ferences of opinion among them to excite a critical mind to examine the matter with some minuteness, in the hope that our observations may somewhat help in the solution of the difficulty. I proceed to state and defend certain opinions adverse to the idea of the beneficiality of the Crusades.

I. The Crusades were founded on, and encouraged a false opinion regarding the conditions of Christian faith.

Faith is a great, noble, and effective force, one of the mightiest movers of men; but force neither is, nor is able to excite or control faith. We cannot believe" on compulsion." Faith is free; it will only change by reason applied to the intellect or love applied to the heart; it cannot be brought about by blows, fire, imprisonment, or fight. To show fight may show faith, but is not very likely to change it. The Crusades were a series of endeavours to work out moral changes and religious reforms, to bulwark and promote Christianity by armed intervention, warfare, and belligerency. They were missionary expeditions to enforce conversion at the point of the sword; they were demands made by fanatical men, upon what, to their enemies, appeared fanciful and false grounds, for territorial concessions consequent on change of faith, which change was sought to be effected by the weapons of the kingdoms of this world. I affirm that it is a most disastrous form of thought to fix in men's minds and to practise among them that intellectual conviction can be effected by force, and that religious change can be brought about in men's minds by the application of war, persecution, and external violence. This is the essence of the principle of persecution; and in so far as the Crusades, directly or indirectly, tended to induce men to admire and to administer force as a means of altering men's faith, they were disadvantageous to social progress.

II. The Crusades were undertaken and persevered in from a superstitious regard for the places of the Holy Land, and so were akin in their origin to idolatry.

The kingdom of God is not meat and drink; neither is it dependent on sanctuaries and holy places, pilgrimages and shrines. The merit of Christianity is that it lives in the heart, and is personal, is independent of place and time. Anything that encourages superstitious. reverences of such a sort as those which Peter the Hermit advocated is inimical to true Christianity and to social progress. We may even point to the long-continued evil influence arising from the superstition about the holy places by noting how much these ideas lay at the root of the disturbances of Europe which resulted in the Crimean war. It cannot be too expressly observed how little local the Christian religion is, and how particular our Lord was in denying to places any sacredness in themselves, making them appropriate for places of worship and associations of worshippers, and this should enable us to see that, in so far as the Crusades tended to induce men to form and to foster ideas concerning sanctities of place, they were creating influences disadvantageous to social progress.

III. The tendency of the Crusades was to build up the Papacy and increase its power. "Among the direct consequences of the Crusades, none is so prominent and undeniable as the advance of papal aggrandizement. This increase of an influence the most obstructive of any to social improvement-the deadliest paralyzer of activity, and the malignant foe of reason-is an evil of such magnitude as is not to be compensated by any accidental good. The eventual triumph of the Gothic mind over this monster mischief may have been collaterally aided by circumstances arising out of the Crusades. But these had not the impellent virtue which is by some ascribed to them. There was nothing more in them than may be found, in a greater or less degree, in the events of all wars, especially those which first brought the barbarian tribes into the abodes of civilization." The power, wealth, luxury, and corruption of the Papacy exercised a most deleterious influence upon the progress of men and nations. During the two centuries through which the Crusades lasted, the power of the Pope was not only confirmed, but enhanced; and not a few of those pernicious adjuncts to its power which most fatally affected social progress were added to it or strengthened by them. This intolerable growth has still a greater amount of préstige from these olden times than it ought.

IV. The Crusades distracted the minds of men from the true causes of social improvement and withdrew men from following out and pursuing those sound schemes of progress and prosperity which alone can lead men to happiness.

The bedazzlement of war always affects civilization for evil; but religious war has a bewildering effect far worse than common warfare. Warriors sought fame and eternal benefit from war, and they impoverished Europe by their demands; they arrogated on their return such special privileges and immunities, and they formed such formidable oppressors, that they greatly impeded the growth of liberty and independence. The glamour of these distant and costly enterprises blinded the eyes of men to the tyranny they employed and fostered, and they invested foreign warfare with glittering attractions, such as have not yet faded from the minds of those who delight in the gorgeous habiliments of soldiery. This sanctifying of bloodshed was greatly the result of the wars of the Crusaders.

