WEAKENING OF THE EMPIRE BY THE CRUSADES. 121 English private soldier in comparison with the craftiness and falseness, the ingenuity and persistence in cruelty, of an East- ern sovereign of the worst type- In their way, and accord- ing to their lights, they were religious, by which I mean that they were actuated, not only with a profound belief that the}- were doing a duty which God had appointed them, but that they hated lying and cowardice and cruelty, because they be- lieved them to be sinful. The religion of the West, though allied with numberless superstitions, existed side by side with a sense of dut3 The religion of the East was not only in- volved in an almost equal number of superstitions, but seemed to the Crusaders to be divorced from morality. The great de- fect of the Eastern churches then, as now, was the very slight effect which they exercised upon the conduct of life. Com- paratively indifferent to morality, they were jealously watch- ful of the last iota of what they chose to consider orthodoxy. The Byzantines were ready to spend their time in discussing the attributes of the Unknowable, in arguing upon some shade of meaning to be attached to a phrase in the creed or to the performance of a ceremony. All the intellectual ability of the race seemed, at times, to be spent in subtile hair-splitting. The Western Crusaders could no more hold their own in ar- gument with the Greeks than an English private in presence of a Bengalee. But they could get to the root of the matter, could recognize, in spite of the shower of words with which the Byzantines sought to deceive them, what was right and what was wrong. They lost patience occasionally, and when they saw that their opponents were endeavoring to entangle them in words, boldly told them that they were not to be thus deceived. Man for man, they felt themselves stronger than the Byzantines, and with the contempt of ignorance despised them on account of their wealth and learning. On the other hand, the Byzantines wrote and spoke of them as barbarians, recognized their superiority in strength and energy, but thought of them in return as ignorant men and as fanatics. The disastrous failures of the second and third crusades were attributed, for the most part unjustly, to the intrigues and hostility of the Emperor of the Kew Rome. In the
