Yet even these, like every outburst of free human thought, had their
use and their fruit. They brought before the minds of churchmen a
thousand new questions which must be solved, unless the Church was
to relinquish for ever her claims as the great teacher and satisfier
of the human soul. To study these bubbles, as they formed and burst
on every wave of human life; to feel, too often by sad experience,
as Augustine felt, the charm of their allurements; to divide the
truths at which they aimed from the falsehood which they offered as
its substitute; to exhibit the Catholic Church as possessing, in the
great facts which she proclaimed, full satisfaction, even for the
most subtle metaphysical cravings of a diseased age;--that was the
work of the time; and men were sent to do it, and aided in their
labour by the very causes which had produced the intellectual
revolution. The general intermixture of ideas, creeds, and races,
even the mere physical facilities for intercourse between different
parts of the Empire, helped to give the great Christian fathers of
the fourth and fifth centuries a breadth of observation, a depth of
thought, a large-hearted and large-minded patience and tolerance,
such as, we may say boldly, the Church has since beheld but rarely,
and the world never; at least, if we are to judge those great men by
what they had, and not by what they had not, and to believe, as we
are bound, that had they lived now, and not then, they would have
towered as far above the heads of this generation as they did above
the heads of their own. And thus an age, which, to the shallow
insight of a sneerer like Gibbon, seems only a rotting and aimless
chaos of sensuality and anarchy, fanaticism and hypocrisy, produced
a Clement and an Athanase, a Chrysostom and an Augustine; absorbed
into the sphere of Christianity all which was most valuable in the
philosophies of Greece and Egypt, and in the social organisation of
Rome, as an heirloom for nations yet unborn; and laid in foreign