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46 POLITICAL CONSEQUENCESnear connexion with political, but,even ifthe union of thestate with itsacknowledged forms of worship were lessstrict, these could seldom be overthrown without entailingthe fall of more than can be originally foreseen.Who shall define the channel of the torrent which hasburst its bed ? or who sets limits to the earthquake?But however awful these shocks may be, it is by themmore especiallythat the fortunes of our race are determined. The moral, like the physical world, owes its purification and its maintenance to the storms which sweep overit. But centuries and their generations must pass away, before the operation of them is so fully developed as to allowthe dim eye of human intelligence to embrace and givejudgment upon the full extent of their results. And whenthis time at length arrives, when the inquirer at lastmayfairly enter upon his task, what occasion could he select, onwhich it would be more becomingto feel diffident of his ownpowers, and to bear continuallyin mind that his horizon isat best but of scanty extent, and that to review the unlimiteduniverse of the history of man belongs only to a Being himself illimitable ?Since the fall of the Roman empire tnade wayfor theerection of the states of modern Europe, this portion of theworld has witnessed three revolutions such as we have described. The deep degradation of its inhabitants during themiddle ages is chiefly attributable to the want, for many centuries, of an impulse which might call the minds of men,and not merely their bodies, into activity. Hence that overwhelming barbarism which in the tenth and eleventh centunfesthreatened to extinguish the last gleams of civilization,till at tibe close of the latter the Crusades were set on foot,aai awsfcened the decaying spirit of mankind from theshm&er which threatened to be its last. These expeditions,dtkragli fruitless in their immediate event, laid the foundation of a new order of things in Europe, Owingto themthe peasantry was freed, although neither quickly nor universally, from the bondage of the feudal law and;while theyoung Muse of the Knighthood was gathering boldnessto utter its conceits in castle and hall, they gradually, byibe commerce which they brought to Europe, were the-f frfdHfehiog k her towns that class of free eiti*