d grown gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa would
have landed on the shores of Kent, and an English nation have begun its
world-wide life.

But some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every other
quarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in Constantinople,
which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and manners of Asia. The
Eastern World seemed barred, by some stern doom, from the only influence
which could have regenerated it. Every attempt of the Gothic races to
establish themselves beyond the sea, whether in the form of an organised
kingdom, as the Vandals attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of
brigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a
praetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the middle age; or as
religious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in the corruption
and disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary reform in
morals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandal
conquerors worked in North Africa, availed them nothing; they lost more
than they gave. Climate, bad example, and the luxury of power degraded
them in one century into a race of helpless and debauched slave-holders,
doomed to utter extermination before the semi-Gothic armies of
Belisarius; and with them vanished the last chance that the Gothic
races would exercise on the Eastern World the same stern yet wholesome
discipline under which the Western had been restored to life.

The Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour not
for themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and decrepitude
were already but too manifest in them. That very peculiar turn of the
Graeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great thinkers of the then
world, had the effect of drawing them away from practice to speculation;
and the races of Egypt and Syria were effeminate, over-civilised,
exhausted by centuries during which no infusion of fresh blood had
come to renew the stock. Morbid, self-conscious, physically indolent,
incapable then, as now, of personal or political freedom, they afforded
material out of which fanatics might easily be made, but not citizens of
the kingdom of God. The very ideas of family and national life-those two
divine roots of the Church, severed from which she is certain to wither
away into that most godless and most cruel of spectres, a religious
world-had perished in the East from the evil influence of the universal
practice of slaveholding,