Between the far away past history of the world, and that which lies near
to us; in the time when the wisdom of the ancient times was dead and
had passed away, and our own days of light had not yet come, there lay a
great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition,
of cruelty, and of wickedness.
That time we call the dark or middle ages.
Few records remain to us of that dreadful period in our world’s history,
and we only know of it through broken and disjointed fragments that have
been handed down to us through the generations.
Yet, though the world’s life then was so wicked and black, there yet
remained a few good men and women here and there (mostly in peaceful
and quiet monasteries, far from the thunder and the glare of the worlds
bloody battle), who knew the right and the truth and lived according to
what they knew; who preserved and tenderly cared for the truths that the
dear Christ taught, and lived and died for in Palestine so long ago.
This tale that I am about to tell is of a little boy who lived and
suffered in those dark middle ages; of how he saw both the good and the
bad of men, and of how, by gentleness and love and not by strife and
hatred, he came at last to stand above other men and to be looked up to
by all. And should you follow the story to the end, I hope you may find
it a pleasure, as I have done, to ramble through those dark ancient
castles, to lie with little Otto and Brother John in the high
belfry-tower, or to sit with them in the peaceful quiet of the sunny
old monastery garden, for, of all the story, I love best those early
peaceful years that little Otto spent in the dear old White Cross on the
Hill.
Poor little Otto’s life was a stony and a thorny pathway, and it is well
for all of us nowadays that we walk it in fancy and not in truth.