At the beginning the German seemed likely to destroy the entire product which antiquity had bequeathed. He was quite unprepared to assimilate the rich fruits of that ancient civilization. He had, indeed, less mind for the elaborate forms of Greek philosophy than for the lighter forms of Greek art. In his first contact he could understand neither. Moreover ancient society was so weak that it could not educate him, who was its conqueror, into its culture. Nevertheless, there was one element in that ancient society that did appeal to the German. That was the spiritual power of the Christian church. Alone amid the ruins of antiquity the power of the church had grown so strong that the men of the north bowed before it, and religion accomplished through the emotions of the Germans what art, philosophy, and statecraft failed to achieve. The preaching of the Gospel laid hold of the feelings of these primitive people, for the church in its pretensions, and sometimes in fact, represented the old Roman political unity. Moreover the church was also the repository of what was left of Greek science. The church expressed for the German his own ideal of the personal inner life. The Germans became the supporters of the church, and in this way the protectors of ancient culture. Mediæval history in western Europe is therefore the record of the development of the Germans under the influence of the Christian church. In contrast with the development of the Eastern church, which was the development of a state church, the Western church was the development of an ecclesiastical state. The Western church, and not the later empire, was the true successor of the Roman empire. Thus the early beginnings of the Middle Ages rested with the church, but the later development of the Middle Ages rested with the German people. =How the Universe appeared to the Mediæval Man.= The mediæval man had very indistinct ideas about the world around him, since his interest did not lie in the earthly realm, but in the spirit that controlled it. He was content in his sciences with conclusions without their demonstrations. Although it is said that relations of space and number are never indistinct in the mind of the civilized man, the man of the Middle Ages certainly did not possess such conceptions in so vigorous a manner as to enable him to discover new truths. We must, furthermore, make a sharper distinction between mediæval popular opinion and mediæval scientific opinion than we should about popular and scientific opinion of modern times; for the results of science did not reach the people then as now. To the ordinary mediæval man the world in which he lived was what it appeared to be to his eye. The earth was flat; the sky was a material dome, which sustained the waters of the world above it. Through this sky-floor the water sometimes breaks and the earth receives showers of rain. These popular notions sometimes appeared in the verse of the time.