Offer to God cross for cross

The Crusader affixed the cross to his shoulder in order that he might “ offer to God cross for cross, passion for passion, and that by mortifying his desires and making himself like unto Christ he might share with him in the resurrection.” To us Jerusalem is an ancient city with more or less sacred or archaeological associations, to be reached easily by steam from Marseilles, and shortly by rail from Jaffa. To the Christian of the twelfth century it was very far distant, the marvel of the earth, and so filled with relics and other memorials of the Divine Life, that it was readily confounded with the heavenly Jerusalem. The crusades, in their practical effect, helped the young nations of the West to shake off their provinciality, to

absorb a part of the civilization of the East, and to think of something better than family or feudal quarrels.

Over by the King of Righteousness

They prevented the civilization of the West from becoming crystallized. They kept alive the great ideal of a kingdom presided over by the King of Righteousness, the Prince of Peace, under whose rule the continual state of warfare, the bloodshed, the treachery, the cruelty, that the Crusaders found among their own people, as among all half-civilized races, should cease. They breathed throughout the Western nations the breath of a common life, furnished them with a high ideal, and gave a great impetus to poetry in Western literature.

As we reach the end of the twelfth century we come to the end of this noble dream. The nations of the West were preparing to reap the harvest of results which had sprung from their efforts, by themselves developing national life, national art, and national literature. The crusading spirit, though it still existed, had lost much of its freshness; and each successive effort made by the forces of Christendom upon the Saracens was made with less fervor, less religions spirit, and less spontaneity than the effort which had preceded it.

During the crusades the men of the West were continually Thecrn«ad brought into contact with the inhabitants of the errs and the New Rome, and with other subjects of the Bvzantine emperor.