oil of the fallen capital, and his soldiers transported
to Carthage, the seat of the new Vandal kingdom, the riches and trophies
which illustrious generals had won,--yea, the treasures of three
religions; the gods of the capitoline temple, the golden candlesticks
which Titus brought from Jerusalem, and the sacred vessels which adorned
the churches of the Christians, and which Alaric had spared.

Thus far the intrepid bishop of Rome--for he was nothing more--calls
forth our sympathy and admiration for the hand he had in establishing
the faith and healing the divisions of the Church, for which he earned
the title of Saint. He taught no errors like Origen, and pushed out no
theological doctrines into a jargon of metaphysics like Athanasius. He
was more practical than Jerome, and more moderate than Augustine.

But he instituted a claim, from motives of policy, which subsequently
ripened into an irresistible government, on which the papal structure as
an institution or polity rests. He did not put forth this claim,
however, until the old capital of the Caesars was humiliated,
vanquished, and completely prostrated as a political power. When the
Eternal City was taken a second time, and her riches plundered, and her
proud palaces levelled with the dust; when her amphitheatre was
deserted, her senatorial families were driven away as fugitives and sold
as slaves, and her glory was departed,--nothing left her but
recollections and broken columns and ruined temples and weeping
matrons, ashes, groans, and lamentations, miseries and most bitter
sorrows,--then did her great bishop, intrepid amid general despair, lay
the foundation of a new empire, vaster in its influence, if not in its
power, than that which raised itself up among the nations in the
proudest days of Vespasian and the Antonines.

Leo, from one of the devastated hills of Rome,--once crowned with
palaces, temples, and monuments,--looked out upon the Christian world,
and saw the desolation spoken of by Jeremy the prophet, as well as by
the Cumaean sibyl: all central power hopelessly prostrated; law and
justice by-words; provinces wasted, decimated, and anarchical;
literature and art crushed; vice, in all its hateful deformity, rampant
and multiplying itself; false opinions gaining ground; Christians
adopting the errors of Paganism; soldiers turned into banditti; the
contemplative hiding themselves in caves and deserts; the rich made
slaves; barbarians everywhere triump