abilities; but none who rendered their names immortal by productions that were worthy of being transmitted to posterity" (p. 219). So low, under the influence of Christianity, had sunk the literature of Greece--Greece Pagan, which once brought forth Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Zenophon, and many another mighty one, whose fame rolls down the ages--that Greece had become Greece Christian, and the vitality of her motherhood had been drained from her, and left her without strength to conceive men. In the West things were yet worse--instead of Rome Pagan, that had spread light and civilization--the Rome of Cicero, of Virgil, of Lucretius--we have Rome Christian, spreader of darkness and of degradation, the Rome of the Popes and the monks. The Latins "were, almost without exception, sunk in the most brutish and barbarous ignorance, so that, according to the unanimous accounts of the most credible writers, nothing could be more melancholy and deplorable than the darkness that reigned in the western world during this century.... In the seminaries of learning, such as they were, the seven liberal sciences were taught in the most unskilful and miserable manner, and