The Sieur de Joinville left a
record of the energy with which the relatively harmless Greek
fire educated and enlarged the French mind in a single night in
the year 1249, when the crusaders were trying to advance on
Cairo. The good king St. Louis and all his staff dropped on their
knees at every fiery flame that flew by, praying -- "God have
pity on us!" and never had man more reason to call on his gods
than they, for the battle of religion between Christian and
Saracen was trifling compared with that of education between
gunpowder and the Cross.
The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a
conscious purpose, was upset by the compass and gunpowder which
dragged and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of
learning. At first, the apparent lag for want of volume in the
new energies lasted one or two centuries, which closed the great
epochs of emotion by the Gothic cathedrals and scholastic
theology. The moment had Greek beauty and more than Greek unity,
but it was brief; and for another century or two, Western society
seemed to float in space without apparent motion. Yet the
attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, and
education became more rapid than ever before. Society began to
resist, but the individual showed greater and greater insistence,
without realizing what he was doing.
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