perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to
excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the
just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to
baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history
what it has become. They set up the principle that only a
foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of
the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the
ideas of the present #91.

The mission of that school was to make distant times, and
especially the Middle Ages, then most distant of all, intelligible
and acceptable to a society issuing from the eighteenth century.
There were difficulties in the way; and among others this, that,
in the first fervour of the Crusades, the men who took the Cross,
after receiving communion, heartily devoted the day to the
extermination of Jews. To judge them by a fixed standard, to call
them sacrilegious fanatics or furious hypocrites, was to yield
a gratuitous victory to Voltaire. It became a rule of policy
to praise the spirit when you could not defend the deed. So that
we have no common code; our moral notions are always fluid;
and you must consider the times, the class from which men sprang,
the surrounding influences, the masters in their schools,
the preachers in their pulpits, the movement they obscurely obeyed,
and so on, until responsibility is merged in numbers, and not
a culprit is left for execution #92. A murderer was no criminal
if he followed local custom, if neighbours approved, if he was
encouraged by official advisers or prompted by just authority,
if he acted for the reason of state or the pure love of religion,
or if he sheltered himself behind the complicity of the Law.
The depression of morality was flagrant; but the motives were