Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/31

I] was but the temporary halting-place of the great spiritual migration which, from the day that Abraham turned his face away from the rising of the sun, has been stepping steadily westward.

Another and a wider sphere was in store for the progress of the Church than its own native regions; another and a nobler conquest than that of its old Latin worn-out enemy on the tottering throne of the Cæsars. The Gothic tribes descended on the ancient world; the fabric of civilized society was dissolved in the mighty crisis; the Fathers of modern Europe were to be moulded, subdued, educated. By whom was this great work effected? Not by the Empire,—it had fled to the Bosphorus; not by the Eastern Church;—it had converted many for a time, but it retained its permanent hold only on one, and that till quite recently the least important, of the northern races. In the Western, Latin, Roman clergy, in the missionaries who went forth to Gaul, to Britain, and to Germany, the barbarians found their first masters; in the work of controlling and resisting the fierce soldiers of the Teutonic tribes lay the main work, the real foundation, the chief temptation of the Papacy. From the day when Leo III. placed the crown of the new, Holy, Roman, German empire on the head of Charlemagne, the stream of human progress and the stream of Christian life, with whatever interruptions, eddies, counter-currents, flowed during the next seven centuries in the same channel. As the history of the earlier stages revolved