I have now endeavored to depict the general and more striking features which distinguished society during the Middle Ages coincident with the period of the Hispano-Arab domination. The description, from the limited space allotted to the subject, is necessarily imperfect. Volumes might still be composed on the events and customs of that dismal period whose most prominent characteristic is the intellectual degradation of mankind. The reader cannot have failed to remark, in every instance--whether merely the trifling incidents of private life were affected or whether the interests of extensive kingdoms were involved--the incessant interference as well as the unquestioned predominance of the ecclesiastical power. He cannot but respect, if he is unable to admire, the commanding genius of an organization which could appropriate and utilize with success the profound policy, the consummate skill, the incomparable talents for administration, the heartless selfishness, of its political exemplar and religious prototype, the Roman Empire. He may turn with disgust from its crimes and its horrors; from papal grandeur built upon forgery and maintained by fraud and torture; from the shamelessness of monastic life; from the duplicity of a system which could avail itself of the uncertain caprices and hideous brutality of barbarian kings; from the repulsive chronicles of famous churchmen, with their long catalogue of appalling cruelties, their obscene and portentous legends. But while disapproving of its methods, he must admit its eminent adaptability to secure the end at which it aimed, and acknowledge that since the institution of society no government has ever exercised such a powerful influence over the bodies and minds of men as the Papacy. From that influence no potentate, however great, was free. The reputation of many a mediæval monarch and statesman with posterity is based, in reality, not upon talents and merit, but upon the standing and relations he maintained during his lifetime with the sacerdotal order. In the universal ignorance of mankind, the familiar phenomena of nature contributed to the ascendency of unprincipled charlatans, who based their hopes of success and its necessary incidents, wealth, power, and glory, on the invention and sedulous propagation of falsehood. The personification of everything material and immaterial, the globe of the earth, the sparkling orbs of the visible heavens, the sudden and often unexpected effects of the action of the imponderable agents, the most ordinary operation of nature’s laws, were classed as supernatural manifestations, were engrafted upon religion and received the obsequious homage of fear and superstition. The wily ecclesiastic never forgot that “Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind.”