or civilization. The queen of cities had been
repeatedly sacked, and her treasures destroyed or removed to distant
cities. Her proud citizens had been sold as slaves; her noble matrons
had been violated; her grand palaces had been levelled with the ground;
her august senators were fugitives and exiles. All kinds of calamities
overspread the earth and decimated the race,--war, pestilence, and
famine. Men in despair hid themselves in caves and monasteries.
Literature and art were crushed; no great works of genius appeared. The
paralysis of despair deadened all the energies of civilized man. Even
armies lost their vigor, and citizens refused to enlist. The old
mechanism of the Caesars, which had kept the Empire together for three
hundred years after all vitality had fled, was worn out. The general
demoralization had led to a general destruction. Vice was succeeded by
universal violence; and that, by universal ruin. Old laws and restraints
were no longer of any account. A civilization based on material forces
and Pagan arts had proved a failure. The whole world appeared to be on
the eve of dissolution. To the thoughtful men of the age everything
seemed to be involved in one terrific mass of desolation and horror.
"Even Jerome," says a great historian, "heaped together the awful
passages of the Old Testament on the capture of Jerusalem and other
Eastern cities; and the noble lines of Virgil on the sack of Troy are
but feeble descriptions of the night which covered the western Empire."

Now Leo was the man for such a crisis, and seems to have been raised up
to devise some new principle of conservation around which the stricken
world might rally. "He stood equally alone and superior," says Milman,
"in the Christian world. All that survived of Rome--of her unbounded
ambition, of her inflexible will, and of her belief in her title to
universal dominion--seemed concentrated in him alone."

Leo was born, in the latter part of the fourth century, at Rome, of
noble parents, and was intensely Roman in all his aspirations. He early
gave indications of future greatness, and was consecrated to a service
in which only talent was appreciated. When he was nothing but an
acolyte, whose duty it was to light the lamps and attend on the bishop,
he was sent to Africa and honored with the confidence of the great
Bishop of Hippo. And he was only deacon when he was sent by the Emperor
Valentinian III. to heal the division between Aetius and Albinu