at
retribution comes, it descends more in mercy than in judgment! Great
changes had prepared the world for a new order of things. The centre of
empire had moved eastward from Rome to Constantinople: the spiritual
centre had moved westward from Jerusalem to Rome. The empire had herself
become Christian, and was allowed after that event nearly a century more
of gradual decline. The judgment was not thus averted; but it was
ennobled. Her children were enabled to become the spiritual instructors
of those wild races by which the '_State_ Universal' had been
overwhelmed. That empire indeed, was not so much destroyed as
transformed and extended, a grace rendered possible by her having
submitted to the yoke of Christ; the new kingdoms which constituted the
Christian '_Orbis Terrarum_' being, for the most part, fragments of it,
while its laws made way into regions wider far, and exercised over them
a vast though modified authority not yet extinct. Here, if anywhere, we
catch glimpses of a hand flashing forth between the clouds, pointing
their way to the nations, and conducting Humanity forward along its
arduous and ascending road. There is a Providence or there could be no
Progress.

For the fulfilment of that part assigned to the 'Barbarians' in this
marvellous drama of the ages, it was necessary that many things should
combine; an exemption from the temptations which had materialised the
races of the south; the severe life that perfects strength; a race
endowed with the physical strength needed to render such sufferings
endurable; and lastly, an original spiritual elevation inherent in that
race, and capable of making them understand the lesson, and accept their
high destiny. The last and greatest of these qualifications had not been
wanting. Much as the religion of the Barbaric race had degenerated by
the time when it deified its great deliverer, it had inherited the
highest traditions of the early world. Mallet thus describes their
religion in its purity: 'It taught the being of a "Supreme God, master
of the universe, to whom all things are submissive and obedient." Such,
according to Tacitus, was the supreme God of the Germans. The ancient
Icelandic mythology calls him "the Author of everything that existeth;
the eternal, the ancient, the living and awful Being, the searcher into
concealed things, the Being that never changeth." This religion
attributed to the Supreme Deity "an infinite power, a boundless
knowledge, an inc