the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret
that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught
us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the
Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire,
and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it
through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the
framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and
civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman
missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the
Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest.
Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the
Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The
moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to
sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was
nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus
lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but
politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military
nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement
of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, and
into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks,
Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when
they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in the
area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as
nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the