sustained by the devotion of chiefs and by the obedience of believes,
alone capable of subsisting beneath the flood of barbarians which the
empire in ruin suffered to pour in through its breaches: and here we
have the church. - It continues to build on these two first
foundations, and after the invasion, for over five hundred years, it
saves what it can still save of human culture. It marches in the van
of the barbarians or converts them directly after their entrance,
which is a wonderful advantage. Let us judge of it by a single fact:
In Great Britain, which like Gaul had become Latin, but whereof the
conquerors remain pagan during a century and a half, arts, industries,
society, language, all were destroyed; nothing remained of an entire
people, either massacred or fugitive, but slaves. We have still to
divine their traces; reduced to the condition of beasts of burden,
they disappear from history. Such might have been the fate of Europe
if the clergy had not promptly tamed the fierce brutes to which it
belonged.

Before the bishop in his gilded cope or before the monk, the
converted German "emaciated, clad in skins," wan, "dirtier and more
spotted than a chameleon,"[1] stood fear-stricken as before a
sorcerer. In his calm moments, after the chase or inebriety, the vague
divination of a mysterious and grandiose future, the dim conception of
an unknown tribunal, the rudiment of conscience which he already had
in his forests beyond the Rhine, arouses in him through sudden alarms
half-formed, menacing visions. At the moment of violating a sanctuary
he asks himself whether he may not fall on its threshold with vertigo
and a broken neck.[2] Convicted through his own perplexity, he stops
and spares the farm, the village, and the town, which live under the
priest's protection. If the animal impulse of rage, or of primitive
lusts, leads him to murder or to rob, later, after satiety, in times