But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those safeguards. Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts formed the keystone of the Galilean dogma. The importance of physical welfare was systematically depreciated. The health-laws of the Mosaic code were abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism sanctioned the use of alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay, by the association of that practice with the rites of a religious sacrament. The habit of purchasing mental exaltation—even of a fever-dream—at the expense of the body, agreed perfectly with the tendencies of a Nature-despising fanaticism, and during the long night of the Middle Ages monks and priests vied in an unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly every one of the thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a vineyard and a wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on the upper Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand, and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal vice. As it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing the seeds of bodily diseases which their system of ethics welcomed as conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.