eachers of the West
went to school at the feet of Arabian masters. To bring order out of
chaotic ruin, to rear a new civilisation and blend hostile and unequal
races into a nation, the thing wanted was not liberty but force. And for
centuries all progress is attached to the action of men like Clovis,
Charlemagne, and William the Norman, who were resolute and peremptory,
and prompt to be obeyed.

The spirit of immemorial paganism which had saturated ancient society
could not be exorcised except by the combined influence of Church and
State; and the universal sense that their union was necessary created
the Byzantine despotism. The divines of the Empire who could not fancy
Christianity flourishing beyond its borders, insisted that the State is
not in the Church, but the Church in the State. This doctrine had
scarcely been uttered when the rapid collapse of the Western Empire
opened a wider horizon; and Salvianus, a priest at Marseilles,
proclaimed that the social virtues, which were decaying amid the
civilised Romans, existed in greater purity and promise among the Pagan
invaders. They were converted with ease and rapidity; and their
conversion was generally brought about by their kings.

Christianity, which in earlier times had addressed itself to the masses,
and relied on the principle of liberty, now made its appeal to the
rulers, and threw its mighty influence into the scale of authority. The
barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education,
except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the
rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to
men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero,
of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was
felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their
newly founded States. The clergy supplied the means of conducting the
new governments, and were made exempt from taxation, from the
jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, and of the political
administrator. They taught that power ought to be conferred by election;
and the Councils of Toledo furnished the framework of the Parliamentary
system of Spain, which is, by a long interval, the oldest in the world.
But the monarchy of the Goths in Spain, as well as that of the Saxons in
England, in both of which the nobles and the prelates surrounded the
throne with the semblance of free institutions, passed away; and t