Hypatia | Page 4

Goths were bribed not to attack the Empire!--The whole
pent-up deluge burst over the plains of Italy, and the Western Empire
became from that day forth a dying idiot, while the new invaders
divided Europe among themselves. The fifteen years before the time of
this tale had decided the fate of Greece; the last four that of Rome itself.
The countless treasures which five centuries of rapine had accumulated
round the Capitol had become the prey of men clothed in sheepskins
and horse-hide; and the sister of an emperor had found her beauty,
virtue, and pride of race worthily matched by those of the hard- handed
Northern hero who led her away from Italy as his captive and his bride,
to found new kingdoms in South France and Spain, and to drive the
newly-arrived Vandals across the Straits of Gibraltar into the then
blooming coast-land of Northern Africa. Everywhere the mangled
limbs of the Old World were seething in the Medea's caldron, to come
forth whole, and young, and strong. The Longbeards, noblest of their
race, had found a temporary resting-place upon the Austrian frontier,
after long southward wanderings from the Swedish mountains, soon to
be dispossessed again by the advancing Huns, and, crossing the Alps,
to give their name for ever to the plains of Lombardy. A few more
tumultuous years, and the Franks would find themselves lords of the
Lower Rhineland; and before the hairs of Hypatia's scholars had grown
gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa would have landed on the shores of
Kent, and an English nation have begun its world-wide life.
But some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every
other quarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in
Constantinople, which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and
manners of Asia. The Eastern World seemed barred, by some stern
doom, from the only influence which could have regenerated it. Every
attempt of the Gothic races to establish themselves beyond the sea,
whether in the form of an organised kingdom, as the Vandals attempted
in Africa; or of a mere band of brigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor,
under Gainas; or of a praetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the

middle age; or as religious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in
the corruption and disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary
reform in morals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries,
the Vandal conquerors worked in North Africa, availed them nothing;
they lost more than they gave. Climate, bad example, and the luxury of
power degraded them in one century into a race of helpless and
debauched slave-holders, doomed to utter extermination before the
semi-Gothic armies of Belisarius; and with them vanished the last
chance that the Gothic races would exercise on the Eastern World the
same stern yet wholesome discipline under which the Western had been
restored to life.
The Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour
not for themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and decrepitude
were already but too manifest in them. That very peculiar turn of the
Graeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great thinkers of the then
world, had the effect of drawing them away from practice to
speculation; and the races of Egypt and Syria were effeminate,
over-civilised, exhausted by centuries during which no infusion of fresh
blood had come to renew the stock. Morbid, self- conscious, physically
indolent, incapable then, as now, of personal or political freedom, they
afforded material out of which fanatics might easily be made, but not
citizens of the kingdom of God. The very ideas of family and national
life-those two divine roots of the Church, severed from which she is
certain to wither away into that most godless and most cruel of spectres,
a religious world-had perished in the East from the evil influence of the
universal practice of slaveholding, as well as from the degradation of
that Jewish nation whichhad been for ages the great witness for those
ideas; and all classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed, 'the old
Adam' in every man and in every age--were shifting the blame of sin
from their own consciences to human relationships and duties--and
therein, to the God who had appointed them; and saying as of old, 'The
woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I
did eat.' The passionate Eastern character, like all weak ones, found
total abstinence easier than temperance, religious thought more pleasant
than godly action; and a monastic world grew up all over the East, of
such vastness that in Egypt it was said to rival in numbers the lay

population, producing, with an enormous decrease in the actual amount
of moral evil, an equally great enervation and decrease of the
population. Such a