when the Duke of Lorraine told them
how, in peaceful villages, his people went about hanging and torturing
all the women, even to the old .... In the twelfth century, wives
and daughters were not allowed to be good and wise; they had no
right to be held in any respect. Their honour was not their own.
Serfs of the body - such was the cruel phrase cast for ever in
their teeth" (Michelet.) The Middle Ages were a cruel, an accursed
time - a time big with despair. The last thing the poor cared
for was to heighten their poverty, to bring one more wretch into
the world, to give another serf to their lord. What changed all
this? what caused this living hell to give signs of the prospect
of heaven ? "It was the advent of Reason." By means of Kepler,
of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, there was in the seventeenth- century
triumphantly enthroned the reasonable dogma of faith in the unchangeable
laws of nature. Miracle for the time dared no longer show itself,
or, when it did dare, it was hissed down. In other and better
words, the fantastic miracles of mere whim had vanished, and in
their stead was seen the mighty miracle of a the universe more
regular and, therefore, more divine. Men once again had faith
in God, saw that He lives - aye, and lives harmonious - in the
grand stability of laws that govern alike the stars and the deep-hidden
mystery of life. Naturally, the old superstitious die hard, but
one by one, they must succumb to Reason. The anti-natural is growing
dim, nor is the day far off when its eclipse will bring back daylight
to the earth, and men I will at last understand what God is, when
they see what the world might be.
