of observation,
a depth of thought, a large-hearted and large-minded patience and
tolerance, such as, we may say boldly, the Church has since beheld but
rarely, and the world never; at least, if we are to judge those great
men by what they had, and not by what they had not, and to believe, as
we are bound, that had they lived now, and not then, they would have
towered as far above the heads of this generation as they did above the
heads of their own. And thus an age, which, to the shallow insight of
a sneerer like Gibbon, seems only a rotting and aimless chaos of
sensuality and anarchy, fanaticism and hypocrisy, produced a Clement and
an Athanase, a Chrysostom and an Augustine; absorbed into the sphere of
Christianity all which was most valuable in the philosophies of Greece
and Egypt, and in the social organisation of Rome, as an heirloom for
nations yet unborn; and laid in foreign lands, by unconscious agents,
the foundations of all European thought and Ethics.

But the health of a Church depends, not merely on the creed which
it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great
ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members.
The _mens sana_ must have a _corpus sanum_ to inhabit. And even for the
Western Church, the lofty future which was in store for it would have
been impossible, without some infusion of new and healthier blood into
the veins of a world drained and tainted by the influence of Rome.

And the new blood, at the era of this story, was at hand. The great tide
of those Gothic nations, of which the Norwegian and the German are the
purest remaining types, though every nation of Europe, from Gibraltar to
St. Petersburg, owes to them the most precious elements of strength,
was sweeping onward, wave over wave, in a steady south-western current,
across the whole Roman territory, and only stopping and recoiling when
it reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Those wild tribes were
bringing with them into the magic circle of the Western Church's
influence the very materials which she required for the building up of
a future Christendom, and which she could find as little in the Western
Empire as in the Eastern; comparative purity of morals; sacred respect
for woman, for family life, law, equal justice, individual freedom, and,
above all, for honesty in word and deed; bodies untainted by hereditary
effeminacy, hearts earnest though genial, and blessed with a strange
willingness