D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The consequences of that dogma refuted its claims by lessons which mankind is not apt to forget for the next hundred generations. From the day when the doctrine of Antinaturalism succeeded in superseding the lingering influence of pagan philosophy, progressive industry waned, and at last almost ceased to supply even a reduced demand; commerce lingered, and the sources of subsistence were wholly confined to the produce of a more and more impoverished soil. With the exception of (still half pagan) Italy, not one of the many once prosperous countries of Christian Europe had anything like a profitable export trade. On the international markets of the Byzantine empire the products of skilled labor—fine clothes, fine fruits, perfume, and jewelry—were sold by oriental merchants, while the Christian buyers had little to offer in exchange but the spontaneous [[113]]products of Nature: timber, salt, amber, and perhaps hides and wool. Medical science had become such a medley of vagaries and barbarisms that even the princes of Christendom could not boast of a competent family physician, and in critical cases had to trust their lives to the skill of Moorish or Persian doctors. Abderaman el Hakim, a king of Moorish Spain, had so many applications for the services of his court-doctor that he often jestingly called him the “Savior of Christian Europe.” The prevalence of the militant type should certainly have encouraged the manufacture of warlike implements; yet not one of the twelve heavy-armed countries of Trinitarian Europe had preserved the art of tempering a first-class sword, and proof-steel had to be imported from Damascus. The traditions of architecture were limited to the fantastic elaboration of religious edifices; peasants dwelt in hovels, and citizens in dingy stone prisons, crowded into crooked and cobble-paved alleys.
The unspeakable filth of such alleys produced epidemics that almost depopulated the most orthodox countries of medieval Europe. Under the stimulus of clerical theories, those epidemics in their turn produced outbreaks of fanatical superstition, which in pagan Rome would certainly have been ascribed to the influence of a contagious mental disease. Diseases, according to a doctrine which it was deemed blasphemy to doubt, could be averted by prayer and self-humiliation. In spite of a diligent application of such prophylactics, diseases of the most virulent kind became more prevalent. The [[114]]logical inference seemed that prayer had not been fervent and self-abasement not abject enough. Hordes of religious maniacs roamed the streets of the plague-stricken cities, howling like hyenas and lacerating their bodies in a manner too shocking to describe. After exhausting the available means of subsistence, the blood-smeared, wretches would invade the open country, and by frantic appeals frighten thousands of peasants into joining their ranks, and in carrying the seeds of mental and physical contagion to a neighboring country. In Germany and Holland the total number of “Flagellants” were at one time estimated at three hundred and fifty thousand; on another occasion at more than half a million. If the disease had exhausted its fury, the self-torturers would claim the reward of their services by falling like hungry wolves upon the homes of the sane survivors. If the plague refused to abate, the leading fanatics would ascribe the failure to their followers’ want of zeal, and enforce their theory by an indiscriminate application of a rawhide knout, till the dispute was referred to the arbitrament of cold steel, and the ranks of the howling maniacs were thinned by mutual slaughter.