V. The Crusades have had the effect of greatly increasing tolerance to military licence and mischief. It is a long time before the influences of the training of centuries is obliterated, and so we inherit from these ages our ideas of a celibate soldiery and camp debauchery.

VI. The Crusades encouraged a reckless disregard for human life, such as the nations have not yet had ability to reform.

It would perhaps be unfair in me, in this opening paper, to cover the entire field of the debate, but I think the dispassionate reader may see enough in what has been said already to make him pause before he accepts unhesitatingly of the affirmation that the Crusades were beneficial to social progress.

M. F. A.

Toiling Upward.

THOMAS COOPER: SHOEMAKER, CHARTIST, AND POET. CHAPTER III.

(Continued from p. 295.)

ON re-entering the prison which he was afterwards to consecrate by noble intellectual work done within its walls, Mr. Cooper found that he was regarded simply as a common criminal, and that books and writing materials were to be withheld. He therefore petitioned the House of Commons for a relaxation of this, to him, great severity of treatment, setting forth his habits of life and the necessity of means for literary occupation. By the intervention of Mr. T. S. Duncombe, M.P., from whom he received gratefully remembered attention and assistance,* and other friends, his request was partially granted, and he obtained liberty to correspond weekly with Mrs. Cooper, who remained at Leicester, and permission to receive his books-political publications alone excepted. "What did I want with them?" Mr. Cooper has said; "I carried my Chartism with me. I wanted Milton and Shakspere,-something for my mind."

By day he occupied a small room, or cell, with a stone floor, at first in conjunction with his fellow-Chartists-Messrs. Capper, Arthur O'Neill, and John Richards. But as their terms of imprisonment expired before his own, he was ultimately the sole tenant of it. It possessed a fireplace; but, when fire was wanted, he had to purchase the wood and coal. For his washing he also had to pay. When pecuniary supplies fell short, and he could not, consequently, obtain fuel, his only resource for warmth was to copy his earlier experience and to wrap himself up in flannels and woollen shirts which some of the Leicester "Shaksperians" had sent. A

In the "Life and Correspondence of the late T. S. Duncombe, M.P.," Mr. Duncombe's son has referred to Mr. Cooper in a manner which can only be termed gratuitously insulting. From a letter of Mr. Cooper to Mr. Thomas Chambers we are permitted to extract the following:-"I suppose I had about £25 from Mr. Duncombe in all, certainly not more. £10 he sent me when my first Chartist paper (at Leicester), the Midland Counties Illuminator, was stopped by corporation influence, and I started the halfpenny Chartist Rushlight, and then the penny Extinguisher; £5 he sent me towards commencing the Commonwealth's-man, and £10 he gave me when I visited him, in the Albany, while out on bail, before I went the second time to prison. That would be in February, 1843."

"His attention to me during my imprisonment was his most noble service to me."-April 8, 1868.

spacious yard, in which a few flowers were cultivated, afforded room for exercise. His sleeping-cell was damp and unhealthy, and the natural consequences of such miserable accommodation were"unutterable agonies from rheumatism, neuralgia, and I had almost said a thousand devilments beside."* Other results of his durance, less to be expected, were a magnificent poem, which, we think, "future generations will not willingly let die," an historical romance, and two volumes of sketches.

