The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

THEIR NUMBERS AND MANUFACTURING SKILL.HIhill-tops, but soon to descend and gladden the valley. Inthe eleventh and twelfthcenturies manufactures and Christianity,—theloom and the Bible,—went hand in hand, andpromised to achieve the peaceful conquest of Europe, andrescue it from the hands of those pontifical and imperialbarbarians who were doing their best to convert it into anunbroken expanse of solitudes and ruins. These manufacturingand Christian societies took possession of thewhole of the Italian and French provinces adjoining theAlps. The valley of the Rhone swarmed with these busyand intelligent communities. They covered with population,industry, and wealth, the provinces of Dauphine, Provence,Languedoc, and, in short, all southern France. They werefound in great numbers in Lombardy. Their factories,churches, and schools, were spread over all northern Italy.They planted their arts and their faith in the valley of theHhine, so that a traveller might journey from Basle toCologne, and sleepevery night in the house of a Christianbrother. In some of the dioceses in northern Italy therewere not fewer than thirty of their churches with schoolsattached.These professors of an apostolic creed were notedfor leading pure and peaceful lives, for the pains they tookin the instruction of their families, for their readiness tobenefit their neighbours both by good offices and religiouscounsel, for their gift of extempore prayer, and for the largeextent to which their memories were stored with the Wordof God. Many of them could recite entire epistles and gospels,and some of them had committed to memory the wholeof the New Testament. The region which they occupiedformed a belt of country stretching on both sides of theAlps and the Pyrenees, from the sources of the Rhine to theGaronne and the Ebro, and from the Po and the Adriaticto the shores of the Mediterranean. Monarchs found thatthis was the most productive and the most easily governedpart of their dominions. Amid the wars and feudalism thatoppressed the rest of Europe, in which towns were fallinginto decay, and the population in some spots were becoming