human existence; to make her, too, its stipendiary slave-official,
to be pampered when obedient, and scourged whenever she dare assert
a free will of her own, a law beyond that of her tyrants; to throw
on her, by a refined hypocrisy, the care and support of the masses
on whose lifeblood it was feeding? So thought many then, and, as I
believe, not unwisely.

But if the social condition of the civilised world was anomalous at
the beginning of the fifth century, its spiritual state was still
more so. The universal fusion of races, languages, and customs,
which had gone on for four centuries under the Roman rule, had
produced a corresponding fusion of creeds, an universal fermentation
of human thought and faith. All honest belief in the old local
superstitions of paganism had been long dying out before the more
palpable and material idolatry of Emperor-worship; and the gods of
the nations, unable to deliver those who had trusted in them, became
one by one the vassals of the 'Divus Caesar,' neglected by the
philosophic rich, and only worshipped by the lower classes, where
the old rites still pandered to their grosser appetites, or
subserved the wealth and importance of some particular locality.

In the meanwhile, the minds of men, cut adrift from their ancient
moorings, wandered wildly over pathless seas of speculative doubt,
and especially in the more metaphysical andcontemplative East,
attempted to solve for themselves the questions of man's relation to
the unseen by those thousand schisms, heresies, and theosophies (it
is a disgrace to the word philosophy to call them by it), on the
records of which the student now gazes bewildered, unable alike to
count or to explain their fantasies.