The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

The rise of the Dutch Republic must ever be regarded as one of the leading events of modern times.

Thus again the Netherlands, for the first time since the fall of Rome, were united under one crown imperial. They had already been once united, in their slavery to Rome.