But man differs from the brutes in this, that while he can fall lower than they, he can also rise higher, and that even the passions and the impulses which he has in common with them may be subdued, and refined, and modified, till they become the servants and instruments of his human life, and the means by which all that is properly spiritual in his being may be reflected and symbolised upon this earth in outward, visible form. The nobler races of men—the historical races, as they have been called—constantly show this aptitude for contending with these downward tendencies of our nature, and for advancing, through the conquest of them, to new and higher life. And so it was in the Middle Ages. The Church was, no doubt, the great civiliser of the nations: still, whatever aid the State derived from the Church, it then, no less than now, had a position and processes of its own, by which it did its own work of civilisation too. And its first great work for controlling the universal anarchy of which I have spoken was the extension and firm establishment of that half-patriarchal, half-military organisation which we call the Feudal System. Every man who was not rich and powerful enough to be a lord became—willingly or unwillingly—a vassal; and all men, from the king downwards, were bound to each other for reciprocal service and protection—a service and protection partly military, but partly patriarchal, since they were rendered not by men strangers to each other except for what Mr. Carlyle calls ‘the nexus of cash payment,’ but united by ties of family, and neighbourhood, and clanship, and by the interests and sympathies that grow out of these. But the protector of his own vassals easily became the invader of the rights and ravager of the possessions of his neighbour and his vassals; and so the old evils of anarchy and violence grew afresh out of the remedy which had been devised to meet them. The ‘monarchies sank into impotence; petty, lawless tyrants trampled all social order under foot,’ says a learned historian of this period, ‘and all attempts after scientific instruction and artistic pleasures were as effectually crushed by this state of general insecurity as the external well-being and material life of the people. This was a dark and stormy period for Europe, merciless, arbitrary, and violent. It is a sign of the prevailing feeling of misery and hopelessness that, when the first thousand years of our æra were drawing to their close, the people in every country in Europe looked with certainty for the destruction of the world. Some squandered their wealth in riotous living, others bestowed it for the good of their souls on churches and convents; weeping multitudes lay day and night around the altars; some looked forward with dread, but most with secret hope, towards the burning of the earth and the falling in of heaven. Their actual condition was so miserable that the idea of destruction was relief, spite of all its horrors[39].’