them was to treat the
case of the eighteenth century as if it were not merely similar to, but
exactly identical with, the case of the fifth, and as if exactly the
same forces which had knit Western Europe together into a compact
civilisation a thousand years before, would again suffice for a second
consolidation. Christianity, rising with the zeal and strength of youth
out of the ruins of the Empire, and feudalism by the need of
self-preservation imposing a form upon the unshapen associations of the
barbarians, had between them compacted the foundations and reared the
fabric of mediaeval life. Why, many men asked themselves, should not
Christian and feudal ideas repeat their great achievement, and be the
means of reorganising the system which a blind rebellion against them
had thrown into deplorable and fatal confusion? Let the century which
had come to such an end be regarded as a mysteriously intercalated
episode, and no more, in the long drama of faith and sovereign order.
Let it pass as a sombre and pestilent stream, whose fountains no man
should discover, whose waters had for a season mingled with the mightier
current of the divinely allotted destiny of the race, and had then
gathered themselves apart and flowed off, to end as they had begun, in
the stagnation and barrenness of the desert. Philosophers and men of
letters, astronomers and chemists, atheists and republicans, had shown
that they were only powerful to destroy, as the Goths and the Vandals
had been. They had shown that they were impotent, as the Goths and the
Vandals had been, in building up again. Let men turn their faces, then,
once more to that system by which in the ancient times Europe had been
delivered from a relapse into eternal night.

The second course was very different from this. The minds to whom it
commended itself were cast in a different mould and drew their
inspiration from other traditions. In their view the system which the
Church had been the main agency in organising, had fallen quite as much
from its own irremediable weakness as from the direct onslaughts of
assailants within and without. The barbarians had rushed in, it was
true, in 1793; but this time it was the Church and feudalism which were
in the position of the old empire on whose ruins they had built. What
had once restored order and belief to the West, was now in its own turn
overtaken by decay and dissolution. To look to them to unite these new
barbarians in a stable and