When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went
on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once
to set apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon
the soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various
work of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we
feel that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements
of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite
lately, indeed, the student of history has had his attention too
narrowly confined to the ages that have been preeminent for literature
and art--the so-called classical ages--and thus his sense of historical
perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as
a text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less
portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly
no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled
period in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman
Europe were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to noble ends by
the Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty
agents has come the political system of the modern world. The moment
when this interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a
complete and harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the
culminating moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of
Caesar or Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized
men, in which the separate life of individuals and localities was not
submerged. In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of
church, there were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy
with their peoples, that Christendom has known,--an Edward I., a St.
Louis, a Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III.
and his successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious
yearnings of men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the