plete with no ordinary difficulties to the inquirer; it includes ages differing from each other as well in the more obvious characteristics which lie on the very surface of the most superficial chronicle, as in the hidden tokens of moral and social progress or dissolution. We are compelled to bring under our glance Roman Europe and Germanic Europe, under nearly every variety of their changing forms;-the former, from the time when the traditions of the Republic were yet fresh to that melancholy age when the subjects of a degenerate sceptre looked back with regret to the comparative greatness and virtues of the later Cæsars; while in the latter we discern features of greater or less obscurity but of unvarying interest, from the first vague movements of the Teutonic hordes to the helpless indolence and final extinction of the despised Carlovingians.

But our province includes not merely an examination of the benefits which accrued to the several elements of contemporary society, whether Roman or barbarian, from the influence of the Christian clergy;-it leads us to the more intricate problem of tracing, amid the complicated framework of modern society and government, the great results of the foundations laid in the turmoil of the middle ages for the historical student is inevitably conducted, by a thousand points of more or less remote analogy, from the undeveloped forms of those early days to the comparative perfection of our own times; and there are but few causes which shew themselves at work there, that cannot be discovered by their influence, be it of action or of reaction, now.

But while it is 'necessary thus at the very outset to present to ourselves the magnitude of the task in which we are engaged, it is no less necessary that we should impose upon it its due restrictions. In the first place then, we must remember that we have to do, not with the effects of the Christian religion or morality considered by itself, a subject which would lead us into a far wider and deeper contemplation, but solely with those produced by the ministers of that religion, whether as individuals or as a corporation: and in the next place, we have to present, not every important result of their intercourse with the members of the body secular, but only those of them which to an observer freed from the distortions of prejudice by the lapse of so many centuries may seem to have been beneficial.

In reviewing, then, the benefits conferred by the clerical body on the world during the period before us, we shall class them under two heads:

(1) Those which make themselves perceptible in the social and moral life of mankind:

(2) Those which affect more directly the political state and progress of European nations.

We shall include under the former head all those blessings which the clergy, the salt of the earth, however much at times tainted by the admixture of secular interests and debasing passions, have imparted to man individually, or in his more immediate relations with his fellow-beingsthe steps by which they have enforced a greater regard for morality and justice, and have united in one common

bond the too often jarring elements of human society: under the latter, the more palpable because more historical consequences of the intercourse of the Christian clergy with the secular powers of the state. In other words, we shall consider the influence of the priesthood both in their external and in their internal relations, both as they appeared to the powers of this world and as they shewed themselves to the faithful under their banners.

Furthermore, it cannot fail to strike every student of history that in no equal period of the world's existence are included so many distinct distributions of national power, and so many and great changes of national characteristics, as during the first ten centuries of our era. Throughout those eventful years, the stage of history is occupied by every varied form of human society, from the yet stedfast empire of Rome to the roving hordes of Huns and Vandals; and again from the idolatrous followers of Attila and Clovis to the sumptuous paladins of the champion of the holy see. We are called upon to detest

or

admire every form of sceptred depravity or justice, from a Tiberius to a Charlemagne, from an Arcadius to an Alfred. Hence, though it has ever been the glory of the Christian Church that, while emperors and empires rose and sunk, she alone remained, in principles at least, if alas! not in practice, unaltered, we are compelled to a second partition of our subject, in order to meet the shifting relations of the spiritual and the secular powers. We shall, accordingly, divide the field of our researches into four main periods:

The first, extending from the propagation of Christianity in Judea to its elevation to the imperial throne with Constantine [CHAPTER II. ]:—

The second, from the age of Constantine to the fall of the Western Empire and the establishment of the Ostrogothic power in Italy [CHAPTER III.]

The third, from the settlement of the barbarian tribes on the ruins of the empire to their union under Charlemagne [CHAPTER IV.]:

The fourth, from the accession of Charlemagne to the close of the tenth century, or, as we might perhaps define it, to the age of Hildebrand [CHAPTER V.].

CHAPTER II.

THE Christian faith was pre-eminent among all the systems, which commanded the respect of the learned or the unlearned among its early contemporaries, by this great fact in particular, that while it solved the mighty problem of the relations of man to his Infinite Creator, and prescribed ritual laws in accordance with those relations, it proclaimed, what none of its predecessors had attempted, a new era in the moral history of mankind. By bringing the mind of man for the first time into full contact with a perfect Ruler, it impressed upon him a true consciousness of his own imperfections, and he learnt, as no earthly philosophy could have taught him, to know himself, and from such an humiliating knowledge to derive guidance in dealing with beings like himself. And truly the need of a higher standard of action had been too long apparent, as well from the strange vagaries of would-be moral teachers, as from the gigantic corruptions which weighed so heavily upon a suffering world. The human intellect, debased from its pristine purity, and forgetful of its divine original1, had long ceased to

1 For the phraseology of Tertullian, forcible, as coming from his pen, it must needs be, can hardly have represented any religious truth recognized as such by his contemporaries.

"Te quoque palam et tota libertate, qua non licet nobis, domi ac foris audimus ita pronuntiare, ‘Quod deus dederit', et ‘Si deus ita voluerit'. Ea voce et aliquem esse significas et omnem illi confiteris potestatem ad cujus spectas voluntatem, simul et ceteros