him plotting; or said that he had done so; and degraded him
publicly at Rimini before his whole army. Again he offered peace. The
insane Romans proclaimed that his guilt precluded him for ever from the
clemency of the Empire.

Then came the end. He marched on Rome. The Salarian gate was thrown
open at midnight, probably by German slaves within; and then, for five
dreadful days and nights, the wicked city expiated in agony the sins of
centuries.

And so at last the Nibelungen hoard was won.

'And the kings of the earth who had lived delicately with her, and the
merchants of the earth who were made rich by her, bewailed her, standing
afar off for the fear of her torment, and crying, Alas! alas, that great
Babylon! for in one hour is thy judgment come.'

St. John passes in those words from the region of symbol to that of
literal description. A great horror fell upon all nations, when the news
came. Rome taken? Surely the end of all things was at hand. The
wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria--especially to Jerusalem;
perhaps with some superstitious hope that Christ's tomb, or even Christ
himself, might save them.

St. Jerome, as he saw day by day patrician men and women who had passed
their lives in luxury, begging their bread around his hermitage at
Bethlehem, wrote of the fall of Rome as a man astonied.

St. Augustine, at Hippo, could only look on it as the end of all human
power and glory, perhaps of the earth itself. Babylon the great had
fallen, and now Christ was coming in the clouds of heaven to set up the
city of God for ever. In that thought he wrote his De Civitate Dei. Read
it, gentlemen--especially you who are to be priests--not merely for its
details of the fall of Rome, but as the noblest theodicy which has yet
proceeded from a human pen.

Followed by long trains of captives, long trains of waggons bearing the
spoils of all the world, Alaric went on South, 'with the native instinct
of the barbarian,' as Dr. Sheppard well says. Always toward the sun.
Away from Muspelheim and the dark cold north, toward the sun, and
Valhalla, where Odin and the Asas dwell in everlasting light.

He tried to cross into Sicily: but a storm wrecked his boats, and the
Goths were afraid of the sea. And after a while he died. And the wild
men made a great mourning over him. They had now no plan left; no heart
to go south, and look for Odin over the sea. But of one thing they were
resolved, that the