which this Christian Catholic
view of the world established in Europe. It was necessary as a wholesome
reaction against the cruelly colossal materialism which had developed
itself in the Roman realm and threatened to destroy all spiritual human
power. As the lascivious memoirs of the last century form the _pieces
justificatives_ of the French Revolution, as the terrorism of a _comite
du salut public_ seems to be necessary physic when we read the
confessions of the aristocratic world of France, so we recognize the
wholesomeness of ascetic spiritualism when we read Petronius or
Apuleius, which are to be regarded as the _pieces justificatives_ of
Christianity. The flesh had become so arrogant in this Roman world that
it required Christian discipline to chasten it. After the banquet of a
Trimalchion, such a hunger-cure as Christianity was a necessity.

Or was it that as lascivious old men seek by being whipped to excite new
power of enjoyment, so old Rome endured monkish chastisement to find
more exquisite delight in torture and voluptuous rapture in pain? Evil
excess of stimulant! it took from the body of the state of Rome its last
strength. It was not by division into two realms that Rome perished. On
the Bosphorus, as by the Tiber, Rome was devoured by the same Jewish
spiritualism, and here, as there, Roman history was that of a long dying
agony which lasted for centuries. Did murdered Judea, in leaving to
Rome its spiritualism, wish to revenge itself on the victorious foe, as
did the dying centaur who craftily left to the son of Hercules the
deadly garment steeped in his own blood? Truly Rome, the Hercules among
races, was so thoroughly devoured by Jewish poison that helm and harness
fell from its withered limbs, and its imperial war-voice died away into
the wailing cadences of monkish prayer and the soft trilling of
castrated boys.

But what weakens old age strengthens youth. That spiritualism had a
healthy action on the too sound and strong races of the North; the too
full-blooded barbarous bodies were spiritualized by Christianity, and
European civilization began. The Catholic Church has in this respect the
strongest claims on our regard and admiration, for it succeeded by
subduing with its great genial institutions the bestiality of Northern
barbarians and by mastering brutal matter.

The Art-work of the Middle Ages manifests this mastery of mere material
by mind, and it is very often its only mission. The epic po