And, I would ask Archbishop Lynch, what was the condition of the Byzantine Empire during the thousand years or upwards of its existence?--An empire under the sway of his Church, from its foundation by the first Christian emperor, Constantine--that exemplary Christian murderer who, because the Pagan priests refused him absolution for his enormities, hastened to the bosom of the Christian Church, whose priests he found more pliable, having little compunction or hesitancy about granting absolution to the new proselyte. What is the record of history touching this Empire under the aegis of Catholic Christianity? The historian Lecky thus graphically sets forth its condition:--
"The universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed. Though very cruel and very sensual, there have been times when cruelty assumed more ruthless, and sensuality more extravagant aspects, but there has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all the forms, the elements, of greatness, and none to which the epithet _mean_ may be so emphatically applied. The Byzantine Empire was pre-eminently the age of treachery. Its vices were the vices of men who ceased to be brave without learning to be virtuous. * * * The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides." In speaking of the condition of the Western Empire the same author proceeds:--"A boundless intolerance of all divergence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud, that could favor received opinions. Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only broken by the scrutinizing, innovating and free-thinking habits that accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy. Few men who are not either priests or monks would not have preferred to live in the best days of the Athenian or of the Roman republics, in the age of Augustus, or in the age of the Antonines rather than in any period that elapsed between the _triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century_."