tially a cheerful body, having for their favorite emblem the serene image of the Good Shepherd, and believing firmly that "grief is the sister of doubt and ill-temper, and beyond all spirits destroyeth man." If in the Middle Ages the Church apparently darkened earth to brighten heaven, it was simply because she took life as she found it, and strove, as she still strives, to teach the only doctrine of compensation that the tyranny of facts cannot cheaply overthrow. The mediæval peasant may have been less badly off, on the whole, than we are generally pleased to suppose. He was, from all accounts, a robust, unreasoning creature, who held his neck at the mercy of his feudal lord, and the rest of his scanty possessions at the discretion of the tax-gatherer; but who had not yet bared his back to the intolerable sting of that modern gadfly, the professional agitator and socialistic champion of the poor. Yet even without this last and sorest infliction, it is probable that life was to him but little worth the living, and that religion could not well paint the world much blacker than he found it. There was scant need, in his case, for disparaging the pleasures
