or to conquer save in fair and open fight--is
the type of the Teuton hero; and one which had no chance in a struggle
with the cool, false, politic Roman, grown grey in the experience of the
forum and of the camp, and still as physically brave as his young enemy.
Because, too, there was no unity among them; no feeling that they were
brethren of one blood. Had the Teuton tribes, at any one of the great
crises I have mentioned, and at many a crisis afterwards, united for but
three years, under the feeling of a common blood, language, interest,
destiny, Rome would have perished. But they could not learn that lesson.
They could not put aside their boyish quarrels.

They never learnt the lesson till after their final victory, when the
Gospel of Christ--of a Being to whom they all owed equal allegiance, in
whose sight they were all morally equal--came to unite them into a
Christendom.

And it was well that they did not learn it sooner. Well for them and for
the world, that they did not unite on any false ground of interest or
ambition, but had to wait for the true ground of unity, the knowledge of
the God-man, King of all nations upon earth.

Had they destroyed Rome sooner, what would not they have lost? What
would not the world have lost? Christianity would have been stifled in
its very cradle; and with Christianity all chance--be sure of it--of
their own progress. Roman law, order, and discipline, the very things
which they needed to acquire by a contact of five hundred years, would
have been swept away. All classic literature and classic art, which they
learnt to admire with an almost superstitious awe, would have perished
likewise. Greek philosophy, the germs of physical science, and all that
we owe to the ancients, would have perished; and we should have truly had
an invasion of the barbarians, followed by truly dark ages, in which
Europe would have had to begin all anew, without the help of the
generations which had gone before.

Therefore it was well as it was, and God was just and merciful to them
and to the human race. They had a glorious destiny, and glorious powers
wherewith to fulfil it: but they had, as every man and people has, before
whom there is a noble future, to be educated by suffering. There was
before them a terrible experience of sorrow and disappointment, sin and
blood, by which they gained the first consciousness of what they could do
and what they could not. Like Adam of old, like every