s by a brutal and animal
barbarism. The deep soil of their powerful natures had long been budding
into nobler capacities, and had expanded into nobler perceptions.
Reverence for female dignity, a sentiment never found before in any
nation, gave a vernal promise of some higher humanity, on a wider scale
than had yet been exhibited. Strong sympathies, magnetic affinities,
prepared this great encampment of nations for Christianity. Their
nobility needed such a field for its expansion; Christianity needed such
a human nature for its evolution. The strong and deep nature of the
Teutonic tribes could not have been evolved, completed, without
Christianity. Christianity in a soil so shallow and unracy as the
Graeco-Latin, could not have struck those roots which are immovable. The
ultimate conditions of the soil and the capacities of the culture must
have corresponded. The motions of Barbaria had hitherto indicated only
change; change without hope; confusion without tendencies; strife
without principle of advance; new births in each successive age without
principle of regeneration; momentary gain balanced by momentary loss;
the tumult of a tossing ocean which tends to none but momentary rest.
But now the currents are united, enclosed, and run in one direction, and
that is definite and combined.

Now truly began that modern era, of which we happily reap the harvest:
then were laid the first foundations of social order and the first
effective hint of that sense of mutual aid and dependence which has,
century by century, been creating such a balance and harmony of adjusted
operations--of agencies working night and day, which no man sees, for
services which no man creates: the agencies are like Ezekiel's
wheels--self-sustained; the services in which they labour have grown up
imperceptibly as the growth of a yew, and from a period as far removed
from cognizance. One man dies every hour out of myriads, his place is
silently supplied, and the mysterious economy thus propagates itself in
silence, like the motion of the planets, from age to age. Hands
innumerable are every moment writing summonses, returns, reports,
figures--records that would stretch out to the crack of doom, as yet
every year accumulated, written by professional men, corrected by
correctors, checked by controllers, and afterwards read by corresponding
men, re-read by corresponding controllers, passed and ratified by
corresponding ratifiers; and through this almighty po