The shortcomings of the life of the Middle Ages resolve themselves in the main, firstly, to the rudeness of life and absence of material comforts: secondly, to the element of oppression and violence in which men lived; and thirdly, to the. ignorance and superstition which veiled so much of our truth from their minds.
As to the rudeness of life it must be 78 remembered that men do not suffer from the lack of comforts which they have never had before their eyes, and of which they cannot even conceive. Indeed, in our own day, though we can conceive that flying would be a pleasanter method of progression than an express train, nevertheless we are not made unhappy by the fact of our not being able to fly. The sensitiveness of men adapts itself easily to their surrounding conditions, and such inconveniences as may exist in these are not felt by those who consider them unavoidable. It is true that this argument can only be put forward when the shortcomings are not of a nature to degrade those who have to bear them; but it must be admitted that there is no degradation in mere external roughness of life. For the rest, though it would be a shock for the modern man to be transplanted, without preparation, into mediæval conditions, the mediæval man in his turn would probably be as ill at ease amid the “comforts” of modern London.
Another consideration is far more 79 serious than this, and far more calculated to shake our complacency in modern civil1sation, to wit that whatever advantages we have gained over the Middle Ages are not shared by the greater part of our population. The whole of our unskilled labouring classes are in a far worse position as to food, housing, and clothing than any but the extreme fringe of the corresponding class in the Middle Ages.
Let us look next at the ignorance and superstition of the Middle Ages. In the main this ignorance meant a naiveté in their conceptions of the universe, which was partly a survival of the animism of the earlier world.