Hypatia | Page 3

unable alike to count or to explain their
fantasies.
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 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.
And their strength was felt at once. Their vanguard, confined with
difficulty for three centuries beyond the Eastern Alps, at the expense of
sanguinary wars, had been adopted wherever it was practicable, into the
service of the Empire; and the heart's core of the Roman legion was
composed of Gothic officers and soldiers. But now the main body had
arrived. Tribe after tribe was crowding down to the Alps, and trampling
upon each other on the frontiers of the Empire. The Huns, singly their
inferiors, pressed them from behind with the irresistible weight of

numbers; Italy, with her rich cities and fertile lowlands, beckoned them
on to plunder; as auxiliaries, they had learned their own strength and
Roman weakness; a casus belli was soon found. How iniquitous was
the conduct of the sons of Theodosius, in refusing the usual bounty, by
which the