ignorance,” says Hallam, “overspread the whole face of the church, hardly broken by a few glimmering lights who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness.... In 992, it was asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, even in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain could address a common letter of salutation to another.” Every deathbed became a harvest-field of clerical vampires who did not hesitate to bully the dying into robbing their children for the benefit of a bloated convent. Herds of howling fanatics roamed the country, frenzying the superstitious rustics with their predictions of impending horrors. Parishioners had to submit to the base avarice and the baser lusts of insolent parish priests, who in his turn kissed the dust at the feet of an arrogant prelate. The doctrine of Antinaturalism had solved the problem of inflicting the greatest possible amount of misery on the greatest possible number of victims. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT. The intellectual interregnum of the Middle Ages, the era of specters and vampires, received the first promise of dawn about the middle of the fourteenth century, when the lessons of the Crusades and the influence of Moorish civilization began to react on the nations of Christian Europe. Yet, by methods of their own, the vampires succeeded in prolonging the dreadful night. They set their owls a-shrieking from a thousand pulpits; they darkened the air with the smoke-clouds of autos-da-fé. They treated every torch-bearer as an incendiary.