hine of brass, forced by its very
structure to destroy among its subjects all courage to act and all
desire to live, they had proclaimed the "glad tidings," held forth the
"kingdom of God," preached loving resignation in the hands of a Heavenly
Father, inspired patience, gentleness, humility, self-abnegation, and
charity, and opened the only issues by which Man stifling in the Roman
'ergastulum' could again breathe and see daylight: and here we
have religion. On the other hand, in a State gradually undergoing
depopulation, crumbling away, and fatally becoming a prey, they had
formed a living society governed by laws and discipline, rallying around
a common aim and a common doctrine, sustained by the devotion of chiefs
and by the obedience of believes, alone capable of subsisting beneath
the flood of barbarians which the empire in ruin suffered to pour in
through its breaches: and here we have the church.--It continues to
build on these two first foundations, and after the invasion, for over
five hundred years, it saves what it can still save of human culture.
It marches in the van of the barbarians or converts them directly after
their entrance, which is a wonderful advantage. Let us judge of it by
a single fact: In Great Britain, which like Gaul had become Latin, but
whereof the conquerors remain pagan during a century and a half, arts,
industries, society, language, all were destroyed; nothing remained
of an entire people, either massacred or fugitive, but slaves. We have
still to divine their traces; reduced to the condition of beasts of
burden, they disappear from history. Such might have been the fate of
Europe if the clergy had not promptly tamed the fierce brutes to which
it belonged.

Before the bishop in his gilded cope or before the monk, the converted
German "emaciated, clad in skins," wan, "dirtier and more spotted than a
chameleon,"[1101] stood fear-stricken as before a sorcerer. In his
calm moments, after the chase or inebriety, the vague divination of
a mysterious and grandiose future, the dim conception of an unknown
tribunal, the rudiment of conscience which he already had in his forests
beyond the Rhine, arouses in him through sudden alarms half-formed,
menacing visions. At the moment of violating a sanctuary he asks himself
whether he may not fall on its threshold with vertigo and a broken
neck.[1102] Convicted through his own perplexity, he stops and spares
the farm, the village, and the town, which