A feeling of awe comes over us as we approach our task. We cannot but feel that in dealing with the Arab and Jew in Europe, the period that extends from the beginning of the eighth to the end of the fifteenth century, we are dealing with a divine agency, sent into Europe to rekindle and keep alive the sacred fire of intelligence, which, prior to their coming, had been extinguished by the church and by barbarian conquerors. At this era they are the sole depositories of learning. The second and third chapters of this narrative have acquainted us with the terrible stifling mist of ignorance and its concomitants, fanaticism and cruelty and corruption and intense suffering, which hovered over Europe at the time when the people of the Orient had entered it, and began their intellectual unfolding. In the East those centers of learning that had not yet passed away were rapidly declining. Antioch, Alexandria, Bagdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, these cities which in their day had made the light of the East more luminous with their light, had drawn in their rays and sent them forth no more. But the Jew and Arab had wandered into Europe before this intellectual decline, and there they fanned the spark of knowledge they had brought with them into such a brilliant and active life, that its light still illumines our mind, and its genial warmth still cheers our heart. The Jew and the Moor have made Europe their everlasting debtor for their services in bridging the yawning chasm which separates ancient from modern culture. With them, most of that ancient knowledge, for which mankind had toiled diligently and untiringly for thousands of years, would have been lost, and lost forever, and modern knowledge, would have been compelled to begin again at the very alphabet, and we to-day might have been some 2,000 or 3,000 years behind. Without their untiring efforts to disperse the poisonous mists, and force their light upon the people, even at the expense of much suffering, the darkest, and most slothful period of European annals which was co-eval with the highest Jewish and Moorish intelligence before that intelligence made itself felt in Europe, might have still surrounded us to-day. But this is not the time for reflection nor laudation. Hark! Already the doleful knell is tolling, and the people are thronging the public square, and the clergy are chanting hymns of victory and imprecatory formula, and the _autos-da-fe_ are piled up high and dry, and the condemned are impatient, for they long for death, they pray to be released, at last, from the insufferable tortures of the Inquisition, and so we must hasten to our task of recording upon History's pages the wonderful strides the Jews and Moors did make in science and literature and philosophy, before flame and sword and rack and expulsion, silence their voice and obliterate their works forever.