"The Crusades are not, in my mind, either the popular delusions that our cheap literature has determined them to be, nor papal conspiracies against kings and peoples, as they appear to Protestant controversialists; nor the savage outbreak of expiring barbarism, thirsting for blood and plunder, nor volcanic explosions of religious intolerance. I believe them to have been in their deep sources, and in the minds of their best champions, and in the main tendency of their results, capable of ample justification. They were the first great effort of medieval life to go beyond the pursuit of selfish and isolated ambitions; they were the trial-feat of the young world, essaying to use, to the glory of God and the benefit of man, the arms of its new knighthood. That they failed in their direct object is only what may be alleged against almost every great design which the great disposer of events has moulded to help the world's progress; for the world has grown wise from the experience of failure, rather than by the winning of high aims. That the good they did was largely leavened with evil may be said of every war that has ever been waged; that bad men rose by them while good men fell, is and must be true, wherever and whenever the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. But that in the end they were a benefit to the world no one who reads can doubt; and that in their course they brought out a love for all that is heroic in human nature, the love of freedom, the honor of prowess, sympathy with sorrow, {299} perseverance to the last, the chronicles of the age abundantly prove; proving, moreover, that it was by the experience of these times that the forms of those virtues were realized and presented to posterity." [Footnote 25] [Footnote 25: Stubbs, "Seventeen Lectures on Medieval and Modern History," p. 180.]