intolerance, discord of creeds, religious wars, crusades, inquisitions
and persecutions; as the form of fellowship, chivalry, compounded of
savagery and folly, with its pedantic system of ridiculous false
pretences carried to an extreme, its degrading superstition and apish
veneration for women. Gallantry is the residue of this veneration,
deservedly requited as it is by feminine arrogance; it affords continual
food for laughter to all Asiatics, and the Greeks would have joined in
it. In the golden Middle Age the practice developed into a regular and
methodical service of women; it imposed deeds of heroism, _cours
d'amour_, bombastic Troubadour songs, etc.; although it is to be
observed that these last buffooneries, which had an intellectual side,
were chiefly at home in France; whereas amongst the material sluggish
Germans, the knights distinguished themselves rather by drinking and
stealing; they were good at boozing and filling their castles with
plunder; though in the courts, to be sure, there was no lack of insipid
love songs. What caused this utter transformation? Migration and
Christianity.

_Demopheles_. I am glad you reminded me of it. Migration was the source
of the evil; Christianity the dam on which it broke. It was chiefly by
Christianity that the raw, wild hordes which came flooding in were
controlled and tamed. The savage man must first of all learn to kneel,
to venerate, to obey; after that he can be civilized. This was done in
Ireland by St. Patrick, in Germany by Winifred the Saxon, who was a
genuine Boniface. It was migration of peoples, the last advance of
Asiatic races towards Europe, followed only by the fruitless attempts of
those under Attila, Zenghis Khan, and Timur, and as a comic afterpiece,
by the gipsies,--it was this movement which swept away the humanity of
the ancients. Christianity was precisely the principle which set itself
to work against this savagery; just as later, through the whole of the