mpire came
together again. What strikes us at every step in the tangled history
of these times is the wonderful life which the Roman name and the Roman
Power still kept when it was thus attacked on every side from without
and torn in pieces in every quarter from within." And the reason for
this indubitably was that the {4} Empire had now another organisation
to support it, based on the same idea of central unity. One Church
stood beside one Empire, and became year by year even more certain,
more perfect, as well as more strong. In the West the papal power rose
as the imperial decayed, and before long came near to replacing it. In
the East, where the name and tradition of old Rome was always preserved
in the imperial government, the Church remained in that immemorial
steadfastness to the orthodox faith which was a bond of unity such as
no other idea could possibly supply. In the educational work which the
emperor had to undertake in regard to the tribes which one by one
accepted their sway, the Christian Church was their greatest support.
In East as well as West, the bishops, saints, and missionaries were the
true leaders of the nations into the unity of the Empire as well as the
unity of the Church. [Sidenote: The Church's conquest of barbarism.]
The idea of Christian unity saved the Empire and taught the nations.
The idea of Christian unity was the force which conquered barbarism and
made the barbarians children of the Catholic Church and fellow-citizens
with the inheritors of the Roman traditions.

If the dominant idea of the long period with which this book is to deal
is the unity of the Church, seen through the struggles to preserve, to
teach, or to attain it, the most important facts are those which belong
to the conversion, to Christ and to the full faith of the Catholic
Church, of races new to the Western world. The gradual extinction in
Italy of the Goths, the conversion of the Franks, of the English, of
many races on distant barbarian borderlands of civilisation, the
acceptance of Catholicism by the Lombards and {5} the Western Goths, do
not complete the historical tale, though they are a large part of it:
there was the falling back in Africa and for a long time in Europe of
the settlements of the Cross before the armies of the Crescent. There
were also two other important features of this long-extended age, to
which writers have given the name of dark. There was the survival of
ancient learning, whic