central and fixed opponent.

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Empire as a pagan
institution; they will pretend that the Catholic Church was something
alien to that pagan thing; that the Empire was great and admirable before
Catholicism came, weak and despicable upon its acceptation of the Creed.
They will represent the Faith as creeping like an Oriental disease into
the body of a firm Western society which it did not so much transform as
liquefy and dissolve.

Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable
Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous
barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of splendid pagan
qualities--which usually turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant
qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased Catholic body of the
Roman Empire which they are pictured as attacking.

Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat the Empire and its institutions
as dead after a certain date, and discuss the rise of a new society without
considering its Catholic and Imperial origins. Nothing is commoner, for
instance (in English schools), than for boys to be taught that the pirate
raids and settlements of the fifth century in this Island were the "coming
of the English," and the complicated history of Britain is simplified for
them into a story of how certain bold seafaring pagans (full of all the
virtues we ascribe to ourselves today) first devastated, then occupied, and
at last, of their sole genius, developed a land which Roman civilization
had proved inadequate to hold.

There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious or
unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, according to the degree of learning in