The Rev. Mr. Sedger, chaplain of the gaol from May, 1844, to the end of Mr. Cooper's detention, testifies to the quiet, orderly conduct of the Chartist prisoners, and to the meanness and discomfort of their quarters.† Of Mr. Cooper himself he says that studiousness was his special characteristic, reading and writing being his continual occupations. One drawback to the good man's satisfaction with the always respectful and thoughtful worker was his refusal to attend chapel-a result, partly, of now sceptical opinions, partly of some disagreement with the previous chaplain. The latter, perhaps, may have been occasioned by Mr. Cooper-he has himself told the story-having once seized the reverend gentleman forcibly in his surplice, as he was about to step into the reading-desk of the gaol chapel, and demanded that, as a minister of Christ, he should interfere and prevent the magistrates from persevering with their ill-usage-particularly their cruel decree that the prisoner should neither write to his apparently dying wife nor receive a letter from her. But," he adds, "it was too bad; the chaplain was not to blame; he could do nothing in the matter."

66

Such, with a few instances which will be gathered from the "Purgatory" itself, is a picture of Mr. Cooper's exterior prisonlife. We return to its results, and trace the steps of further "toiling upward" by which they were produced.

He had for ten years entertained the idea of writing a work in which the chief personages should be such as had died by their own hands. During the enforced leisure of Mr. Cooper's first confinement in Stafford gaol the purpose took definite form, and a first attempt was made towards its realization. A poem, to be called "The Purgatory of Suicides," was commenced, in blank verse, and exactly one hundred lines, forming a "first book," were written. The following passages will illustrate its form and character:

:

"Of kings and curses, and of priests and lies;

Of human thraldom, and the withered forms

Letter to the Leicester Chartists.

In manuscript "Recollections," written by request of his nephew, Mr. Thomas Chambers, to whom the writer of this sketch is indebted for assistance and much valuable information.

From the original MS., hitherto wholly unpublished.

Of toiling men and wives and weeping babes,-
I thought, and groaned, upon my prison bed,
And strove, with many an anxious throe, to sound
The depths of that unfathomed problem-Why

The many still are slaves unto the few."

The free soul, not suffering like the flesh from the hard bed upon which the body in vain sought restful slumber,

"Discursive, travelled over distant shores

Through ancient times. The spirits of the past,
God-like and glorious, shedding beams of light,
But sudden and fitful-coruscations brief-
Mere meteors gorgeous-fled athwart the dark,
Leaving a track all lucid, but so thin
And fragmentary that my eager eye,
Wearied with following, sank into the gloom-
The mortal gloom profound. Leonidas
Was there a moment-and Thermopyle
Gleamed as if gods three hundred had unveiled
Their sun-like faces on that narrow path."

Of Rome he writes thus,

"The tenfold gloom

Of basest superstition swallowed up
Each streak, each latent glimpse of glory left
Circling the Capitol, its native crown;

And Papal keys, shook o'er th' enervate sons,
Frighted them from their father's heritage-
Immortal freedom-heirloom of the brave."

When Mr. Cooper again entered the gaol, access to his papers was refused; but he had not been long a prisoner for the second time before he resolved to re-write the poem, and, abandoning blank verse, to adopt the grand old resonant Spenserian stanza as the more suitable vehicle for his imaginings. The following extract from a prison journal (unpublished) fixes the date of the recom

mencement :-
:-

"In the evening of the day that the foregoing was scribbled (July 15, 1843) I made an earnest beginning of my long-projected epic, The Purgatory of Suicides,' and up to the present time I have completed sixteen Spenserian stanzas. The commencement I made while in gaol before (in blank verse) being in my trunk, which I am not permitted to have, I was thus prevented from using, and I think it is well that I was. My hope is very strong that I shall, this time, effect my purpose. If I embody my beau idéal, I shall not have lived in vain."

Progress in its composition was steadily made, at an average rate of sixty stanzas monthly; and the whole, in 1,206 stanzas, 10,854 lines, was completed upon the 10th of February, 1845.

So the slow weeks passed by, with little external break to their monotony, but marked in the prisoner's inner life by the fine conceptions which successively arose in his imagination, and his effectual efforts to embody these in sinewy yet harmonious verse. By the aid of the "Purgatory" itself we can see some of the few