ies wasted; all natural ties disregarded; neither age, nor sex,
nor dignity, respected by hordes of savages, incapable themselves of
learning, strangers to science, without perception of art; the sum being
that the richest civilisation which the world had borne was crushed down by
brute force. They saw, and mourned, and bore with unfailing personal
courage their portion of sorrow, mayhap turning themselves in their inmost
mind from a world perishing before their eyes, to contemplate the joy
promised in a world which should not perish. But neither to St. Jerome, nor
to St. Augustine, nor to St. Leo, did the thought occur that this barbarian
mass could be controlled into producing a civilisation richer than that
which its own incursion destroyed. That, instead of perpetual strife and
mutual repulsion, it could receive the one law of Christ; be moulded into a
senate of nations, with like institutions and identical principles; that,
instead of one empire taking an external impress of the Christian faith,
but rebelling against it with a deep-seated corruption and an unyielding
paganism, and so perishing in the midst of abundance, it should grow into
peoples, the corner-stone of whose government and the parent of their
political constitution should be the one faith of Christ, and their
acknowledged judge the Roman Pastor; and that the Rome which all the three
saw once plundered, and the third twice subjected to that penalty, should
lose all its power as a secular capital, while it became the shrine whence
a divine law went forth; and that these hordes, who laid it waste before
their eyes, should become its children and its most valiant defenders.

Had such a vision been vouchsafed to either of these great saints, with
what words of thankfulness would he have described it. This is the subject
which this narrative opens; and we, the long-descended offspring of these
hordes, have seen this sight and witnessed this exertion of power carried
on through centuries; and degenerate and ungrateful children as we are, we
are living still upon the deeds which God wrought in that conversion of the
nations by the pastoral staff of St. Peter, leading them into a land
flowing with oil and wine.

NOTES:

[3] "Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur."--S.
Cyprian, _De Unitate Ecclesiae_.

[4] Gregorovius, i. 286. "Das Papstthum, vom Kaiser des Abendlandes
befreit, erstand, und die Kirche Roms wuchs unter Truemmern maech