ut if the social condition of the civilised world was anomalous at the
beginning of the fifth century, its spiritual state was still more so.
The universal fusion of races, languages, and customs, which had gone
on for four centuries under the Roman rule, had produced a corresponding
fusion of creeds, an universal fermentation of human thought and faith.
All honest belief in the old local superstitions of paganism had
been long dying out before the more palpable and material idolatry of
Emperor-worship; and the gods of the nations, unable to deliver those
who had trusted in them, became one by one the vassals of the 'Divus
Caesar,' neglected by the philosophic rich, and only worshipped by
the lower classes, where the old rites still pandered to their grosser
appetites, or subserved the wealth and importance of some particular
locality.

In the meanwhile, the minds of men, cut adrift from their ancient
moorings, wandered wildly over pathless seas of speculative doubt, and
especially in the more metaphysical and contemplative East, attempted to
solve for themselves the questions of man's relation to the unseen by
those thousand schisms, heresies, and theosophies (it is a disgrace to
the word philosophy to call them by it), on the records of which the
student now gazes bewildered, unable alike to count or to explain their
fantasies.

Yet even these, like every outburst of free human thought, had their use
and their fruit. They brought before the minds of churchmen a thousand
new questions which must be solved, unless the Church was to relinquish
for ever her claims as the great teacher and satisfier of the human
soul. To study these bubbles, as they formed and burst on every wave of
human life; to feel, too often by sad experience, as Augustine felt,
the charm of their allurements; to divide the truths at which they aimed
from the falsehood which they offered as its substitute; to exhibit the
Catholic Church as possessing, in the great facts which she proclaimed,
full satisfaction, even for the most subtle metaphysical cravings of a
diseased age;--that was the work of the time; and men were sent to do
it, and aided in their labour by the very causes which had produced the
intellectual revolution. The general intermixture of ideas, creeds,
and races, even the mere physical facilities for intercourse between
different parts of the Empire, helped to give the great Christian
fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries a breadth