It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress
of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be
here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will
had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the
slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and
fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found
capable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moral
anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged
upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those
events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve
it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot
distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have
been incorporated into our popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the
poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest
themselves. The principle of equality had been discovered and
applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the
mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power, produced by
the common skill and labour of human beings, ought to be distributed
among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by him
to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility
to result to all.
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