Pope Urban II., at the end of the eleventh century, showed a great superiority to the age in which he lived, and at the council of Clermont evinced qualities of both the heart and the mind which have deservedly brought his name down to us with honour. His first act in the council was to excommunicate, for adulterous profligacy, Philip, monarch of the very ground on which he stood; and, in so doing, he made use of the only acknowledged authority by which the kings of that day could be checked in the course of evil. Whether the authority itself was or was not legitimate, is not here the question; but, being at the time undisputed, and employed for the best of objects, its use can in no way fairly be cited as an instance either of pride or ambition. The pope's conduct in preaching the crusade is equally justifiable. His views were of course those of the age in which he lived, and he acted with noble enthusiasm in accordance with those views. He made vast efforts, he endangered his person, he sacrificed his ease and comfort, to accomplish what no churchman of his day pretended to doubt was a glorious and a noble undertaking. In thus acting, he displayed great qualities of mind, and showed himself superior to the century in powers of _conducting_, if he was not so in the powers of _conceiving_ great designs. It would be very difficult to prove, also, that the pope, had he even possessed the will, could, by the exertion of every effort, have produced the same effect in any other cause that he did in favour of the crusades. I have already attempted to show that all things were prepared in Europe for the expedition to the Holy Land, by the spirit of religious and military enthusiasm; and the task was light, to aid in pouring on the current of popular feeling in the direction which it had already begun to take, when compared with the labour necessary to have turned that current into another channel. He who does not grasp the spirit of the age on which he writes, but judges of other days by the feelings of his own, is like one who would adapt a polar dress to the climate of the tropics.