their princes of their own accord, since "we have, at least, no account
of any compulsion or violence being employed in their conversion" (p.
215); if the Russians adopted Christianity without compulsion or
violence, all we can say is, that their conversion is unique. The Danes
were converted in A.D. 949, Otto the Great having defeated them, and
having made it an imperative condition of peace, that they should
profess Christianity. The Norwegians accepted the religion of Jesus on
the same terms. Thus the greater part of Europe became Christian, and we
even hear a cry raised by Pope Sylvester II. for the deliverance of
Palestine from the Mahommedans--for a holy war. Christianity having now
become so strong, learning had become proportionately weak; it had been
sinking lower and lower during each succeeding epoch, and in this tenth
century it reached its deepest stage of degradation. "The deplorable
ignorance of this barbarous age, in which the drooping arts were
entirely neglected, and the sciences seemed to be upon the point of
expiring for want of encouragement, is unanimously confessed and
lamented by all the writers who have transmitted to us any accounts of
this period of time" (p. 218). In vain a more enlightened emperor in the
East strove to revive learning and encourage study: "many of the most
celebrated authors of antiquity were lost, at this time, through the
sloth and negligence of the Greeks" (p. 219). "Nor did the cause of
philosophy fare better than that of literature. Philosophers, indeed,
there were; and, among them, some that were not destitute of genius and
abilities; but none who rendered their names immortal by productions
that were worthy of being transmitted to posterity" (p. 219). So low,
under the influence of Christianity, had sunk the literature of
Greece--Greece Pagan, which once brought forth Pythagoras, Socrates,
Plato, Euclid, Zenophon, and many another mighty one, whose fame rolls
down the ages--that Greece had become Greece Christian, and the vitality
of her motherhood had been drained from her, and left her without