No intermediate shade, atheists reiterate.

Dolorous and exquisite epoch, say the artists and the religious savants.
"What is certain is that the immutable classes, the nobility, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the people, had loftier souls at that time.

You can prove it: society has done nothing but deteriorate in the four centuries separating us from the Middle Ages.
"True, a baron then was usually a formidable brute.

He was a drunken and lecherous bandit, a sanguinary and boisterous tyrant, but he was a child in mind and spirit.

The Church bullied him, and to deliver the Holy Sepulchre he sacrificed his wealth, abandoned home, wife, and children, and accepted unconscionable fatigues, extraordinary sufferings, unheard-of dangers.
"By pious heroism he redeemed the baseness of his morals.