Orosius was a young priest who came out of Spain into Africa to visit Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, at the time when that Father of the Latin Church was writing his greatest work, which he entitled the _City of God_. The occasion for this work arose out of the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in the year 410. A great outcry was made by the pagans against Christianity, as if it had been the cause of calamities which they attributed to the displeasure of the ancient gods for their neglected altars. In his _City of God_, which was conceived as an answer to this charge, Augustine constructed his argument upon a broad view of human history, urging that events must not be interpreted in an isolated manner, but must be taken with their connection and sequence; and then we shall discern signs of a great providential purpose guiding mankind in a progressive course of amelioration. The old dispensation prepared men for a fuller revelation, and the spread of Christianity has brought manifest improvement in the condition of human life. The heathen empires of the world, as Babylon in the East and Rome in the West, have been active though unconscious factors in this vast and beneficent process. The book is in fact a philosophy of history, with the Gospel for its pivot, and all events subordinated to this master principle. The thesis is developed with an extraordinary wealth of reasoning and illustration. To make this great argument the more complete, Orosius undertook, at Augustine’s request, to write a compendium of general history in the same spirit, and accordingly he loses no opportunity of showing up the calamities of the old heathen times, and indicating the tendency of Christianity to mitigate the horrors of war. This book of Orosius became the recognised manual of general history down to the sixteenth century. The _Consolation of Philosophy_ by Boethius was the chief if not the sole representative of the philosophy, the ethics, and the religious aspirations of the ancients during the Dark and early Middle Ages. The author is thus introduced by Gibbon: “The senator Boethius is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman.” Suspected by Theodoric, the Gothic King of Italy, of the crime of Roman patriotism, he was cast into prison, and a sentence of confiscation and death was pronounced against him, while he was denied the means of making his defence. Chained and in view of death he composed the _Consolation of Philosophy_, of which Gibbon says: “A golden volume, not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully, but which claims incomparable merit from the barbarism of the times and the situation of the author.”[26]