lands, by unconscious agents, the foundations of all European
thought and Ethics.

But the health of a Church depends, not merely on the creed which it
professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great
ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual
members. The _mens sana_ must have a _corpus sanum_ to inhabit.
And even for the Western Church, the lofty future which was in store
for it would have been impossible, without some infusion of new and
healthier blood into the veins of a world drained and tainted by the
influence of Rome.

And the new blood, at the era of this story, was at hand. The great
tide of those Gothic nations, of which the Norwegian and the German
are the purest remaining types, though every nation of Europe, from
Gibraltar to St. Petersburg, owes to them the most precious elements
of strength, was sweeping onward, wave over wave, in a steady south-
western current, across the whole Roman territory, and only stopping
and recoiling when it reached the shores of the Mediterranean.
Those wild tribes were bringing with them into the magic circle of
the Western Church's influence the very materials which she required
for the building up of a future Christendom, and which she could
find as little in the Western Empire as in the Eastern; comparative
purity of morals; sacred respect for woman, for family life, law,
equal justice, individual freedom, and, above all, for honesty in
word and deed; bodies untainted by hereditary effeminacy, hearts
earnest though genial, and blessed with a strange willingness to
learn, even from those whom they despised; a brain equal to that of
the Roman in practical power, and not too far behind that of the
Eastern in imaginative and speculative acuteness.