darkness succeeded to light. The religion of Jesus
Christ was alone capable of resisting this barbarian
invasion, and science and literature, together with
the arts, disappeared from the face of the earth,
taking refuge in the churches and monasteries. It
was there that they were preserved as a sacred deposit,
and it was thence that they emerged when
Christianity had renovated pagan society. But
centuries and centuries elapsed before the sum of
human knowledge was equal to what it had been at
the fall of the Roman empire. A new society,
moreover, was needed for the new efforts of human
intelligence as it resumed its rights. Schools and
universities were founded under the auspices of the
clergy and of the religious corporations, and thus
science and literature were enabled to emerge from
their tombs. Europe, amidst the tumultuous conflicts
of the policy which made and unmade kingdoms,
witnessed a general revival of the scholastic
zeal; poets, orators, novelists, and writers increased
in numbers and grew in favour; savants, philosophers,
chemists and alchemists, mathematicians
and astronomers, travellers and naturalists, were
awakened, so to speak, by the life-giving breath of
the Middle Ages; and great scientific discoveries
and admirable works on every imaginable subject
showed that the genius of modern society was not
a whit inferior to that of antiquity. Printing, was
invented, and with that brilliant discovery, the Middle
Ages, which had accomplished their work of