one generation or more in the history of those early times; periods which can only be considered as historical exceptions from the general order of things. Even those more comprehensive, and so far more general political institutions, evidently peculiar to those Christian ages, and nowhere else to be found--like the truce of God, which repressed within certain limits the hereditary spirit of feud--or the spiritual chivalry in the orders of the Templars and of the Knights of St. John, consecrated to warfare in the cause of God, and opening as they did, in the time of the crusades, to the same spirit of chivalrous feud a higher path and a more noble career--all these political institutions, I say, springing out of the nature and exigencies of their age, can be understood only by a reference to the circumstances and prevailing spirit of the times, and must therefore be judged as historical peculiarities. As they often sprang up suddenly without a visible or apparent cause, and as if by some high mysterious impulse, so they often sank again as rapidly; and the pure spirit--the true import of such institutions appeared but for a moment, like a silvery gleam; then they degenerated, or were transformed into something totally different. And we must not be astonished at this, since what is best and noblest in man--feeling and its divine quality, is most easily and rapidly impaired, and may sometimes indeed preserve an external vigour, when it has undergone an internal change, and assumed a direction opposed to God and all goodness. There were also particular rulers possessed of an energetic will and a comprehensive understanding, who exercised a wide and commanding, but pernicious influence on their age, and the world; and among these, the most noted were Barbarossa and that secret friend of the Saracens, the emperor Frederick the Second; princes who with some others, must be regarded as the first authors of the great dissension. After this dissension had broken out in the fearful struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and Christendom was divided into two parties; discord became general, pursued its resistless course, and acting in those distracted times like some new destroying law of nature, absorbed all personality and its influence in the general abyss of error, or made it at least less conspicuous.